“Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?”

As I described yesterday, in March 1769 the British writer Horace Walpole asked Thomas Chatterton for more information about the fifteenth-century manuscript he said he was transcribing.

Chatterton’s 30 March reply included more verses and some remarks about his life as a poor young law clerk in Bristol, but no solid evidence. Walpole, born into wealth, became suspicious of a scam. He asked literary friends about the Rowley writings. They told him the language and form weren’t authentic.

On 4 April, Walpole sent Chatterton what he viewed as an avuncular letter, advising him to stick to his studies instead of literary forgeries. That document doesn’t survive.

Four days later, Chatterton replied, insisting that the Rowley writings were genuine. He also admitted he was “but 16 Years of Age.” And in a snit he wrote about “destroying all my useless Lumber of Literature, and never using my Pen again but in the Law.”

Then Chatterton sent another letter on 14 April, asking Walpole to return his manuscripts. This paper has a scrawled postscript: “Apprentice to an Attorney Mr Lambert, who is a Good Master; I find engrossing Mortgages &c a very irksome employ.”

Walpole went to France before returning the documents. That prompted even angrier demands from the teenager in July and August. On his return, Walpole wrote a response accusing Chatterton of “entertaining yourself at my expense” but decided not to send it. Instead, he just bundled up the Rowley papers and mailed them to Bristol.

At some point, and it’s unclear when, Chatterton summed up his feelings in a poem about Horace Walpole being mean, snobby, and hypocritical:

WALPOLE, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has proved to be.
Thou who, in luxury nurst, behold’st with scorn
The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favour—thou mayst call me cheat.
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
Who wrote Otranto? . . .

As I noted yesterday, back in 1764 Walpole had concealed his authorship of The Castle of Otranto for a year, letting people think it was an authentic medieval story. Chatterton was apparently playing the same game, but he didn’t have the standing to pull it off.

That fall, the young man turned to political writing using the name Decimus. In 1770 he left the attorney’s office and moved to London to establish a literary career. John Wilkes and other opposition politicians admired his essays, but no one paid him for them. He penned some more Rowley poems but couldn’t publish them, either.

On 24 Aug 1770 Chatterton killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was three months shy of turning eighteen. He was evidently a person of strong moods.

Seven years later, a scholar named Thomas Tyrwhitt collected some of Chatterton’s manuscripts and published Poems Supposed to have been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. He was among the shrinking number of people who thought the Rowley documents were genuine.

That book prompted articles about Chatterton, the supposed young discoverer. One detail in those reports was that Walpole had discouraged him. Indeed, a writer from Bristol said that Walpole’s dismissal had led to Chatterton’s suicide “soon after,” though a year had passed between the events.

But remember how Walpole owned a printing press? He could put out his side of the story. He printed a small private edition, enough to circulate among his many literary friends.

Meanwhile, Chatterton’s work, life, and death became yet another inspiration for the Romantics.

As a result, the exchange between Chatterton and Walpole is well known to scholars of literature and literary gossip. Some documents in their brief 1769 correspondence are already in libraries. Walpole’s early biographer, Mary Berry, had access to all the letters that survived in his papers and summarized them.

Now a few more of those documents—Chatterton’s letters, Walpole’s unsent reply, and his note on when he returned the Rowley writings—have come on the auction market. Bonhams is offering the collection for sale on 14 November. The estimated price is £100,000–150,000.

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.