Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830

Daniel Cook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137332493
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the 'second Shakespeare' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, in particular, engendered a renewed fascination with ancient English literature.With Chatterton as its case study, this book offers new insights into the formation and development of literary scholarship in the period, from the periodical press to the public lecture, from the review to the anthology, from textual to biographical criticism. Cook demonstrates that, while major scholars found Chatterton to be a pertinent subject for multiple literary debates in the eighteenth century, by the end of the Romantic period he had become, and still remains, an unsettling model of hubristic genius.

1

Genius and Scholarship

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside: they have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune – I mean Chatterton.

(William Hazlitt)¹

During a brief aside to his lecture series on the major British poets, Hazlitt dashed Chatterton’s claim to literary fame. ‘It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done’, he suggests, ‘that excite our wonder and admiration.’² For more than forty years, by this point, Chatterton had in fact been conducive to a number of highly divisive critical debates. And over a number of decades many noteworthy literary figures collected piles of Chattertoniana with relish, including Thomas Percy, William Mason, Michael Lort, Robert Glynn, William and Jane Cole, as well as the leading Shakespeare experts of the age, such as Edmond Malone, George Steevens and Richard Farmer, along with dozens of notable gentlemen, aristocrats, physicians and amateur historians. In the public realm the principal vernacular scholars of the late eighteenth century gave detailed axiological attention to Chatterton’s texts, particularly so by Thomas Warton, Malone, Steevens, and the nation’s pre-eminent Chaucerian, Thomas Tyrwhitt, as well as Southey and Cottle, Walter Scott, and Percival Stockdale in the early nineteenth century. In particular, the boy-poet proved flexible enough to conform to, and embolden, familiar if conflicting theorizations of genius, from Joseph Addison’s well-known essay in The Spectator (no. 160) on natural and learned genius through to Edward Young’s forceful rejection of the Augustan ‘rules of art’ in the second half of the eighteenth century, as well as the models of intertwined genius, taste and judgement established by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers William Duff and Alexander Gerard. At the core of each of these and other explorations lay a fundamental concern: what is literary genius? Does it subsist in meteor-like flashes of brilliance or only in an accomplished body of polished works? Does it go hand in hand with learning, or is learning anathema to the creative spirit? Is it a native impulse to be nurtured or perhaps even feared? Such questions puzzled not only the leading academic aestheticians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also the wider scholarly network of periodical writers, biographers and lecturers, as well as poets.

As we shall see throughout this book, Chatterton continually provided a rich test case in the late 1770s and beyond as many commentators wondered whether, and how, the charity-schoolboy from Bristol had been capable of writing so vast a body of works, texts thick with an unfamiliar pseudo-medieval diction and obscure learning. Frequently compared with Shakespeare and Homer, he, as a purveyor of mock-antique verse, appeared to bridge (by dishonest or highly original means) ancient creativity and modern art. With Chaucer and Spenser he stimulated a more specific interest in England’s gothic heritage. Grouping him with Milton and Pope, commentators began to consider more closely the psychological (and even physical) peculiarities of literary precociousness. Alongside Laurence Sterne, Stephen Duck and Richard Savage he epitomized for some the ‘trashy’ modern writer of the fashion-conscious marketplace. By the end of the eighteenth century he had become the figurehead of ‘neglected genius’, but he could also resemble the earlier, satirical image of the duncical ‘distressed poet’. His alleged suicide dramatically substantiated the link between poetic rapture and madness, and demonstrated to young readers the need to fortify inborn talent with hard-earned judgement. Some attributed his achievements to the irrational, unfathomable powers of natural genius, while others seized the opportunity to undermine from within the academy’s garish fascination with ancient English poetry. The linguistic rust, some said, masked rather ordinary modern writing or, at best, extended the ballad tradition newly popularized by Percy. Did Chatterton forge a missing link between the ancients and the moderns or did he merely benefit from fleeting fashions? What challenges did the figuration of his protean, unstable genius pose to normative critical traditions, especially during the development of literary history writing as a new scholarly genre in England? This chapter offers an overview of the shifting relationship between genius and scholarship in the eighteenth century, as it will be most germane to the more detailed discussions of the issues surrounding Chatterton’s reception in the chapters that follow.

