PETER ACKROYD, POSTMODERNIST PLAY AND CHATTERTON

Well-known in Britain, less generally known in the States, Peter Ackroyd is representative of a new breed
of British novelists who can loosely be termed postmodernist. But, unlike their counterparts in the States,
these British postmodernists do not necessarily cultivate radical experimentation nor do they confine their
appeal to an elite, mainly academic coterie. They are capable of producing best sellers such as Martin
Amis's Money. They produce works of fiction that are turned into movies, such as Angela Carter's story,
"The Company of Wolves", a rewriting of the traditional fairy story of Little Red Riding Hood. They have
absorbed the triumphs (and absurdities) of poststructuralism and can utilize those aspects of recent theory
that suit their purposes without becoming enslaved by them. They have never lost touch with their
readership. But they are clearly distinguishable (and distinguish themselves) from the mainstream of
British realist novelists typified by writers like Angus Wilson, Alan Sillitoe, or Margaret Drabble.
Yet none of these less realist novelists belongs to a school or subscribes to a group identity. Peter Ackroyd
typically insists on the difference of his fiction from the entire contemporary scene: "Someone said the
novels I write really have no connection with the novels of my contemporaries, or even with the period
itself. I think that's probably true" (Smith 60). Ackroyd is a peculiar combination. He is of his time and
outside it, representative of a newer kind of fictional British writing and yet unique, in rebellion against
the mainstream English fictional tradition yet writing in an alternative British strain of his choosing. To
illustrate the particular position he occupies in the contemporary field of British novelists this article will
concentrate on what a number of reviewers consider to be his best novel to date, Chatterton. But because
this is the first essay (as opposed to reviews and interviews) to be written about him, the first section will
be taken up with his earlier career and stated attitudes to the genres of literature which he has produced.
Ackroyd's introduction to postmodern writing came when he won a Mellon Fellowship that enabled him
to spend two years from 1971 to 1973 at Yale. He had just been awarded a double first in English
literature at Cambridge, a bastion of New Criticism in the F.R. Leavis mold. At Yale he met John Ashbery
and Kenneth Koch, both poets of the New York School. Ashbery had spent nine years in France and was
well acquainted with contemporary currents in French thought. He was also a friend of a number of
postmodern artists such as Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. After Cambridge this potent new brew went to
Ackroyd's head like wine. He quickly absorbed these Americans' disruption of meaning and reference,
their exploration of the self-reflexivity of language and art.
Towards the end of his stay at Yale he wrote what he described as "not a scholarly work" but "a polemic,"
Notes for a New Culture (9). The position he takes in it reflects Yale's enthusiastic adoption of
contemporary French theory at that time. But, seen in a British context, his assertion that form and
language constitute the true subject of contemporary modernism (postmodernism as a term had yet to
become fashionable) was inflammatory material. In the book he ridicules F. R. Leavis's belief in the moral
force of literature. He also deplores the English subscription to a great tradition of literature (as defined
by Leavis) built on a conventional aesthetic which rests on key notions of "subjectivity" and "experience."
This old humanistic belief in the referential instrumentality of language, Ackroyd argues, was replaced by
the modernist aesthetic. "Modernism is the movement in which created form began to interrogate itself,
and to move toward an impossible union with itself in self-identity...Language is seen to constitute
meaning only within itself, and to excise the external references of subjectivity and its corollary, Man"
(145). But England has insulated itself from "that formal self-criticism and theoretical debate which
sustained European modernism" (147). The true line of modernism, according to Ackroyd, runs from
Mallarm and Nietszche through Joyce to contemporaries such as Ashbery in literature and Derrida and
Lacan in theory. Both Ashbery and his fellow poet of the New York school, Frank O'Hara, share "a
concern for a language which, although assured and relaxed, manifestly 'says' nothing" (127). Ackroyd
concludes that England's separation from the mainstream of modernist developments has led to a paucity
in English creative writing. "Our own literature has revealed no formal sense of itself and continues no
substantial language." (147).

