The Marvelous Boy: the Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis

The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis (England) 1856

The Marvelous Boy: the Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis
 
Death, in purple and auburn. Lying supine in satin and fading sunlight, his hand is poised nonchalantly, teasing his puffy shirt ever so slightly away from his hairless chest. His body is a perfect, graceful arc, and his face is a pale sad moon between the sartorial lavender and the natural halo of fiery red hair.
 
What are we looking at? Here lies Thomas Chatterton, in his pauper’s attic garret, anonymous for now, his genius unrecognized. Around him are shards of words, torn up scraps of poetry, lost forever. The painting is The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis, depicting the frail puer as a martyr. Cause of death, confirmed by inquest: suicide by arsenic at the tender age of seventeen.
 
Thomas Chatterton is a myth. Perhaps he was the first, the very prototype of the brilliant, tortured, impoverished, isolated ingenue. The starving artist. There were others before him, yes, but seen this way- romanticized- only in retrospect. The young poet in the painting was the catalyst who ushered Romanticism into being. Romanticism, of course, was the late 18th century movement with a focus on emotion over reason, awe over the power of nature, individualism, and a fascination with the mystery and darkness of the Gothic. 
 
Lord George Gordon Byron saw in Chatterton his soul mate, another misunderstood maestro of poetry. William Wordsworth referenced him in his 1802 poem, “Resolution and Independence,” as “the marvellous Boy/ The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” Percy Byshe Shelley’s 1821 pastoral elegy, “Adonai,” mourning John Keats, likened Keats to Chatterton, who died young before him. And John Keats’ 1818 “Endymion” was dedicated to Chatterton, and famously begins, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Coleridge started things off in 1790 with a monody for the fallen poet. “When Want and cold Neglect had chill'd thy soul…”
 
The pre-Raphaelite painters were, in turn, heavily influenced by Romanticism, especially their emphasis on beauty, tragedy, and imagination. Henry Wallis was respected for his travels researching antiquities like medieval tiles and ancient pottery, and he published numerous illustrated volumes on the subject. But it is this iconic painting that gave him immortality. Depicting the vulnerable young poet on his deathbed in the room he rented cheaply from Mrs. Angel of Gray’s Inn, a brothel, he used purple velvet to anoint the tragic orphan to royal status. The open window behind him contrasts the squalor and symbolic prison of the poet’s poverty and pain with the world outside, and represents the freedom he has finally found, the escape or flight of his soul. Clenched in his dead hand and scattered in the foreground are torn up papers, showing us the tatters of his rejected poems. The message is clear: the poet died for his art.
 
The painting was a triumph for Wallis. It was his first exhibited work and his most successful. He painted it several times over. Whenever the need for money arose, Wallis created another Chatterton. The artwork is layered with tragedy, irony, and scandal. Wallis’s model was his friend George Meredith, a poet influenced by Keats, and a novelist. Meredith’s beautiful wife left him to run off with Wallis, with whom she had a child. Though he posed as the quintessential failed poet, he went on to write several bestselling novels and take seven nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature.
 
The poet in the painting was declared, in his earliest days, an imbecile. He never knew his namesake, because his father died a few months before he was born. Prone to daydreaming, crying jags, and long silent spells, he was assumed to be a simpleton. Then, he surprised everyone when, barely out of nappies, he taught himself to read from a Bible and a trove of medieval illuminated papers stored in St. Mary Redcliffe’s, the Gothic church he liked to play in. 
 
Thomas lived for many of his childhood years in a children’s hospital, where in every spare moment he devoured books of heraldry, history, theology, and poetry, work by Chaucer and Spencer, John Weever and William Dugdale. By the age of eight he spent full days at work writing. By age eleven, he was writing for the Bristol Journal, and shortly after, for Middlesex Journal and Town and Country Magazine. He sought patronage for his work with limited success, and did administrative writing for a paltry paycheque. Although he was able to avoid the workhouses through his office jobs, he lived in abysmal poverty. He wrote 1200 poems before declaring himself a rejected failure, and swallowing the arsenic in 1770.
 
