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Overview
Setting his analyses within the contexts of "historic," heroic, satiric, pastoral, and descriptive modes, the author considers each of Chatterton's major works as solutions to the literary problems the poet set for himself, thus tracing the literary history of Chatterton's artistic development as a sequence of subjects and literary modes explored.
As Professor Taylor amply demonstrates, Thomas Chatterton's brief career embodies important features of the literary transition from the Augustans to the Romantics and, contrary to traditional assumptions, shows that the historical worlds Chatterton imagined have close ties to the century and sensibility against which he is assumed to have rebelled.
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691614489 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1570 |
| Pages: | 356 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Thomas Chatterton's Art
Experiments in Imagined History
By Donald S. Taylor
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06375-1
CHAPTER 1
Seven Early Pieces: 1763-1764
The literary evidence upon which this history must be primarily based has an odd chronological distribution. For Chatterton's tenth and eleventh years (1763-1764) we have seven works that are certainly or almost certainly his. Then, from spring 1764 to autumn 1768 we have nothing but one satire possibly his — this despite anecdotal evidence that much satirical, religious, and love verse has been lost. Yet for his last two years, his late fifteenth year until his death two months before he would have been eighteen (fall 1768 to August 1770), we would seem to have almost everything he wrote — over two hundred texts.
This odd distribution is easily explained. From the fall 1768 appearance of the first works attributed to Thomas Rowley and Rowley's fifteenth-century circle, curious amateurs and scholars searched out (even stimulated the production of) the mass of Rowleyan works and documents. After his death, because of the bearing on the authenticity of the Rowleyan works, everything non-Rowley an Chatterton had written was sought. However, the case is very different for the years before Rowley. Unlike Picasso (see the epigraph to the Introduction), Chatterton hadn't, apparently, the faintest interest in preserving his writings once they had served or failed to serve their immediate purposes, much less in bothering to date them. His only early collectors were his mother and sister, they had only what he chose to show them, and most of that little was soon dispersed.
We are sure, consequently, of only three poems before fall 1768, all of them probably copied into a notebook given him by his sister Mary and returned to her a year later "filled with writing, chiefly poetry." Those three early poems and various anecdotes led scholars to search Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, where Chatterton's "Bridge Narrative" had appeared in October 1768. For the years 1763 and 1764 they found three poems and a satirical letter that are almost certainly his. Of these seven pieces, the sure poems are "Sly Dick," "Apostate Will," and "A Hymn for Christmas Day." The four works probably his are "On the Last Epiphany" and three interrelated satirical pieces — "The Churchwarden and the Apparition," "I've let my Yard," and the "Letter from Fullford, the Gravedigger." There are reasons both general and particular for devoting this first chapter to these early works. Major poets frequently master their craft when very young — Tasso, Pope, Shelley, many others quickly come to mind; but most of them live long enough to suppress their juvenilia. Chatterton's earliest works, preserved by accidents, suggest that poets begin with precocity at language, prosody, and the adaptation of immediately available structures. Though almost always highly imitative, they work inventively with contemporary modes rather then stodgily observing them. For Chatterton in particular, these early pieces will be seen to foreshadow technically the generally stronger poetry of his last two years.
As for organization, the probable order of composition places the seven pieces in modal groupings that bring out common problems and contrasting formal solutions.
CHRISTIAN HISTORY, LANX SATURA, FABLE
Chatterton's first extant writings are modeled upon hints — subjects, styles, prosodic measures and patterns — taken from The Book of Common Prayer, the convention of "last day" poems, and John Gay's Fables. Throughout his brief literary life, his imagination seized upon whatever was most immediately to hand, and when we come to the Rowleyan writings we shall see that this was one of the most effective guardians of his secrets. Scholars again and again scoured the esoteric and missed his obvious, everyday sources.
The two earliest hymns face the problem of evoking feelings adequate to their lofty subjects — Christ's first and last appearances in human history. The solutions are so different as to recall Ronald Crane's observation that the formal variety of the shorter poems we call "lyrics" is largely unexplored country. The structure of "On the Last Epiphany" is of a sort very frequent among "sublime" odes written around the year 1700: a rapid narrative of events in themselves awesome and presented, therefore, in heightened diction. As in many such poems — Dryden's "Songe for St. Cecilia's Day" and his "Alexander's Feast" will be familiar examples — the sequence is extremely orderly; there is nothing of the rhapsodic confusion often encountered in sublime "Pindaric" odes. Nor is this orderliness to be taken as tight structure controlling intense emotion, for the sublime effects are heightened by a regular, inexorable progression.
In "On the Last Epiphany" the sky divides at Christ's appearance and sun, moon, and stars are astonished at his brightness. Lightnings flash, thunder shakes land and sea, the last trump pierces land and sea, and the dead in each — fearful sinners and rejoicing saints (note the continued pairings) — await their dooms. The conclusion focuses the reader's attention on his own part in this judgment, for although we are not directly addressed after the first word ("Behold"), we have been carried through the awesome preliminaries of an event in which each must perforce be an actor. A conventional, "correct" prosody supports the orderly structure: Chatterton has chosen octosyllabic couplets rather than Pindaric irregularity. This measure is used for the same subject in Swift's "Day of Judgment" and Dryden's St. Cecilia ode.
