Produced by Leah Moser and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
REPRINT OF THE EDITION OF 1778. (The Table of Contents follows the1778 title-page.)
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on the 20th of November 1752.His father—also Thomas—dead three months before his son's birth, hadbeen a subchaunter in Bristol Cathedral and had held the mastershipin a local free school. We are told that he was fond of reading andmusic; that he made a collection of Roman coins, and believed in magic(or so he said), studying the black art in the pages of CorneliusAgrippa. With all the self-acquired culture and learning that raisedhim above his class (his father and grandfathers before him formore than a hundred years had been sextons to the church of St. MaryRedcliffe) he is described as a dissipated, 'rather brutal fellow'.Lastly, he appears to have been 'very proud', self-confident, andself-reliant.
Of Chatterton's mother little need be said. Gentle and rather foolish,she was devoted to her two children Mary and, his sister's junior bytwo years, Thomas the Poet. Of these Mary seems to have inherited thecolourless character of her mother; but Thomas must always have beenremarkable. We have the fullest accounts of his childhood, and thedetails that might with another be set down as chronicles of thenursery will be seen to have their importance in the case of this boywho set himself consciously to be famous when he was eight, wrotefine imaginative verse before he was thirteen, and killed himself agedseventeen and nine months.
Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy who knew few of hisletters at four; and was superannuated—such was his impenetrabilityto learning—at the age of five from the school of which his fatherhad been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half sofrequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparentlycauseless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for hisreason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by hissister—and there is no incongruity in the two accounts—that heearly displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over hisplaymates as their master and they his hired servants.' At seven anda half he dissipated his mother's fear that she had borne a foolby rapidly learning to read in a great black-letter Bible; forcharacteristically 'he objected to read in a small book.' In a veryshort time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contentsof every volume he could lay his hands on. He had a thirst forknowledge at large—for any kind of information, and as the merestchild read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history,astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel mostchildren, and perhaps one may say, most men. At the age of eightwe