Onuphrio Muralto, Ossian, and Thomas Rowley

Last week I elaborated on a news story from Britain about the rediscovery of a detail in an eighteenth-century painting that everyone knew about from documentary sources but no one had seen for many decades. Here’s a similar story about historic letters.

I think this story begins in 1764 when The Castle of Otranto appeared, described on its title page as “Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.” Some early reviews hailed the book as an important discovery in medieval literature.

In 1765, however, a second edition was printed, and the author came forward: the Hon. Horace Walpole, M.P. (shown here). He declared this little novel was his “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” Literary scholars now credit Walpole with writing the first gothic novel, a precursor to Romanticism.

Meanwhile, the British literary world was debating the poems of Ossian, the first published in 1761. James MacPherson presented these verses as his translations of ancient Gaelic ballads from Scotland.

The Ossian poems attracted many devoted admirers, including Thomas Jefferson. Other people dismissed the verses on artistic and historic grounds; Samuel Johnson declared that Macpherson was “a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud.”

MacPherson produced none of the manuscripts he was supposedly translating, and in 1764 went off to Florida as the governor’s secretary before returning to Britain for a political career. He never admitted creating the poems himself, as most scholars now believe. Those same scholars credit “Ossian” with inspiring both genuine Gaelic scholarship and early Romanticism.

Into that literary atmosphere came a teenager named Thomas Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney in Bristol. He was a literary prodigy, having seen one of his poems published at age eleven.

Son of a widow who taught school, Chatterton started seeking out literary patrons, first in Bristol. He played the same game that MacPherson and Walpole had, claiming to have found manuscripts from centuries earlier. These poems, Chatterton declared, came from a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley.

In March 1769 Chatterton sent “The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wrote bie T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge” to Horace Walpole, knowing the wealthy man had an interest in painting and publishing connections. Indeed, Walpole had his own printing press and staff of printers.

Walpole replied, “Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be found. I should not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.”

TOMORROW: It all goes horribly wrong.