In this 250th anniversary of Thomas Chatterton's birth, Anjili Babbar, writes for us.

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As I entered through the looming arch of the north porch of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, I mentally congratulated Peter Ackroyd for his perception in choosing this as a setting for his mystery about Thomas Chatterton. The intricacies of the church's design and the pervasive air of holiness only added to my sense that, from a certain vantage point, it was the perfect setting for such a novel, and as the young verger showed me around, this idea took root more firmly in my mind. All of the plaques, the commemorations, the restoration of certain areas of the church to the eighteenth-century style only serve to emphasize the author's absence from this place--an absence more noticeable due both to the disappearance of the Chatterton monument and to the family grave in the back of the church which notoriously lacks the body of Thomas himself.

I was led first to the altar where Coleridge and Southey had exchanged vows with their brides, then to the damp spiral staircase to the muniment room where Samuel Johnson is said to have become stuck on a visit to the tower that Chatterton made famous, and it occurred to me that for centuries writers and scholars had been making the same pilgrimage I was making. Yet oddly enough, that pilgrimage seemed always to be inspired by the air of mystery upon which I had first remarked, a pilgrimage to the haunt of Chatterton the man or Chatterton the myth, but rarely Chatterton the author.

I suppose everyone who studies Chatterton inevitably falls in love with his biography and the myths surrounding it. Born in Bristol in 1752, Chatterton became fascinated by the church whose Gothic towers loomed across from his childhood home, and where his late father had served as a chorister. Prompted by the workings of his intense imagination and enthralled with certain scraps of medieval manuscript from the church, the young poet forged a canon of writings, ostensibly the work of a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley. These writings, though highly controversial, were initially generally regarded as authentic, and were not definitively proven otherwise for several years following the poet's death. Filled with pride at the success of his forgery and the nearly universal praise of "Rowley's" work, in 1770 Chatterton moved to London with great hopes of furthering his career as a writer. Unfortunately for him, the writings he attempted to publish under his own name seem to have been met with apathy at best, and he was forced to endure the irony that the Rowley works were largely accepted as authentic due to the presumption that he himself did not have the talent to be the author of such magnificent verse.

On the morning of August 24, 1770, a seventeen-year-old Chatterton was discovered dead in his garrett in Brooke Street, Holborn, the victim of arsenic poisoning. The coroner quickly pronounced a verdict of suicide, and Chatterton was buried in an unmarked grave in the Shoe Lane Workhouse cemetery. And here the mythology begins: what became of Chatterton's body, missing for centuries from the aforementioned burial ground? Did Chatterton in fact commit suicide, or was the arsenic poisoning a grave accident-perhaps an attempt to rid himself of a social disease? What about claims by poets in the following century that the ghost of Chatterton had appeared to them, dissuading them from contemplating suicide?

Undoubtedly, the premature death of Chatterton and the mysteries surrounding it rendered a Romantic fascination with his biography inevitable. The poets of the nineteenth century discovered in him the epitome of the suffering young artist-for Keats, he became a nightingale; for Wordsworth, a "marvellous boy" and a "sleepless Soul that perished in his Pride." When the flame-haired George Meredith posed for Henry Wallis in the Brooke Street attic where Chatterton had composed his final verses, the image was perfected. Far from being equated with the snub-nosed, "goggle-eyed" boy in the only contemporary portrait known to exist of him, Chatterton took on the face of the slender, pale and innocently beautiful Meredith, a creature too ethereal to be anything but victimized by this world, with the fiery hair an indication of his unrecognized yet unquenchable genius.

