Telling Tales (4 page)

Now hideously pompous and ill-humoured, Macpher– son was nobody’s favourite. Even Hume, not known for his bitching, said he had ‘scarce ever known a man more perverse and unamiable’. Macpherson disingenuously conceded in his preface to the 1765 edition of
The Poems of Ossian
, that his overnight renown ‘might flatter the vanity of one fond of fame’. He further wrote that ‘The eagerness with which these Poems have been received abroad, is a recompense for the coldness with which a few have affected to treat them at home’. But given that within a few years he would have abandoned poetry for a life in colonial politics, it seems that the plaudits of foreigners were not recompense enough.

By 1764, he was preparing to leave the British Isles for the colony of Pensacola, now Florida (a suitable retirement place for a wealthy old cross-patch even now) where he had been offered an official post.

For the next part of his relatively short life, he kept out of the literary scene which had built him up and knocked him down, but on returning to London in 1766 he misguidedly decided to take up the pen again, producing his version of the history of Britain. If this got laughed out of the critics’ circle (which it did) nothing could compare to the monumental pasting his translation of Homer’s
Iliad
received in 1773. It takes an author of supreme confidence to undertake a work of this magnitude, especially when one of the greatest versions of all time – Alexander Pope’s – had been published a generation before. What bedraggled laurels Macpherson had to rest on as an interpreter of ancient heroic myth were not enough to shield him from the merciless kicking he now received. But perhaps by this time he was genuinely unbothered by the scorn poured on him from all corners. Perhaps he was happy just to be rich, well-travelled and talked about. Considering what we know of his insatiable desire for fame, surely he would have been rather pleased to know that long after his death he would continue to ignite passionate debate about the authorship of his most famous work.

Critics and historians have now proved conclusively that Macpherson did some admirable and interesting things. He did love the poetic folklore of 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.

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 Bristol, which would have been of interest to local historians because the new bridge which had just been built in that one’s place was currently the talk of the town.

He also tried his hand at creating a pedigree for a local pewter-maker who had high hopes for his genealogy, taking payment for ‘discovering’ a document which said that the man, Henry Burgum, was descended from one Syrr Johan de Berghamme.

Now aged fifteen and apprenticed to a lawyer, a job he hated but had little choice in taking, Chatterton began devoting all his spare time to the Rowley hoax. All his life he had mooned around the church and its environs, its effigies and manuscripts his only friends, but now there was a purpose to his being ‘alone and palely loitering’ as Keats, who would dedicate his ‘Endymion’ to him, might have seen it.

Chatterton was by now a poet of considerable powers and it is hard to believe he was only a teenager when he wrote works such as the great dramatic poem ‘Aella’. He showed the Rowley poems not only to his former teacher but to a local historian, Mr Barrett, his supporter and patron, Henry Burgum, and the collector, George Catcott. Then he decided to move things up a level, approaching the London publisher Robert Dodsley and asking him whether he might submit to him some ‘ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV’.

Dodsley was a key figure in eighteenth-century letters and a man whose rags to riches story was well known. He was the publisher of almost every famous writer of the late 1700s, from Defoe and Richardson to David Garrick and Edmund Burke. He himself had started life as a weaver and then a footman but, having been discovered by the great poet Alexander Pope and set up as a publisher, playwright and poet, he went on to define the literary canon of his generation with his famous anthology,
A Collection of Poems By Several Hands
. It must have seemed to an ambitious young Chatterton that he might look kindly on a boy from a similarly lowly background with equally grand literary aspirations.

When his submissions received no reply, he felt the bite of the first of many professional disappointments, but resolved to try someone else. Horace Walpole looked like the right candidate, and this time he appeared to have some success: Walpole, of course, had perpetrated his own literary hoax in the shape of
The Castle of Otranto
(which he confessed to having written quite soon after its first publication) but this did not at first seem to lend him any special powers of detection, for he replied that he should like to see more of Rowley’s ‘wonderful’ work and quite possibly publish it. But in the time it took for Chatterton to write back detailing his tall tale of the discovery of the papers in a church chest and outlining his life story as one who is poor but who wishes to better himself, Walpole had shown the manuscripts to his friend, the poet Thomas Gray, who had pronounced it a fake. So poor Chatterton received a brusque brush-off and was advised to seek his fortune elsewhere. Years later, and too late for it to do any good, Walpole would admit he thought there never ‘existed so masterly a genius’.

