Going early into that good night
(with apologies to Dylan Thomas)

One of the smallest and plainest memorials in St Mary Redcliffe church is dedicated to the poet Thomas Chatterton. In the churchyard there is a slightly larger stone on the grave of another Tom – the church cat, who died in 1927, aged 15. But now we have a statue of Chatterton in Millennium Square, close by one of Cary Grant. The statues are not mounted on lofty plinths but are down among us: both are described as ‘eminent Bristolians’ on their accompanying plaques, and Chatterton as ‘poet – a marvellous boy’. That was Wordsworth’s tribute to him. Samuel Johnson, in a complimentary swipe, said ‘it is wonderful how the whelp has written such things’. Southey and Coleridge sang his praises and made him an emblem for the Romantic movement.

Now the trouble with penning verses is that it can seriously damage your health. Just look at these early exits: Dylan Thomas at 39, Byron 36, Sylvia Plath 31, Shelley 30, Keats 26, and our local poetic meteorite flashing brightly and briefly, Chatterton at just 17¾. At least he outlived that cat.

But it is Chatterton’s attitude to Bristol, rather than his poetry, that should interest us. The port of Bristol and Redcliffe parish played central roles in the romance that he created. Chatterton claimed old parish records written on parchment taken from the church by his father were narratives and poems written in the fifteenth century. He ‘transcribed’ them to create a detailed history of Bristol. Much is made of the influence of St Mary Redcliffe looming, all pinnacles and buttresses, over his childhood home, but it was also St John’s, Broad St that provided inspiration. A memorial plaque there commemorates Thomas Rowley, merchant, who died in 1478. Rowley was a contemporary of William Canynge and Chatterton’s quill made him Canynge’s priest-secretary at St Mary Redcliffe.

With Rowley as his imaginary scribe, Chatterton deceived some colourful Bristol characters – the eccentric pewterer Catcott and the man-midwife William Barrett. They both had the history of our city at heart; Barrett wrote The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol, the first all-embracing study, but his eagerness to accept Chatterton’s fabrications tainted the book and he was ridiculed when it was published in 1789.

Nowadays, Chatterton is demonised as a plagiarist but he did not appropriate another’s efforts and present it as his original work. He actually wrote the historical accounts and poems that he pretended were written by Rowley. He is a faker, pure and simple, and it is impossible to discern where his genuine artistic passions end and his criminal impulses begin.

His statue has a telling message, taken from a mock suicide note he wrote to shock his employer into releasing him from his indentures:

Reader, judge not if thou art a Christian. Believe that he shall be
judged by a superior power. To that power only is he now answerable.

We should not be too harsh on young Thomas. He had a more intense sense of history about our city than any of us can ever have. His memorial on Harbourside next to a Hollywood great is, I think, fitting. His story would make a terrific film

Chatterton’s “elevations of Bristol Castle in 1138” bears
T Rowleie, Canonicus, delin. 1440. It fooled all Bristol.

Gordon Young
0117 924 0621
email: yogordo@hotmail.com





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