Chatterton’s verse followed in the tradition of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with flawless rhyme and metre atop a satirical undercurrent. They ponder history, spirituality, and man’s constant wrestling with death and meaning. But he was best known for perpetrating a brilliant literary hoax. Unable to find the acclaim he yearned for with his own poetry, his imagination took him back into the dusty mysteries of time of the cathedral he’d been reading in for all of his short life. There were old oak chests in the muniment rooms there, and Thomas helped himself to the forgotten and abandoned leftovers of parchment and vellum dating back to the 1400s. These ancient manuscripts had long been picked over: those deemed valuable removed and filed in archives, and others taken and used be congregants, including his father, to wrap the beloved books in their own libraries. Thomas loved the archaic writing on these documents, and began composing poetry in a medieval script and voice. 
 
AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE:
Thomas Rowley,1464
 
Liste! now the thunder's rattling clymmynge sound
Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs,
Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown'd,
Still on the gallard ere of terroure hanges;
The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges;                    
Again the levynne and the thunder poures,
And the full cloudes are braste  attenes in stonen showers.
 
These were persona poems, and the persona was Thomas’s own invention, a 15th century poet-priest named Thomas Rowley. Chatterton’s extensive knowledge of history and theology and his poetic mastery made the work itself convincing, and skillfully written on the old papers, his audience believed they were a legitimate discovery found inside the old wooden coffers. Historians and publishers were excited by this epic find and eagerly praised the fictional priest’s contribution to the canon of literature.
 
Many academics and historians refer to Chatterton as a forger, irate on behalf of all who had been duped. And he did forge the poems, so well that the belief in a writer-priest named Rowley continued long past the boy’s premature demise. But it was not really a forgery. It was an elaborate literary hoax, the creation of a character in writing so brilliant that the fictional character had true believers. It was a prank on parallel to adolescent phone calls, “is your refrigerator running?” only by a genius who outsmarted the great minds of the times. 
 
There is a long tradition of literary hoaxes aimed at mocking the experts and tastemakers of the literary establishment. In1988, Canadian cult writer Crad Kilodney, notorious for his demeanour of misanthropy, widely submitted the works of literary giants under the pseudonym Herman Mlunga Mbongo. Attached to this name, the writing of the greats was summarily rejected across the board. 
 
Thomas’s inspiration for the prank may have come from Horace Walpole, a dandy writer and tony politician he admired. Walpole’s now-famous Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was first published as “from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto." Chatterton sent his Rowley poems to Walpole and received due praise for them, but Walpole turned on him when he began to question the veracity of their provenance. Chatterton responded privately with “To Horace Walpole,” a poem he never sent. 
 
Walpole, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has prov’d to be,
Thou who, in lux’ry nurst, beholds with scorn
The boy, who friendless, penniless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favour- thou mayst call me cheat.
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
 
(After Chatterton’s untimely death, Walpole softened. “I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius,” he said of the boy poet.)
 
Chatterton was a prolific and talented writer but members of his class were seldom taken seriously. The entire Rowley fabrication was meant to show what he was capable of. In another irony, when he tried to confess that he had written the priest’s poems himself, he was not believed: a young man of the precariat could surely not produce such skillful, historically knowledgeable poems. He was a child prodigy, yet the works in his own name continued to go unnoticed, rejected, or unpaid.
 
That Chatterton suffered for his art is known absolutely. He was half-starved, unable to earn enough to cover his lodging and meals in long office hours as a scrivener, writing legal contracts or property documents. He stayed up until the wee hours in his attic working on his poetry, and like the painting shows, he was known to tear up poems he deemed worthless because they did not meet his perfectionist standards.
 
But even so, what is almost true is not completely true. The entire tragic Romantic myth of the poete maudit and tormented starving artist, purified, or made real by poverty and suffering was invested in the suicide of this marvelous boy, too pure for this cruel world. It’s a pervasive notion we still romanticize today. Great artists are tragic, destitute and depressed, uniquely incapable of managing their lives. 
 
But it turns out that Chatterton more than likely wanted what the rest of us want: to live, to survive, to have the chance to grow and thrive and prove himself, however that would have played out. Many scholars today have changed course as records reveal another story. The revised edition reveals that Chatterton was so bent on life, he was taking nasty prescribed medication with a high-risk profile, like toxicity and accidental overdose: arsenic.
 
His affliction was much more mundane than a writer’s desolation, a condition commonplace at the time: gonorrhea. Arsenic was believed to be a cure. Chatterton was buried in the pauper’s cemetery for Holborn’s Shoe Lane Workhouse, his remains unmarked, in a mass grave.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic