*Ø* Blogmanac August 24, 1770 | The death of Chatterton

Boy genius poet and forger

Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, was born on November 20, 1752 and produced all his work by the age of only 17, when he committed suicide on this day in 1770 ...

It was only after Chatterton's death that the controversy over his work began. Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777) was edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt, a Chaucerian scholar who believed them to be genuine medieval works. However, the appendix to the following year's edition recognises that they were probably Chatterton's own work ...

The boy poet/forger was not without his supporters. Shelley commemorated Chatterton’s genius in Adonais, and Wordsworth in Resolution and Independence. Coleridge wrote A Monody on the Death of Chatterton, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti lauded him in Five English Poets. John Keats inscribed Endymion “to the memory of Thomas Chatterton”. Alfred de Vigny's drama of Chatterton invented a fictitious account of the poet

Excerpted from a new article I posted today at the Scriptorium