"A Hymn for Christmas Day," equally "lyric," has a very different structure. The state of mind is again conveyed in an orderly way, but the sequence is argumentative rather than narrative. A problem-solution sequence explores and logically evokes the appropriate emotion — the basic hymnic stance of humble adoration in which even the gift of praise can only come from the giver of all. This is done in a conventional song-hymn stanza, the line-by-line music unobtrusive and sure, the solemnity of the occasion maintained in a heightened diction.
Chatterton's later lyrics of praise are usually addressed to medieval heroes or eighteenth-century girls. With the heroes we shall see narrative and apostrophic structures similar to that of the last day poem; with young women of Bristol and other nonheroic mortals, as in the Christmas hymn, some logical pattern — problem-solution, question-answer, comparison-contrast, exploration of paradox — is usually employed.
For the second group of early pieces to be considered, there are, if I have correctly hypothesized its nature, more topical than formal similarities to later writings. I hope to prove that his second published work is a satiric miscellany — a Ianx satura — of three pieces printed together in Felix Farley 7 January 1764 and clearly intended to be read as one — "The Churchwarden," "I've let my Yard," and the prose "Letter from Fullford." It is all but certain that "The Churchwarden" is Chatterton's. The problem I raise is whether the three pieces act as one; if they do, and if they are Chatterton's, then his literary beginnings are much more complex than hitherto assumed. The three appear together, but as discrete works, in the "doubtful" section of Works (II, 688-691). But in Felix Farley they were run together, the second and third untitled. All three are so highly topical that a brief account of the occasion is essential.
Joseph Thomas, the churchwarden of Chatterton's parish and a brickmaker, combined religious and economic enterprise in a project to pull down the old Bristol High Cross in St. Mary Redcliff churchyard, remove the turf, and level the ground. His ostensible reasons were convenience and the appearance of the churchyard, but local wits were quick to note the quantities of clay being hauled off to Joe's brickyard during the operation. On 17 December 1763 satiric items began to appear in Felix Farley. Since all three pieces in question are about the scandal, it will be necessary to establish intended unity by showing artistic rather than merely topical connections.
The three pieces deal with Joe's project from three points of view in three distinct forms. "The Churchwarden" is a fable in two consecutive scenes presenting Joe's dream of churchyard wealth and his waking to the stern indictment of Conscience. "I've let my Yard" takes us into an imagined future: it is the dramatic monologue of Joe's deathbed repentance cast in stanzas that are best described as mock aria. The Swiftian prose letter from Fullford, the Redcliff gravedigger, shows that Joe's enterprising spirit has been quickly emulated at the lowest level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The most obvious connections are that the mock aria would seem to be Churchwarden Joe's belated response to Conscience's accusation in the fable, that Fullford apes Joe's duplicity and enterprise, and that in all three pieces the project is seen through the eyes of participants — the mock hero or the imitating swain.
The distinct structure of "The Churchwarden" itself will be discussed later with those of the other early fables. I am concerned here with its contribution to the total structure of the hypothesized satiric miscellany. Its two scenes constitute a psychomachy, the first exhibiting the vitality and precision of Joe's avaricious imagination, the second giving us Conscience's deft anatomizing of Joe's moral being. Yet it is, after all, Joe's conscience, even though he rejects its counsel, and both scenes are oddly sympathetic, even though they laugh at Joe.
In the second section of the miscellany, the mock aria, our sympathy strengthens because of the urgent sincerity of his repentance. Joe has made more of a bargain than he had supposed. In a punning recitative passage — "I've let my Yard, and sold my Clay, I And he, that likes to burn it, may —" the clay is also mortal and "he, that likes to burn it," turns out, in the further punning of an interpolated line of explanation that precedes the aria proper, to be the Devil: "A Lease granted, and Possession taken by another Baker." All of this gives rather a grisly double meaning to the piece. The comic perspective is not lost in either fable or aria; since the reader knows that Conscience's accusation was disregarded, the imagined deathbed scene still elicits punitive laughter, as though one were to say, "Joe will be burning day longer than he planned." Yet the sympathy is there too, and we shall see later that the deathbed thoughts of misers are as intriguing to Chatterton as they had been to John Gay. The Rowleyan "Gouler's Requiem," Chatterton's best treatment of the subject, is, like the mock aria, both comic and sympathetic. This later monologic "requiem" substantially strengthens Chatterton's claim to "I've let my Yard."
There is a problem in assigning the letter from Fullford to any eleven-year-old, even Chatterton. It is unquestionably the master stroke of this Ianx satura, if such it be, and it uses so many of the ironic techniques of Swift's self-satirizing authors (Partridge, for example, the Arguer for Christianity, or the Modest Proposer) that it would be unthinkable to attribute it to Chatterton except for the near certainty that "The Churchwarden" is his and for the case that can be made for a three-part satiric miscellany.
