Knowra Thomas Chatterton Thomas Chatterton Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) was an English poet who passed his own medieval-style poems off as works by the fictional monk Thomas Rowley. His early death and literary deception made him a lasting figure in Romantic legend.
Bristol : A port city in southwest England with a long history as a center of commerce and culture. Chatterton grew up in Bristol and drew on its medieval buildings and local history for his poems.
Middle English : The forms of English used from roughly the late eleventh to the late fifteenth century. Chatterton’s archaic spellings and vocabulary aimed to make his poems sound like works from this period.
Horace Walpole : An English writer, antiquarian, and politician known for The Castle of Otranto. Walpole initially entertained the Rowley poems as genuine before learning that Chatterton was their author.
Romanticism : An artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. Romantic writers recast Chatterton’s precocious talent and death as signs of a misunderstood genius.
Colston's School : A Bristol charity school founded by merchant Edward Colston in the early eighteenth century. Chatterton attended the school, where its library exposed him to medieval texts and antiquarian interests.
Literary forgery : The deliberate creation or alteration of literary works to misrepresent their authorship, date, or provenance. The Rowley poems presented Chatterton’s compositions as authentic writing by a medieval author.
William Barrett : An English surgeon and historian of Bristol who relied on Chatterton’s material for a history of the city. Barrett received historical material from Chatterton and incorporated some of it into his Bristol history.
The Death of Chatterton : A 1856 oil painting by Henry Wallis depicting Thomas Chatterton dead in a London attic. Wallis’s painting fixed the image of Chatterton as a beautiful, doomed young poet.
Antiquarianism : The study and collecting of historical objects, documents, and customs, especially from earlier periods. The period’s fascination with old manuscripts gave Chatterton a setting for presenting invented poems as discoveries.
Pseudepigrapha : Texts attributed to an author who did not write them, often in order to invoke that author’s authority. Chatterton placed his poems under Rowley’s name, though Rowley himself was fictional.
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