Guilty Thing (9 page)

He sufficiently exaggerated his frailty to earn a few months curled up in bed, being read to by his mother. The number of books they covered was ‘past all counting', recalled De Quincey, and included Milton's
Paradise Lost
. This he described as ‘not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces', and De Quincey would continually describe his own life as a fall from Paradise. There is always a gain to illness, and De Quincey found that maternal tenderness and a ceaseless supply of literature were the rewards of this one – his mother thawed when her son lay helpless between the sheets. The tenderness was not to last: when his headmaster, a brilliant and celebrated scholar himself, implored Mrs Quincey to return her son to school, she was appalled by the compliments lavished on the child's intelligence and to preserve Thomas's modesty she withdrew him immediately. De Quincey's education was now placed in the hands of an exiled French nobleman with romantic designs on his employer. The widow was evidently a catch, and De Quincey took on the role of driving his mother's suitors away. Accordingly, he and his two younger brothers behaved as badly as possible, spending the school hours making faces through the window at the old lady who lived opposite. When the exasperated neighbour complained, Thomas apologised with such formality and charm that she thought him quite the nicest boy she had ever met. Meanwhile, the tutor returned to his battered country without having won the hand of Mrs Quincey, who would never remarry.

At about this time, they heard that William,
aged seventeen
, had died from typhoid fever in London; this was presumably another reason for keeping Thomas at home. Three of his seven siblings, as well as his father, were now dead and De Quincey had become the male head of the family. The death of his father registered as wheels he was waiting to hear on a distant road; Jane's death made its impact only when Elizabeth died; Elizabeth's death took the form of the central tragedy of his life; and William's death was described as the answer to a prayer. De Quincey expressed no ambivalence about this, and no guilt over his absence of grief. William ‘
had
controlled,' he later wrote, ‘and for years to come
would have
controlled, the free spontaneous movements of
a contemplative dreamer like myself
.' De Quincey had, however, luxuriated in this control and abandoned himself to his own slavish position; the sudden termination of the dynamic on which his identity was constructed was like the removal of scaffolding around an unfinished building. Nor was the high romance of William's status as the family pariah lost on him. His brother was a warrior, a tiger, a destroyer of domestic calm, whose adventure in London – a place that De Quincey had only ever read about – had ended in tragedy.

William's death did not mean, any more than Elizabeth's death, that he disappeared from De Quincey's mind. The deaths of his siblings made their power over him all the more potent. The direction of his own life began to shadow that of his dead brother: just as William had been sent away to school when he became unmanageable, Thomas was now enrolled at a small boarding school in a nearby village called Winkfield, ‘of which the chief recommendation lay in the religious character of the master'. The staff had nothing to teach him, and he did much of the Latin and Greek teaching himself. There was, he told his mother, ‘no emulation, no ambition, nothing to contend for –
no honours to excite one
'. Mrs Quincey had not only failed to protect her son from vanity but in so doing, he informed her, she had destroyed his education. Effortlessly at the top of the class, De Quincey was worshipped more by the pupils at Winkfield than he had been by the headmaster at Bath grammar. Bored, miserable, and still fretting about his head injury, he divided his school fellows into rival bands of Greeks and Trojans, and organised mock battles.

Ten miles west of genteel Bath lay her sister city: teeming, money-grubbing, commercial Bristol, ‘the greatest, the richest, the best port of trade in Great Britain', as Daniel Defoe described it in 1725, ‘London only excepted'. A walled and gated citadel composed of narrow streets, with quays high enough to accommodate forty-foot tides, Bristol had a skyline of smoking glass kilns, which Alexander Pope compared to pyramids. Bristol, said Pope, was like ‘Wapping or Southwark [but] ten times as big'. The trade was seaborne: ships returned here from Spain, America, the Caribbean and the Barbary Coast, laden with soap, salt, leather, gunpowder, cheese, stockings, wine, wool and, of course, slaves. Bristol was England's premier slave port; twenty slaving voyages a year set out from the city's two quays. Edmund Burke had been MP for Bristol, and Hannah More was raised here; before the trade in human beings led her to become an abolitionist, the city's theatres had inspired her to become a playwright. More's sisters ran a respected School for Young Ladies in Trinity Street, near College Green, and De Quincey's own sister, Mary, was at school in Bristol.

There was a great deal of traffic between Bristol and Bath, and a great deal in Bristol to feed De Quincey's imagination. In College Green in 1764, Highwayman Higgins, whose skeleton he knew so well, had murdered the rich widow and her servant. Visiting the house in which the crime had taken place, De Quincey found it still unoccupied: ‘
forty years
had not cicatrised the bloody remembrance; and, to this day, perhaps, it remains amongst the gloomy traditions of Bristol'. It was in Bristol that Richard Savage, the murderer and poet immortalised in Samuel Johnson's brief biography
The Life of Savage
, had died in a debtors' prison in 1743, cursing the city of ‘upstarts and mushrooms' and ‘proud relentless hearts'. Thomas Chatterton, born here ten years later, who identified with Savage (‘Another Savage to be starv'd in me') also loathed Bristol, calling it a ‘
despicable place
', a ‘mercenary cell', a ‘city of commerce and avarice' inhabited by ‘little, mean, and contemptible men', no more than ‘twenty' of whom could read.

Never had a city been more associated with a writer than Bristol was with the poet immortalised by Wordsworth in ‘Resolution and Independence' as ‘the marvellous boy. . . that perished in his prime'. Chatterton, the first of the Romantics, was raised in the school house on Pyle Street, Redcliffe Hill, in the shade of St Mary Redcliffe, still the grandest of all English parish churches. A Gothic masterpiece standing proud above the harbour where she towered over the masts of the ships, the church was the last thing mariners saw when they set sail and the first thing they saw as they returned home. Her medieval structure was substantially restored in the fifteenth century by Sir William Canynges, a local cloth and shipping merchant who, following the death of his wife, found his calling and joined the priesthood. Canynges is commemorated twice in the south transept of St Mary Redcliffe: in one effigy he lies, dressed in the finery of a merchant, alongside his spouse; in another he lies alone in the priestly garb of the Dean of Westbury. Thomas Chatterton would bestow on Canynges a third identity, as patron to the poet Thomas Rowley.