At this stage Chatterton was still optimistic and believed that he would soon be able to make a living from writing rather than clerking in a dreary law firm. He also dearly wished to help and reward his mother who was now hard at work teaching as well as sewing and carrying on the business of keeping an impecunious young family together. He decided to try his hand at writing satire for some of the many political magazines that were in vogue at the time, and it is to his credit that his abilities were elastic enough to earn him professional work in the
Middlesex Journal, Town and Country Magazine
and the
Freeholder’s Magazine
. He lampooned the leading figures of the day and just before Easter 1770 pulled off his journalistic
coup de grâce
: the bold, semi-satirical ‘Last Will and Testament’ in which he expressed his intention to take his life the following day due to his dissatisfaction with the modern world and his hopeless place in it. Reading this impassioned piece, his formerly hard-nosed master, Mr Lambert, released him from his employ on the spot and sent him off to London to seek his literary fortune.

By the end of April that year he was in the capital, living in Shoreditch and determined to earn money from his writing. He did manage to get work for various periodicals, and sat up all night writing endlessly in poetry and prose, satirical and straight, even parodying Macpherson’s Ossian poems in one piece. But although he had the flattery of editors he was hardly being paid enough to eat. Despite having spent his first wages on presents for his mother and sister back home in Bristol, he somehow found the money to move into a room in Brooke Street, just off Chancery Lane. It was here, little more than a couple of months after arriving in London, that he must have realized what little luck he had was running out. Neighbours reported that he wandered around looking half-starved, but always too proud to take the meals and charity they offered. Determined to make his own way but disillusioned by the difficulty of earning money in London’s overcrowded literary world, he reverted to the comfort of the Rowley poems, producing a new work, the ‘Excelente Balade of Charitie’.

No longer having access to the piles of forgotten old books and papers of St Mary Redcliffe, he could come by no parchment to write on so made what he said was a transcription from a medieval manuscript found in Bristol. He sent it off to the
Town and Country Magazine
in high hopes but it was rejected. Chatterton, still less than twenty years old, would not live to see another summer. When his body was found in the little room in Brooke Street, dead from self-administered arsenic, it was thought he hadn’t eaten for several days. The room was strewn with scraps of hand-written manuscript which he had torn into tiny bits in the hours before his death. It is hard to imagine a more pathetic scene, except perhaps for the pauper’s burial he had the next day in a municipal ground round the corner.

Hoaxing, for Thomas Chatterton, was more an outlet for his immense creative powers than a ruse to gain fame. Although he needed money, and desperately, and no doubt realized he was owed not only payment but respect for the work he was creating, the circumstances of his dishonest project were so urgent, passionate and – crucially – tinged with the satirical humour of one who liked, despite all his life’s hardships, to laugh, that he must surely be considered the noblest of the English hoaxers. His legacy reflects this: not only was he posthumously taken up by the Romantic poets – Keats and Wordsworth both lauding him in verse and holding him up as an inspirational figure and even a martyr to the cause of poesy – but even in the twentieth century his story is still being retold and plumbed for new meaning. Recent examples of his afterlife can be found in the work of the novelist Peter Ackroyd, the opera composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo and the Australian vocal artist Matthew Dewey.

However for one young man – also a melancholy lawyer’s apprentice with a troubled home life – the story of Chatterton would become an obsession, and one which, less than two decades after the Bristol poet’s demise and about half a mile down the road from where he died, would replay itself in much more daring, if less glorious, terms. That young man was William Henry Ireland.

W
ILLIAM HENRY IRELAND
was only a teenager when he pulled off one of the most daring hoaxes ever to dupe literary London. In 1775 he was born into a world and a family in thrall to the notion of literary and historical relics, which would pay a high price to own an object or book touched by the hand of one of Europe’s great minds. Before the century was out, William and his father Samuel would pay a far higher price than either could have imagined when the plan first took hold in the younger man’s mind. The gusto with which William produced the faked Shakespeare documents that made him famous before he had reached adulthood was incredible: he executed all the documents in his bulging dossier in little under two months in 1795. And the spur which endowed him with this extraordinary energy for composition was neither money nor fame but the peculiar circumstances of his unfortunate upbringing.