Nick Groom reveals new evidence which suggests that Thomas Chatterton did not commit suicide but died from an accidental overdose…
How did Bristol’s boy-poet and forger Thomas Chatterton die? The received wisdom is that he committed suicide out of despair at his poverty, out of bitterness at his failure to get published, and because he was mad, and he did so by taking arsenic. The compelling Henry Wallis painting of the young poet dead athwart his bed, with paper shredded and cast about the room and the fatal bottle of poison lately dropped from his lifeless hand, is the iconic image of neglected genius and Romantic suicide and the embodiment of a myth. Indeed, in the popular imagination Chatterton is certainly far more famous for committing suicide than for anything he actually wrote-his is one of themost famous suicides in Western culture.
Except taht he didn’t commit suicide. Evidence and opinion among a small group of iconoclasts has been questioning the suicide verdict for some years; there is now sufficient evidence to reassess his death.
The suicide thesis is taken for granted, and seems to symbolize the extraordinary career of Chatterton who until his death in 1770 was a literary forger of medieval poetry. It rests on three key points. Chatterton had threatened suicide at least twice before, and these threats culminated in his release from his apprenticeship; he immediately left his native Bristol for London. Within a few months in the capital he was starving to death and refused credit at the baker’s, having failed to make a living as a writer:he consequently killed himself in a fit of despair. the coroner reported that he had killed himself with arsenic and opium, and declared himself of unsound mind. He received a pauper’s burial; he was only seventeen.
Out of this sketch was generated the myth of the neglected young genius, spurned by London, oppressed by poverty and in a moment of madness taking his own life.
But the evidence actually points in a different direction. First, the threats to commit suicide were transparent attempts by Chatterton to escape from his apprenticeship to an attorney and hsi ‘will’ is in fact a rollicking satire on Bristol. Clearly the ruse worked, and Chatterton’s swift departure to London suggests that no-one thought he was too unstable to travel to the capital and work there. His letters show no sign of suicidal depression. This is partly because he was already earning money from London publishers, having published 31 pieces in seven different journals before he even arrived. Over the next few months before he died (April-August 1770) Chatterton published over two dozen more pieces, had received a book commission, and sold a musical drama for five guineas.
Even if he were only making shillings out of publishing poetry, lodgings were cheap and a family could live on a pound a week. In other words, his earnings would have given him some security. He ate little and abstained from alcohol, and was soon making enough to send presents to his family and to move from a shared room to a single-occupancy garret. After his death, Chatterton’s publishers insisted that ‘He did not die for want’.
The coroner’s verdict was that he ’swallowed arsenick in water, on the 24th of August,1770, and died, in consequence thereof, the next day’. The report has been lost (although ironically a forgery of the document turned up in the nineteenth century), but witnesses were later identified. One of these, Mrs Wolfe the barber’s wife, claimed that Chatterton had been refused a loaf on credit. This caught the public imagination- the boy ‘died for want of bread’- but this witness actually changed her story from her original account and this element seems to have evolved as an urban myth.
What was he doing with arsenic, however? Chatterton had contracted some sort of sexually transmitted disease. He occupied the garret above a brothel and had boasted in an innuendo-laden letter to a friend in Bristol that he had already taken liberties with athe girls there, which had led to his rent being raised. Chatterton certainly cultivated a rakish reputation in both Bristol and London and wrote some extravagantly bawdy verse, and though much of this was perhaps just teenage braggadocio, he certainly had contracted an STD and was consequentially dosing himself with potentially dangerous drugs. His infection was later confirmed by the Brooke Street apothecary, who admitted selling Chatterton arsenic for ‘the Foul Disease’, warning him’against the too free use’of the chemicals. He was also taking opium, from the forensic evidence of a stain on the pocketbook found on his body after death. Possibly laudanum (opium in alcohol) was being taken as a painkiller, possibly for more exotic reasons. Either way, Chatterton was treating himself with arsenic for the pox and simultaneously taking opium. Did this create a lethal cocktail? Did he misjudge the dosage?
Either way, he left no suicide note, although papers were recovered from his room and returned to his family. The very absence of Chatterton’s last words is deeply suggestive of an accidental death:surely such an opinionated writer would have had something pungent to say on the topic, particularly as he had already done so in jest? The existence of a suicide note would be incontrovertible evidence that he did indeed kill himself; ironically, no fewer than two have turned up over the years in order to bolster the myth. At least one must be fake, and it transpires that both are forgeries.
Why the non compos mentis suicide verdict, then? The apothecary had persuaded the coroner to record that Chatterton was mad because of the outrageous things he used to say, such as threatening ‘to turn Mahometan’. It acrually suited everyone to treat Chatterton as a mad suicide: madness could account for everything- from his medieval forgeries to his flight to London to his impetuous death- even his vegetarianism and eccentric taste in clothes; it would also divert attention from his sexual improprieties and go a long way to explaining them. It was far less mortifying for his surviving family that their son was mad than that he was poxed.
So for almost two and a half centuries Western culture has celebrated the suicide of a seventeen-year-old as embodying the myth of Romantic genius. Perhaps it is now time to weave a different myth, a story that actually fits the facts, and which in the context of twenty-first century drug culture has considerably more resonance today:that the brilliantly precocious poet Chatterton died alone, far from home, of an accidental drugs overdose.
This an edited version of ‘The Death of Chatterton”, published in From Gothic to Romantic:Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol, ed. Alistair heys (Redcliffe Press). Nick Groom is Reader in English and Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies at Bristol University, and Secretary of the Thomas Chatterton Society. His books include Thomas Chatterton and Romatic Culture (ed. 1999); The Forger’s Shadow:How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature(2002), and an edition of Chatterton’s Selected Poetry (2003).
