Thomas Chatterton’s forged Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1777) has dazzled critics and poets since it appeared as a ‘most singular literary curiosity’ seven years after his premature death.1 In many of the periodicals, reviews, newspapers and literary clubs the ‘Rowley debate’ immediately ensued.2 Although
... [Show full abstract] notionally concerned with the authenticity of the works, this debate played a larger and more important role in the unresolved axiological tensions in the supremacist battle between the ancients and moderns.3 Chatterton’s numerous fashionable modern works in poetry and prose by contrast were often associated with the trashy modern novel. A review of Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; by Thomas Chatterton (London, 1778) in the Gentleman’s Magazine treats them as the ‘loose, immoral pieces’ appropriate for a writer now as ‘famous’ as Laurence Sterne — famous, lest it be forgotten, as the outed author of the new-old medieval forgeries.4 For the reviewer ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’, ‘which none but a sad Dog could write’, is an appropriate self-expression of this young libertine writer as depicted in contemporary anecdotes.5 In many uncomfortable ways this presupposes that even in the process of unifying the canon under the head of Thomas Chatterton, the Rowley poems remained charismatically ancient, segregated from Chatterton and the grubbily modern.