Chatterton's father, a sexton of the church, died when his son was still in the womb, and Chatterton would spend the best part of his brief life reinventing the world which existed before he was born. His family had been sextons of St Mary Redcliffe for generations, and as such he considered the church both his birthright and his playground. He whiled away the hours beneath its forest of flying buttresses, hexagonal vaults and polygonal arches. Drifting amongst the effigies and tombs he fantasised about the noble figures commemorated here, and the chivalric age gone by. Leaning with his book against the graveyard headstones he would occasionally look up to ‘
fix his eyes
upon the church' in a state of ‘trance' or ‘ecstasy'.

The most magnificent part of St Mary Redcliffe is still the north porch, facing what would then have been the harbour. Inspired by the Moorish architecture of North Africa and Spain, its striking crisscross design would not be out of place in a tale of
Arabian Nights
. Through this oriental gateway is a spiral staircase, at the top of which can be found the muniment room whose chests contained, as Mrs Chatterton put it, ‘
a miscellaneous
collection of odds and ends – bundles of shrivelled parchment covered with strange hieroglyphics'. Treated in a work-a-day fashion by Chatterton's father, these bundles found their way from the church to the school house where they were turned into dustjackets for books, splints to light fires, and knitting patterns for Mrs Chatterton; they also provided young Chatterton with his first experience of black-lettering. Until the age of seven he had shown no enthusiasm for reading and had been regarded by his teachers as a dunce; Chatterton now read everything he could get his hands on, so long as it was in Black Letter.

Aged sixteen he obtained the key for the muniment room from his uncle – then the church sexton – and began to explore the treasures himself. It was here that Thomas Rowley, blind monk and poet, began to take shape in his mind. Rowley was Chatterton's other self, his medieval double, a figure from another realm who existed only in an ornamental English of Chatterton's own construction. With the invention of Rowley came a poetry that bore no relation to the clipped etiquette of neoclassical couplets found in mid-eighteenth-century verse: Chatterton created a copy without an original. His minstrel was given an expansive, melodic voice in which he sang ballads of strange fragility and beauty; by embellishing spellings he changed the flavour of familiar words such as
wyllowe
,
waterre
,
wytches
, and
leathalle tyde
. Rowley's city returned to its former name of ‘Bristowe', and Chatterton began to endow his birthplace with a noble past. Bristowe was everything that Bristol was not; a Camelot of culture, taste and sensibility presided over by Rowley's patron, the ‘gloryous' Sir William Canynges.

Once Thomas Rowley was conceived, there was no stopping Thomas Chatterton. Rowley the monk was a lover of beauty who sang in praise of St Mary Redcliffe (‘the pride of Bristowe and the Westerne lande. . . Greater than can by Rowlies pen be scande'), in praise of William Canynges (‘Such is greate Conynge's mind when pared to God elate'), in praise of the splendid ‘Kingdom of Lyghte' in which he was honoured to live. Rowley's works, smeared with yellow ochre and lamp charcoal to make them look old, were presented to the gullible citizens of Bristol as found documents. The muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe – or ‘Radclift' as Rowley called it – was overflowing, so Chatterton explained, with manuscripts by the blind poet.

Chatterton had a precedent for his hoax: a similar trick had been played by Horace Walpole in a Gothic novel he published in 1764. The full title of Walpole's novel was
The Castle of Otranto: A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto
. It purported to be a translation of an Italian manuscript, ‘printed in the Black Letter in the year 1529', discovered in the library of ‘an ancient Catholic family in the North of England', and brought to the attention of the reading public by William Marshal, the pseudonym of Walpole. In the second edition of the book Walpole dropped his mask and revealed his authorship; the public were entertained, and critics no more than mildly embarrassed. It was, said Sir Walter Scott, ‘
the first modern attempt
to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the basis of the ancient romances of chivalry'. Chatterton assumed that if his cover was blown, it would be greeted in a similarly jocular fashion.

While the Rowley industry was churning away in the lumber room at the top of the house, Chatterton tested his powers of persuasion by practising a fraud of a different kind. He convinced a lowborn pewterer named Burgum that he had found, also in the muniment room, evidence that the Burgum family were originally the De Berghams, whose pedigree could be traced from the time of William the Conqueror. Burgum was descended from one of the noblest families of the day: ‘Simon de Leyncte Lyze, alias Senliz, who married Matilda, daughter of Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland, Northampton and Huntingdon' and so forth, the names spreading over page after page. The baroque document, exquisitely penned by Chatterton and presented to Burgum as evidence of the pewterer's impressive heritage, contained a complex roll call of fathers, sons, marriages and offspring, including mention of a man called Redcliffe De Chatterton of Chatterton, the heir general of many families. There was a bitterness to this con, played on a susceptible man by an arrogant boy. Chatterton felt that Burgum, a man on the make, got what he deserved, but while mocking the vulgarity of Bristol's inhabitants, he indulged, to what might be called a pathological degree, his own desire to hail from a more noble place. Chatterton was as serious in his reinvention of Bristol as Beau Nash had been in his reinvention of Bath; and one senses that there was no more humour intended in his conjuring of ‘Redcliffe De Chatterton' than there was in the ‘De' which Elizabeth Quincey now added to her own family's name. The De Quinceys, she explained to her children and her neighbours, could be traced back to the time of William the Conqueror.