AN UNRECORDED COPY OF CHATTERTON

Turnbull Library Record, Volume IV, 1 July 1941, Page 6

AN UNRECORDED COPY OF CHATTERTON

lan A. Gordon

a unique and hitherto unrecorded volume in the Turnbull Library is a copy of Chatterton’s poems considerably augmented with contemporary reviews and articles and with manuscript notes and transcripts from Rowley documents by Chatterton’s main supporter in the Rowley controversy, George Catcott. The tenacity with which Chatterton’s supporters clung to their belief in the authenticity of his forgeries (well illustrated in the D.N.B. article on William Barrett) finds further evidence in

this elaborately documented volume. George Catcott, a Bristol pewterer in partnership with Henry Burgum (for whom Chatterton provided a fake pedigree and coat of arms in 1767) was presented with many of the Rowley manuscripts, including The Bristowe Tragedie and the Songe to Aella, from 1768 onwards, and lacking the scholarship to detect the forgeries he fell a willing victim to such gratifying attention. Soon he and William Barrett (Bristol surgeon, would-be Bristol historian) were deluged with ‘ancient documents,’ poetical for Catcott and antiquarian for Barrett, and in spite of the scholarly disclaimers by Thomas Gray and William Mason (to whose opinion Horace Walpole deferred in time to save his own repute) and the rout of the Rowley supporters in the subsequent controversy, Catcott and Barrett, clung resolutely to their faith in their documents, many of which Barrett used in his discredited History of Bristol (1789).

Catcott was less unlucky perhaps because he printed less, but the volume under discussion shows how completely he was taken in. Chatterton’s Rowley poems were first printed in 1777 in a volume edited by the scholarly Thomas Tyrwhitt, Poems , supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century : the greater part now first published from the most authentic copies, with a specimen or one of the MSS. The second edition was a duplicate of the first, but next year (1778) appeared the third edition to which Tyrwhitt added a new Appendix containing some observations upon the language of those Poems, tending to prove that they were written, not by any Antient Author, but entirely by Thomas Chatterton. The indignant Catcott had a copy of this third edition rebound to include copious documentary evidence' to substantiate the authenticity of the Rowley poems, and this volume with insertions and manuscript annotations by Catcott is now part of the Chatterton collection in the Library.

The additions to the volume fall into two sections: 1. A preliminary twenty-eight pages which contains a detailed list of “Directions to the Binder,” virtually a table of contents of the additions, with a vindication of Chatterton and of Catcott’s advocacy, dated and signed “George Catcott, July 18, 1781.”

2. At the end of the volume there are bound in one hundred and fifty-two pages cut from various publications. These fall into three groups (a) The original reviews of Tyrwhitt’s edition of the Rowley poems from the Critical Review and the Monthly Review. The latter journal ran a series of three articles (all included) on the authenticity of the poems, one of the articles largely contributed by Catcott himself. The Monthly Review came to the conclusion “We do not hesitate to pronounce that these Poems are the original productions of Rowley, with many alterations and interpolations by Chatterton.” (b) A series of articles cut from the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1777 and 1778 which give a vivid picture of the Rowley Controversy at its height, Catcott himself on several occasions contributing a letter when some hit had been scored by his opponents. The original review of Thomas Warton’s second volume of his History of English Poetry with a full discussion of Warton’s section on Thomas Rowley is probably the most interesting of the extracts from the Gentleman’s Magazine. (c) The final printed addition is a copy of a pamphlet by Henry Dampier (with a manuscript dedication to Catcott) Remarks upon the eighth section of the second volume of Mr. Warton’s History of English Poetry, London, 1780.

Not content with massing such printed evidence, Catcott had bound in a group of transcripts from unprinted Rowley manuscripts in his possession. The following is a brief summary: (1) An account by Rowley of the Templar’s Church, Bristol, from the original “now in Mr. Barrett’s possession.” Later published, Bristol 1888. (2) Two poems, the Song of St. Werburg and the Song of Seyncte Baldwynn. Later printed by Dean Milles in his edition of 1801. (3) “A Manuscript in Mr. Barrett’s possession . . . with the following description of Mr. Cannynge’s Person.” I can find no record of this having been published. The MS. itself is now in the British Museum. (4) Fragment of a sermon by Rowley. Later published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1782. This final section of transcripts is rounded off by copies of several letters supporting the authenticity of the Rowley poems, which Catcott had received from different sources. Perhaps the most interesting is one from Thomas Cary who had been a schoolfellow of Chatterton

and who claims that Chatterton was too young to have produced the Rowley poems “as from my intimacy with him I had it in my power to, and did observe the progress of his Genius from its Infancy to its fated Dissolution. His Abilities for his Age were beyond Conception great, but not equal to the Works of Rowley.”

Although the whole volume is a monument of effort in a lost cause, its real importance lies in its preservation of so much Chatterton material. We are not nowadays concerned with the authenticity of Chatterton’s forgeries, but with the genius that went to their production. Some very interesting early criticism of Chatterton is included in Catcott’s additions to the volume which show that Chatterton’s ability as a poet (and not merely as a penman) was appreciated widely in his own day.