Written in 1973, Notes for a New Culture was not published until 1976, by which time Ackroyd was
established back in London as the youngest literary editor of the Spectator, a weekly magazine. It was
reviewed in the influential London Sunday Times by Christopher Ricks, a leading professor in English at
Cambridge at that time. Professor Ricks was implacably opposed to the irruption of French theory into
the field of English studies, and the literary editor of the Sunday Times must have known that he was
offering a red rag to a bull when he sent the book to him for review. After expressing his exasperation at
Ackroyd's attempt "to make out that it [the book] is a lonely oasis when it fact it has a swell of trend
buoying it up" (somewhat of a mixed metaphor), Christopher Ricks concentrates all his fire on Ackroyd's
numerous errors of fact that reflect its origin as the product of a young graduate student who has failed to
check all his sources. He mocks Ackroyd's assertion that Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" was published one
year before Mallarm's Les Posies, seeing that Mallarm was born the same year "Locksley Hall" was
published. He castigates Ackroyd for misspelling Tristes Tropiques (Topiques ), Mauberley (Mauberly ),
Revaluation (Revaluations ) and other misquotations. "Why all this niggling?" he asks. "Because literary
history at present might profit from a long hard look, but only if the look also took a long hard look at
itself first." He concludes: "It will be a gloomy day...if all that happens is that English disdain-for-theory
squares up to Continental disdain-for-fact" (39)
Apart from being upset that Christopher Ricks had been able to point out so many easily avoidable errors,
Ackroyd was not unduly put out by what was ultimately a refusal to confront head on the argument of his
book. After Notes for a New Culture, the next book Ackroyd published was a study of Ezra Pound, one of
the modernist giants. Ezra Pound and his World (1979), one of a series, came out the same year as a less
conventional and more personal book that Ackroyd wrote simultaneously, Dressing Up, Transvestism and
Drag: The History of an Obsession. That combination of the avant-garde and camp places Ackroyd quite
accurately outside the mainstream of English culture. He has subsequently said of his eight years as
literary, then joint, managing editor of the Spectator, "I'm not what you'd call a Spectator person...I don't
fit into that particular kind of Englishness" (Appleyard 53). Asked recently what tradition he does
subscribe to, Ackroyd claimed to admire the English genius for "a combination of melancholy, lyricism
and camp" (McGrath 47). Those are the qualities he attempts to embody in his work. "I don't think many
other contemporary novelists are working in that vein" (McGrath 47). Clearly he has shifted his position
since writing Notes, in that he no longer spurns a particular English literary tradition. But he still
redefines which one he admires. It is not, he insists in the same interview, concerned with the moral life
of adult love and death. Apart from Shakespeare, English "tragedy slides off into excessive horror, or
gothic; and there's very little love either, it tends to become parody or sentimentality" (McGrath 47).
Reading literature may make you a better writer, he quips, but not a better person. So he still stands
opposed to the Leavis school of criticism, and he still cultivates a postmodernist delight in parody and
linguistic self-consciousness.
Throughout this time Ackroyd thought of himself primarily as a poet in the American avant-garde
tradition. His first published work had been a slim book of poems called London Lickpenny (1973), and
he published a second small volume of poems, Country Life, in 1978. Even Peter Porter had to admit in
his review of London Lickpenny for the Observer that he did not understand most of the poems.
Throughout this period Ackroyd saw himself as an experimental poet in the contemporary mode, isolated
in England by a general cultural subscription to humanism and realism. The last thing he contemplated
during this time was extending his linguistic experimentation to the realm of fiction. Interestingly, since
turning to fiction he has stopped writing poetry altogether. But he has noticed that "some of the cadences
and the images and the ideas and the perceptions and even the very phrases which occurred in [the] poetry
have recurred in the fiction" (CA 3).
In 1982 he published his first novel, The Great Fire of London. It has many of the unique characteristics
that Ackroyd's readers have come to associate with his subsequent works of fiction. Setting out to offer a
continuation of Dickens's Little Dorrit, the novel stages this in contemporary London. A cast of characters
attempt to relive parts of the novel - invariably unsuccessfully. The past is unrepeatable. There is the

director of a film based on Little Dorrit who sets himself the impossible task of recreating Dickens's
London using a contemporary prison for the Marshalsea Prison of Dickens's time. There is Audrey, a
telephone operator, who imagines herself at a sance taken over by the persona of Little Dorrit. Other
Dickensian characters include Arthur, a dwarf child murderer and Rowan Philips, a gay Cambridge don
whom the director hires to write the script. Inevitably past and present become inextricably fused when
Audrey, indignant at the presence of an actress on the set impersonating Little Dorrit (herself), burns
down the film set, in the process causing the director's death. That is the fate, Ackroyd considers, that lies
in wait for any realist artist attempting to resurrect the past. As he concludes: "This is not a true story, but
certain things follow from other things" (169). The entire novel is written in a style that brilliantly
encapsulates Dickens's taste for caricature and Dickens's style of writing.