A brief history of genius

The earliest recognizable meaning of genius is that of a tutelary deity or daemon, and thence the spirit of a place, the genius loci, and the spirit of an age, a national identity; the term also referred to a person’s defining essence, their character, or, as it were, their genial disposition. Addison, for one, claimed that early English poets, including Shakespeare, were uniquely poised to create vivid characters and images because ‘the English are naturally Fanciful, and very often disposed by that Gloominess and Melancholly of Temper, which is so frequent in our Nation’.³ Genius is universal yet culturally specific; it bears the marks of both individualism and nationhood. However, we have become accustomed to the truism that, after the Renaissance, genius came to denote more narrowly the grand individual achievements of the select few in both the arts and the sciences. Even now it remains the most elite, if overused, of labels. Such concerns are hardly new. As Addison wearily noted as early as 1711, ‘There is no Character more frequently given to a Writer, than that of being a Genius.’⁴ ‘I have heard many a little Sonneteer called a fine Genius’, he continues; ‘There is not an Heroick Scribler in the Nation, that has not his Admirers who think him a great Genius; and as for your Smatterers in Tragedy, there is scarce a Man among them who is not cried up by one or other for a prodigious Genius.’ Such a view persisted. Samuel Johnson felt that the title of genius (or wit) had been noticeably degraded by the middle of the eighteenth century, a period he facetiously labelled The Age of Authors.⁵ Authorship, he writes, had previously been ‘left to those, who by study, or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind’. Now gentleman-authors jostled alongside uneducated artisans, merchants and labouring-class and female writers. In a book-length poem, The Age of Genius (1786), Thomas Busby mocked the vanity of modern scribblers: ‘Of genius now (blest age!) the diff’rent lot! / All think they have it – nay, who has it not?’⁶ As late as 1818, Hazlitt, in his Lectures on the English Poets, could still complain of ‘a cant in the present day about genius’.⁷ As a critical term, in short, genius had fallen into disrepute precisely in the period in which it gained its widest currency.

To put it another way, the new emphasis on genius as a marker of individual talent coincided with significant shifts in attitude towards professional authorship. As Martha Woodmansee, Mark Rose and Paul K. Saint-Armour have suggested, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars appropriated an ancient word, genius, in order to empower the ‘author’ as the only true proprietor of his or her own works in the literary marketplace.⁸ Edward Young, to take a famous example, invited his contemporaries in 1759 to ‘reverence’ original genius as the sole, inviolable property of the writer who, by his reckoning, must become again a self-immanent force of creativity no longer chained to the modern rules of art.⁹ Earlier in the century Addison had similarly popularized a renewed faith in the ‘nobly wild’ strength of untutored or natural genius, which, he adds, ‘is infinitely more beautiful than all the Turn and Polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit, by which they would express a Genius refined by Conversation, Reflection, and the Reading of the most polite Authors’.¹⁰ And yet, somewhat circumspectly, Addison also asserts that, although ‘we allow a greater and more daring Genius to the Ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above the Nicety and Correctness of the Moderns’. Natural genius is a ‘Wonder of Posterity’, a curiosity, but for Addison it seems to have no valid place in polite society.

The acknowledgment of the ‘nobly wild’ qualities of genius nevertheless lent some credibility to the relatively new focus on vernacular works. Among British poets and scholars John Dryden had already sparked an interest in the ‘faerie way of writing’, particularly the ‘rough magic’ of Shakespeare, the rustic music of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and a small band of medieval poets.¹¹ Much of this interest lay in the spirit, rather than the language, of old English. Dryden famously called Chaucer ‘the father of English poetry’, and yet he depicts him as ‘a rough diamond’ who ‘must first be polished ere he shines’.¹² Literary criticism in the 1750s and 1760s augured a firmer admiration of vernacular literature. Chaucer, for all of his faults, captivated Thomas Warton’s imagination in the boldest of terms: ‘His old manners, his romantic arguments, his wildness of painting, his simplicity and antiquity of expression, transport us into some fairy region, and all are highly pleasing to the imagination.’¹³ Richard Hurd, too, wondered if medieval Britain had witnessed true creativity: ‘may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry?’¹⁴ Editions of old ballads and songs were especially popular during Chatterton’s lifetime, most notably Evan Evans’s Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764) and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) – two collections the marvellous boy had studied closely – as well as David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c. (1769) and, in earlier years, Elizabeth Cooper’s Muses Library (1737). Numerous modern antiques fed the nascent interest in a British bardic tradition, such as Thomas Gray’s The Bard (1757) and James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771).