Fullford begins with professional pride in his precise knowledge of the chorography of his graveyard, "procured at the Expence of so many Years close Study and Application to Business." Joe Thomas's project has made a chaos that will breed trouble in the parish: "even the Poor love to bury with their Kindred: And all's but right that they should." The sense of injured professional pride and violated decorum are worthy a Peachum or a Lockit. Also, all of this is preparation for the postscript's cutting attack on Joe and, perhaps, on someone above him in the hierarchy. Still, the churchwarden's entrepreneurship has elicited sympathetic vibrations in Fullford's otherwise indignant bosom, and he proves Joe's equal at pausible rationalization of greed. The churchwarden, wanting clay for his brickyard, had cited the "convenience" of a level yard. Fullford proposes quitting his "Business of Grave-digger," renting his yard (cf. "I've let my Yard") and "for Decency's Sake" covering the nakedness of the turfless mold ("fat and good," presumably, because of what lies beneath) by planting it in potatoes and "some fine Beds of Onions, &c...." "I see no Reason," concludes Fullford, "why I may not get a profitable Job out of the Church, as well as my Great Master — as I find that's the Game nowadays, — tho' Decency, Convenience, or the like, be the Pretence." The laconic "or the like" might have been inserted by Swift or Gay.
If this prim double irony be Chatterton's, it must be acknowledged that he never again did anything as substantial with the Swift-Gay technique by which the author's satire suggests itself constantly and insistently just beneath a comically plausible surface, coming to that surface — as Swift and Gay so often do — throughout the last long sentence, whose language represents exactly and simultaneously the sentiments of both the comically prim Fullford and the mocking author.
How describe the form and impact of these three pieces taken together? There is movement — by narrative, mock air, and doubly ironic apologia — from the open comic-satiric, through the grimly punning comic-sympathetic, to the ironic-comic-sympathetic; from the clockwork of Joe's fearful greed, through the imagined urgency of his ultimate repentance, to the pastoral clockwork of Fullford's complacent greed, the last steadily pointing up the ecclesiastical chain of command toward heights left open to the reader's imagination. The total satiric view suggested is one of mean, transparently hypocritical self-seeking as the golden rule of St. Mary Redcliff parish.
"The Churchwarden," read by itself, would have been recognized in the eighteenth century as fable, as would "Sly Dick" and "Apostate Will," and eighteenth-century fable is a mode rather than a form. The medium is assertively nonheroic — couplets usually octosyllabic with a diction from the middle to lower levels of everyday usage and sometimes a dash of mock-heroic. A strong moral cast brings action, character, and thought into focus, and this makes, in turn, for a tendency toward allegory, whether that of simple moral illustration or of more specific topical satire. The tone is usually comic and ironic, though with a range from the quiet ironies of Gay to the harsh, often physical ironies of Swift's fables. The characters — animal, human, or superhuman — are viewed at the single middle-to-lower level found in the diction: style and characters are "levelled" by a strict decorum. The sequence is narrative, but the action need not, as we shall see, be the determining structural element. Swift, Prior, and Gay make effective use of the mode, but we find it also, with a more leisurely pace and with none of their encapsulating urge, in Butler's great mock romance. Always the mode deals in home — and homely — truths. It is perhaps to literature what Hogarth's engraving mode is to art. The comic-ironic characters are presented, often indirectly, in telling strokes of action, speech, or epithet. It seems probable that the quietly assured morality and art of the mode had a special congeniality to the desire for central, broadly human truth that has so often been attributed to the age.
The traits of the mode by no means determine the structure of individual fables, though they set loose bounds within which certain structural choices immediately present themselves. In the didactic fable, narrative techniques are placed at the disposal of moral argument: the moral idea determines the choice of action, characters, and so on, as well as the sequence. Gay is the master at such didactic fables. In both the moral fables of his first series and the political allegories of his second, Gay writes narrative illustrations of his convictions. In mimetic fables, on the other hand, though the moral coloring is always strong, structure is determined by the human interest of action or character, one or the other being dominant. Many of Swift's and Prior's fables are constructed as comic actions that determine, in turn, other functional and sequential parts. In a smaller group of mimetic fables, character analyzed determines action and the rest. Chatterton's three early fables are of this latter sort. In each Chatterton has analyzed a particular Bristolian: the structure of the fable embodies his analysis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thomas Chatterton's Art by Donald S. Taylor. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Introduction, pg. 1
- I. Seven Early Pieces: 1763-1764, pg. 29
- II. The Imaginative Matrix: The Rowley World and its Documents, 1768-1769, pg. 44
- III. The Rowleyan Works: Explorations in Heroic Modes, 1768-1769, pg. 79
- IV. Satiric Worlds and Modes: 1769-1770, pg. 170
- V. Imagined Places and Poetries: 1768-1770, pg. 262
- Notes, pg. 313
- Index, pg. 333