As a graduate student, I quickly discovered that researching Chatterton in the traditional sense was not to be an easy task. Even the modern critical works that set out to discuss Chatterton's writings seemed ultimately to degenerate into contemplations of the author's mysterious biography. From the mid-twentieth century onward, I discovered a fascination with Chatterton's life that seemed to mimic that of the Romantic era in its own postmodern context. From Wordsworth's "marvellous boy" Chatterton had become Lund's "angry young man," blustering against the aristocracy of the letter and at least as concerned with sexual experimentation as he was with the composition of verses. And though, as I've mentioned, such a fascination with this particular author's biography is understandable, as I perused Donald Taylor's excellent edition of Chatterton's works, I became extremely aware that there was much more to Chatterton's influence on literature. Readers who are familiar with Keats and Shelley will undoubtedly find echoes in their work of earlier Chatterton poems; "Minstrel's Roundelay" quite evidently provided the structural inspiration for "Ghasta and the Avenging Demon," and "Endymion" and "Ode to Autumn" unmistakably recall Chatterton's AElla.

Yet in 1930, in his commendable biography, Meyerstein claimed that "Chatterton is Rowley, and as far as literature is concerned, nothing else," and I believe that this is hardly the case. Apart from political satire which often seems to transcend temporal boundaries, the canon of Chatterton's claimed works is replete with evidences of a social conscience far ahead of its time. In particular, Chatterton seems to have been a fiercer advocate of religious tolerance than most of his contemporaries. While as early as 1753, Samuel Richardson declared that "No religion teaches a man evil. I honor every man who lives up to what he professes," in the novel in question he is ultimately unable to envision a wedding between his hero and a Catholic heroine, and renders only his Protestant characters capable of displaying the divine courtesy of religious tolerance. As if to drive the point home, Richardson divides the cast of characters of Sir Charles Grandison into men, women and Italians. Compare this to the young Chatterton less than two decades later in his "Articles of the Belief of Me Thomas Chatterton": "That God being incomprehensible: it is not required of us, to know the mysterys of the Trinity &c. &c. &c. &c./ That it matters not whether a man is a Pagan Turk Jew or Christian if he acts according to the religion he professes." Or again, from "The Defence": "I own a God immortal boundless wise/ Who bid our Glorys of Creation rise/ Who form'd his varied likeness in Mankind/ Centering his many wonders in the mind/ Who saw Religion a fantastic Night/ But gave us reason to obtain the light….What I think right I ever will pursue/ And leave you Liberty to do so too."

And this is not even to mention the mastery of verse, and in particular, the mastery of antiquation and forgery that enabled a seventeen-year-old boy to deceive a large portion of the literary world, even if in retrospect it seems clear that certain of his patrons were merely making use of what they themselves recognized as a forgery. Modern scholars frequently ridicule the Rowley controversy, depicting it as one of the greatest embarrassments of literary history-and yet, even after the discovery of the deceit, it cannot be denied that Chatterton is largely responsible for bringing to the attention of the literary world that there was, in fact, pertinent verse composed in England before the modern era apart from Chaucer.

If Chatterton is not as canonized as other of his English contemporaries, then, it is certainly not due to a lack of merit. Perhaps instead it is a result of the inexorable fascination with his biography, which makes him appear less of a poet than a poetic subject. Or again, perhaps the emphasis on Chatterton as forger has served to override his status as composer, thinker, and artist. In either case, with the 250th anniversary of Chatterton's birth this year has come a new surge of interest in the poet. Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, which has done wonders in recreating the muniment room to appear as it did in Chatterton's time, is planning a celebration in honor of the writer, to be held in conjunction with the first Chatterton conference at the University of Bristol early in September.

Over the last several decades, Bristol has certainly embraced its legacy of Romantic poets, and it is heartening to see the town at long last embracing Chatterton as well. For although his final verses were composed in London, Chatterton is unquestionably a Bristolian poet, and his works are replete with references to the town, its history, its glorious medieval church, and the poet's personal hero, William Caynynges. Having arrived in Bristol last year to satiate my curiosity concerning the Chatterton myth, I left with a better understanding of the world which had created Chatterton the poet. Bristolians should take pride in recognizing Chatterton this year not as a mysterious and mythological figure, nor as a precursor to the Romantic movement, but as an author inspired to write by the history and beauty of the town in which he was born.

Anjili Babbar is a doctoral student in eighteenth-century English and French literature in the Department of English at the University of Rochester USA. Her interests include Thomas Chatterton and the relationship of authorial biography and canonization.