Telling Tales Read Online Free Page B

his native lands, and did indeed travel there extensively, recording songs and poems told to him by locals. He probably even used his not very brilliant knowledge of the Gaelic language to translate snatches of what he heard into English prose. And he inspired such important figures as Sir Walter Scott in their grand literary projects. But he had neither the linguistic skills nor the imaginative ones to do what he claimed to have done: to translate a great lost work of folk literature into the English language. All he wanted was fame enough to have his name echo down the corridors of future libraries. Which it still does, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
THOMAS CHATTERTON
    T HE MOST FAMOUS image of England’s most romantic hoaxer is of him lying dead in his Holborn garret, flame-haired and pale-faced, surrounded by torn-up pieces of manuscript. Outside the little window London’s grey rooftops stretch into the distance. The scene in the bare room is pitiful. But the real locus of the story is in Bristol, in the muniments room of the beautiful parish church at St Mary Redcliffe.
    Sextons of this church had been members of the Chatterton family for generations, and at the time of Thomas’s birth in 1752 it was in the hands of the poet’s uncle. Thomas was born after his father had died, and his impecunious mother, with a daughter to raise as well as her son, had to take in sewing to make ends meet. Finding a way to put food on the table was therefore of greater concern than giving her son a literary education, but Thomas, the quality of whose literary output would lead many to call him a genius, was drawn to letters as if by fate. Specifically, he was drawn to some fragments of illuminated manuscript which fell into his hands one day as he played in the vicarage. His mother had been tearing the pages up for scraps, but when she saw the child’s wonder at their content she set about teaching him to read.
    Before long, despite being constantly undermined and teased at his tough school for the poor boys of Bristol, Chatterton was composing verses of his own and borrowing from the library book after book of medieval poetry and history. His school, Colston’s Charity, was a brutish place, and although many considered the quiet and melancholy Chatterton to be soft in the head, one master, Mr Philips, was a writer of poems himself and so encouraged his boys to experiment with writing. At twelve, Chatterton showed him ‘Elinoure and Juga’, a poem he claimed to be by a little-known fifteenth-century author. Philips was impressed. Chatterton began to work on more such compositions, forming in his mind the apocryphal story of how he had found the manuscripts in an old stone chest in the church’s store room. In fact he probably did take the bare materials for his forgeries from there, just as he took the imaginative ones from his excursions into the works of Spenser, Chaucer and John Kersey’s
Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum
.
    The story he would tell was that the poems he found were by a young man called Rowley, also of Bristol, who several hundred years before had written under the patronage of real-life local burgher Master William Canynge. Chatterton inhabited this fantasy quite fully, even imagining a vision of the young Canynge as a boy genius like himself, as these lines from ‘The Storie of William Canynge’ illustrate:
    When the fate-marked babe acome to sight, I saw him eager gasping after light. In all his sheepen gambols and child’s play, In every merrymaking, fair, or wake, I kenn’d a perpled light of wisdom’s ray; He ate down learning with the wastel-cake; As wise as any of the aldermen, He’d wit enow to make a mayor at ten.
    But even before he started composing the poems in earnest, he submitted another
object trouvée
to a local newspaper, and had it not only accepted but roundly praised by all who saw it. This was the supposed account of a twelfth-century mayor crossing a new bridge over the Avon in