Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton is a very interesting and influential person for having lived such a short life, and I wanted to explore his life more than was covered in the high and low presentation. Chatterton was born in 1753, three months after his father, who was a school teacher, died. He was raised in poverty, attending a charity school. Bound as an apprentice to a lawyer at age 14, Chatterton began writing poems, and eventually started fabricating documents.  He ended up inventing a 15th century poet priest named Thomas Rawley. Chatterton moved to London in April, 1770, to try and make it as a writer, but ended up dying on August 24th at age 17 from an overdose on arsenic.

His poems weren't discovered until after his death, inspiring a lot of controversy over whether the Rawley poems were authentic. When it was finally discovered that they were written by a teenager, people were impressed and amazed. Some people consider him to be the first romantic poet - his story and young death inspired a lot of Romantics, becoming an obsession for some writers. Woodsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and Dante all mention or allude to him in their poetry. Chatterton inspired a lot of debate about the value of impersonation, and whether a well-done trick is better than original creativity. Some writers ignore him, others adore him, but overall, Chatterton is an example of how writers are often made famous after their deaths, becoming almost larger than life through their work and the speculations people make about their lives. With Chatterton especially it is interesting to see how such a young person can be made so much of, especially when he died before he accomplished his goals and hopes for life.