The primitivist revival reached its nadir with the publication of the putatively fifth-century works of the Celtic bard Ossian in the 1760s, along with scores of pastiches and parodies – including Chatterton’s own – in the periodical press.¹⁵ Perversely, then, the emergent investment in original genius in the eighteenth century inculcated a wave of imitations and pseudo-ancient poetry that paid a great deal of attention to the figuration of the author-creator. Bards and itinerant minstrels became idealized projections of the central role the poet ought to have in society, an absence acutely felt in the increasingly mercantile modern age of literature. Alongside the ‘nobly wild’ Shakespeare, Homer and Ossian, so-called peasant poets became immensely popular with readers in the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond.¹⁶ Closely echoing Addison’s characterization of a natural genius as a poet ‘never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art’, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), to take a prominent example, knowingly marketed its author Robert Burns as ‘The Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art’.¹⁷ Writing at the same time in which Chatterton embarked upon his Rowley project, Adam Ferguson outlined the importance of the primitive poets within their own society in terms that occluded the educated modern writer: ‘[The bard] delivers the emotions of the heart, in words suggested by the heart: for he knows no other.’¹⁸ Indeed, Ossian, perhaps the most visible example of original genius in the second half of the eighteenth century, appealed to the heart and mind in equal measure. Hugh Blair, for one, praised the works of Ossian because therein ‘we find the fire and the enthusiasm of the most early times, combined with an amazing degree of regularity and art’.¹⁹ If Homer’s artless faults compromised his beauties, as judged by the ab intra values of the mid-eighteenth-century aestheticians, in his Ossian poems in prose James Macpherson had forged an appealing union between the ancient sublime and modern sensibility.

Although largely derivative, contradictory and even in parts outdated, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) is often cited as the watershed between the older, pluralistic meanings of genius and a Romantic faith in the powers of the individual talent set apart from the restrictions of modern society.²⁰ As a departure from Addison’s hedging between natural genius and the rules of art, as well as from Blair’s misjudged celebration of Ossian’s polite primitivism, Young more boldly treats the creative impulse as a divine gift that must oppose, and jettison, all acquired knowledge and modern skills. He writes:

Learning we thank, Genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for Genius is from Heaven, Learning from man; This sets us above the low, and illiterate; That, above the learned, and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; Genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own.²¹

By the second half of the century originality had become the defining ideology driving the newly empowered author.²² ‘Born Originals’, Young famously lamented, ‘how comes it to pass that we die Copies?’²³ In this call to arms the elderly poet challenged a principle long impressed upon young writers across the Republic of Letters: imitatio veterum, imitate the ancients.

Chatterton complicated Young’s mission in fundamental ways. Even if they were purportedly primitive, the Rowley papers were highly learned pieces constructed out of eighteenth-century etymological and dialect dictionaries, concordances, and modern glossaries of Chaucer and Spenser.²⁴ Rowleyese amounts to just over 1,800 words, none of which seem to be pure fabrication by Chatterton. His basic source must have been Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, along with a generous sprinkling of words and variants taken from John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, Thomas Speght’s Chaucer glossary, John Hughes’s 1715 edition of Spenser and the like. Although an original, Rowley violated Young’s well-known theory of organic growth:

An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.²⁵

A keen necromancer, Chatterton raised his poetry from the pages of other men and brought new life to pre-existent if often long dormant materials; but Young, along with Duff, made no allowances for bookishness. To put it another way, Chatterton took the ballad revival to a new extreme, invented (and inventoried) a counterfactual national and local history, and firmed up the gradual acceptance of unpolished medieval English. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Conventions
• Introduction
• 1   Genius and Scholarship
• 2   Tyrwhitt’s Rowley, or ‘what the author wrote
• 3   Miscellanies and the Moderns
• 4   The Rowley Controversy
• 5   ‘Too proud for pity: The Sentimental Reader
• 6   ‘Neglected Genius: The Romantic Canon
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index