The real life of Thomas Chatterton: a world discovered and devised

Abstract

This thesis discusses the poetry of Chatterton by entering into his created world. By re-assembling, from various strands in the Rowleyan poetry and prose, the inner world of Thomas Rowley and his patron William Canyno-e, it seeks to highlight the poetry by speaking of it from the inside - it acquiesces with Chatterton's fictionalizing, just as, I have argued, Chatterton himself acquiesced with eighteenth century demands for such a fiction. This device allows me to offer a notion of Chatterton's portrayal of the relationship between Rowley and Canynge as one of subtle conflict, and to suggest that such a portrayal directly influenced the Rowleyan poetry, particularly ‘Aella’, where these conflicts emerge in the poetry most richly. After this central chapter on 'Aella' (Ch.5), the thesis is content to follow a more biographical mode, - discussing Valpole's dealings with Chatterton and shifting, with Chatterton's removal to London, to a more eighteenth century, London-based view, - but always keeping in sight that inner world which Cbatterton had devised at Bristol and which could re-emerge at any time - as I have suggested it did in the 'Balade of Charitie', which I hav6 argued as being written in London rather than Bristol.