33 Facts About Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17.

Thomas Chatterton was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Thomas Chatterton was able to pass off his work as that of an imaginary 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, chiefly because few people at the time were familiar with medieval poetry, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.

The poet's father, named Thomas Chatterton, was a musician, a poet, a numismatist, and a dabbler in the occult.

Thomas Chatterton had been a sub-chanter at Bristol Cathedral and master of the Pyle Street free school, near Redcliffe church.

Thomas Chatterton was admitted to Edward Colston's Charity, a Bristol charity school, in which the curriculum was limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism.

Thomas Chatterton learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio, and he learned to read out of a black-letter Bible.

Thomas Chatterton's sister said he did not like reading out of small books.

When Thomas Chatterton was age 6, his mother began to recognise his capacity; at age 8, he was so eager for books that he would read and write all day long if undisturbed; by the age of 11, he had become a contributor to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal.

Thomas Chatterton's confirmation inspired him to write some religious poems published in that paper.

Thomas Chatterton liked to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, loot purloined from the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe, and drawing materials, the child lived in thought with his 15th-century heroes and heroines.

Thomas Chatterton remained a boarder at Colston's Hospital for more than six years, and it was only his uncle who encouraged the pupils to write.

Three of Thomas Chatterton's companions are named as youths whom Phillips's taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry; but Thomas Chatterton told no one about his own more daring literary adventures.

Thomas Chatterton's holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house, and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there.

Psychoanalyst Louise J Kaplan suggested that Chatterton being fatherless played a great role in his imposturous creation of Rowley.

Thomas Chatterton assisted them by providing Rowley transcripts for their work.

In 1769, Thomas Chatterton sent "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade" to Walpole, along with specimens of pseudo-medieval poetry he attributed to Rowley and others.

Badly hurt by Walpole's snub, Thomas Chatterton wrote very little for a summer.

John Lambert, the attorney to whom he was apprenticed, cancelled his indentures; his friends and acquaintances having donated money, Thomas Chatterton went to London.

Thomas Chatterton already was known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as a rival of Junius under the nom de plume of Decimus.

Thomas Chatterton had been a contributor to Hamilton's Town and Country Magazine, and speedily found access to the Freeholder's Magazine, another political miscellany supportive of John Wilkes and liberty.

Thomas Chatterton's contributions were accepted, but the editors paid little or nothing for them.

Thomas Chatterton wrote hopefully to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them.

Thomas Chatterton could assume the style of Junius or Tobias Smollett, reproduce the satiric bitterness of Charles Churchill, parody James Macpherson's Ossian, or write in the manner of Alexander Pope or with the polished grace of Thomas Gray and William Collins.

Thomas Chatterton wrote political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and verse.

Thomas Chatterton was still short of money; and now, state prosecutions of the press rendered letters in the Junius vein no longer admissible.

The death of Thomas Chatterton attracted little notice at the time; for the few who then entertained any appreciative estimate of the Rowley poems regarded him as their mere transcriber.

Thomas Chatterton was interred in a burying-ground attached to the Shoe Lane Workhouse in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, later the site of Farringdon Market.

Two of Alfred de Vigny's works, Stello and the drama Thomas Chatterton, give fictionalized accounts of the poet; in the former, there is a scene in which William Beckford's harsh criticism of Thomas Chatterton's work drives the poet to suicide.

Two of Thomas Chatterton's poems were set to music as glees by the English composer John Wall Callcott.

Thomas Chatterton's best known poem, O synge untoe mie roundelaie was set to a five-part madrigal by Samuel Wesley.

Peter Ackroyd's 1987 novel Thomas Chatterton was a literary re-telling of the poet's story, giving emphasis to the philosophical and spiritual implications of forgery.

In 1928, a plaque in memory of Thomas Chatterton was mounted on 39, Brooke Street, Holborn, bearing the inscription below.