Key figures: Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), author; Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–1786), editor
Summary
On February 8, 1777, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century was published in London, edited by classical scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt. The collection consisted of poems authored by Thomas Chatterton — who had died in poverty in 1770 at the age of seventeen — but presented as medieval works supposedly written by a 15th-century Bristol monk named Thomas Rowley. Chatterton had fabricated an elaborate fiction around Rowley, forging not only the poems themselves but also parchment documents, heraldic records, and biographical details to support the persona.
The publication of these posthumous forged poems created a major literary sensation and triggered a scholarly controversy that persisted for decades. Although Tyrwhitt himself included a cautious appendix questioning the medieval dating, the poems were sufficiently convincing — and sufficiently beautiful — to inspire fierce debate among literary scholars. Ultimately recognized as a deliberate hoax, the Rowley poems became deeply influential in European Romantic literature and shaped perceptions of medieval aesthetics for generations.
Chatterton’s Life and the Rowley Forgeries
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol in 1752 into a family of modest means. He displayed exceptional precocity from childhood, teaching himself to read from an illuminated medieval manuscript in the family’s possession — an early and formative encounter with antique texts. By his early teens he had begun producing fake medieval documents, claiming they were transcriptions of manuscripts discovered in a muniment room at St. Mary Redcliffe church in Bristol.
Chatterton’s most elaborate creation was the fictional monk Thomas Rowley, supposedly a 15th-century friend of the Bristol merchant William Canynge. Under Rowley’s name, Chatterton produced poems of considerable technical sophistication, employing archaic vocabulary and spelling to simulate Middle English verse. The poems included Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude, a pseudo-medieval tragedy, and the Bristowe Tragedie, which Chatterton circulated among Bristol scholars and antiquaries.
When Chatterton moved to London in 1770 seeking literary fame, his attempts to sell the Rowley poems — and his contemporary writing under his own name — met with little success. Horace Walpole had initially shown interest but, after consulting scholars who doubted the manuscripts’ authenticity, curtly returned them. Chatterton died in August 1770, aged seventeen, from arsenic poisoning — almost certainly suicide — in a Holborn garret. He left behind a substantial body of work that was largely unpublished at the time of his death.
The 1777 Publication
Thomas Tyrwhitt, a classical scholar and editor best known for his critical edition of Chaucer, undertook the task of preparing the Rowley poems for publication. He drew on manuscript copies that Chatterton had distributed during his lifetime and brought considerable editorial skill to the project, annotating the archaic language and providing contextual notes. His edition was organized thematically and included the full Aella, the Bristowe Tragedie, and more than a dozen shorter poems.
Tyrwhitt’s appendix to the 1777 edition — expanded in a second edition of 1778 — presented philological evidence that the poems could not have been written in the 15th century, pointing to anachronistic vocabulary and historical inconsistencies. This made the 1777 publication unusual: it simultaneously presented and questioned the forgeries, initiating the scholarly debate that would occupy critics for the next two decades. Competing scholarly camps formed, with figures such as Jacob Bryant arguing strenuously for the poems’ medieval authenticity as late as 1781.
Scholarly Controversy and Vindication
The authenticity debate engaged some of the leading literary minds of the era. Horace Walpole — who carried lifelong guilt over his dismissal of Chatterton — published a defensive account of his dealings with the poet in 1779. Samuel Johnson and others examined the manuscripts and sided with the forgery view. The controversy was essentially settled by 1782, when Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry provided detailed evidence confirming Chatterton’s authorship.
The debate had lasting consequences for the emerging disciplines of textual criticism and historical philology. It demonstrated that rigorous linguistic and historical analysis could distinguish genuine medieval texts from imitations — a lesson that informed 19th-century scholarship on the authenticity of other disputed literary works.
Significance
Why 1777 Matters:
- Romantic Precursor: The Rowley poems exemplified preoccupations that would define the Romantic movement — medievalism, authenticity, the creative power of the imagination, and the artist’s struggle against a philistine society. Their publication in 1777 arrived the same year as Klinger’s Sturm und Drang, demonstrating the era’s broad cultural appetite for emotionally intense, imaginative literature that challenged Enlightenment rationalism.
- Scholarly Controversy: The publication sparked a major scholarly debate about textual authenticity, the responsibilities of editors, and the limits of historical evidence — debates that established important precedents for 19th-century philology and literary studies.
- Chatterton’s Legacy: Chatterton, already acquiring the status of a Romantic icon through his tragic early death, gained additional prominence through this edition. He became the archetypal “doomed Romantic poet” cited by Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. In France, Alfred de Vigny wrote a play Chatterton (1835) that transformed him into a symbol of unrecognized artistic genius crushed by a mercenary society.
- Influence on Romanticism: Despite — and partly because of — their fraudulent origin, the Rowley poems influenced major Romantic figures. The freedom conferred by writing in a fictional medieval voice allowed Chatterton to explore emotional registers unavailable to polite contemporary verse, an irony that the Romantics recognized and celebrated.
- Literary Craftsmanship: The elaborate construction of the Rowley persona and the technical sophistication of the archaic pastiche demonstrated that even a deliberate forgery could achieve genuine artistic merit — a paradox that complicated emerging Romantic theories of authenticity and artistic originality.
Influence on Later Literature
The Chatterton phenomenon resonated far beyond British letters. The Romantic poet John Keats dedicated his long narrative poem Endymion (1818) “to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites took up Chatterton as a visual and literary subject; Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton became one of the most celebrated artworks of the Victorian era and remains the most iconic image of the poet.
The Rowley poems also fed directly into the broader late-18th-century enthusiasm for ancient and medieval texts — the same cultural current that would produce James Macpherson’s Ossian poems (already the subject of debate by 1777) and help generate interest in vernacular literature across Europe.
Context in 1777 Arts
The publication coincided with a remarkable concentration of major literary and artistic events in 1777. Sheridan’s The School for Scandal premiered that same year, while Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro was completing its composition. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whose first volume (1776) was still fuelling controversy, reflected the same fascination with historical depth that made the Rowley controversy so charged.
Sources
- 1777 in literature - Wikipedia — entry on Chatterton’s posthumous publication and its literary significance
- Poems by Thomas Rowley - Wikipedia — detailed article on the Rowley poems, their composition, publication, and reception
- Thomas Chatterton - Wikipedia — comprehensive biography covering his life, forgeries, death, and literary legacy
- Thomas Tyrwhitt - Wikipedia — article on the editor who prepared the 1777 edition
Related
- Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s Sturm und Drang — companion arts event of 1777, marking the broader Romantic turn against Enlightenment rationalism
- Sheridan’s The School for Scandal — major theatrical work of the same year
- Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — historical scholarship appearing simultaneously, reflecting the era’s preoccupation with the past
- Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro — another landmark literary work of 1777