His next novel, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), won the Somerset Maugham Award for its
brilliant reproduction of Wilde's voice and linguistic mannerisms. It purports to be Wilde's journal
between August and November 1900 (when Wilde died). The text is sprinkled with Wildean aphorisms
that bear comparison with their original. Ackroyd portrays a Wilde transformed by his public trial and
period in prison: "I longed for fame and was destroyed by it. I thought, in my days of purple and of gold,
that I could reveal myself to the world and instead the world has revealed itself to me" (2). Ackroyd
combines (unacknowledged) quotations from Wilde with his own mimicry of Wilde's voice to invent a
highly plausible fictional journal. One critic even claimed that Ackroyd "is sometimes more Wildean than
Wilde" (Lewis 40). Ackroyd's impersonation of an earlier writer reflects his belief in the disappearance of
the subject in postmodern art. Ackroyd's Wilde writes: "I have discovered the wonderful impersonality of
life. I am an 'effect' merely: the meaning of my life exists in the minds of others and no longer in my
own" (Last Testament 2). "Wilde" is effectually bequeathing the interpretation of his life and writings to
the likes of Ackroyd. Not only does Ackroyd refuse to offer his readers the consolation of an authoritative
narrative position, but he further proceeds to undermine the voice of his impersonated
narrator/protagonist. At one point Frank Harris, after reading a section of the journal, says to Wilde, "you
have stolen lines from other writers." Wilde retorts, "I did not steal them. I rescued them" (161). Ackroyd
here recruits Wilde to justify his own "rescue" of Wilde. As readers we are thoroughly enmeshed in one of
Ackroyd's intertextual mazes in which all literary paths look like one another and none lead to a center, let
alone logocentricism.
The next year, 1984, Ackroyd published T.S. Eliot, a biography that won him wide applause and the
Whitbread Award for Biography. It was written under trying circumstances as the estate refused Ackroyd
permission to quote from any of Eliot's letters or unpublished verse and restricted his citations of the
published writings to a legal minimum. Subsequently Ackroyd claimed that not being able to quote from
the letters verbatim made him "much more inventive about how [he] brought him to life" (CA 4). It was
natural for him to move from Pound to Eliot, and Ackroyd welcomed the opportunity of examining the
makeup of another great modernist and his work, one who owed an extraordinary debt to his American
fellow poet. Reviewing Pound's suggested revisions and deletions from the original version of The Waste
Land, Ackroyd provocatively claims that "Pound mistook or refused to recognize Eliot's original schema
and as a result rescued the poetry" (Eliot 120). At the same time Ackroyd expresses reservations over the
ambiguous role Eliot played in the advent of modernism. "He helped to create the idea of a modern
movement with his own 'difficult' poetry, and then assisted at its burial" (Eliot 239). This position is
similar to that he took in Notes for a New Culture where he argued that Eliot's famous dictum about the
poet's need to escape from personality does not amount to "'escaping' into, and celebrating language, but
rather as 'escaping' into a mysterious entity which is himself and yet not himself" (50). In Ackroyd's eyes
Eliot ultimately turned his back on the modernist revolution he helped introduce, unlike Joyce who took
the modernist fascination with the world of language to its limits in Finnigan's Wake.
Yet as a biographer, Ackroyd is drawn to a writer like Eliot who hides behind invented literary personae.
A gifted literary ventriloquist himself, Ackroyd sees Eliot as one of the great instances of the idea that
literary creativity consists largely of the ability to absorb and rearticulate voices from the past. "The

character inhabited me," he claimed (McGrath 54). He even wrote the biography "in a style that would recreate Eliot's presence" (Lehman 80). Revealingly he has confessed that in writing the biography he
"wasn't concerned with the real Eliot," only with his "creation of an Eliot" towards whom his feelings
were those "of an author towards his character" (McGrath 47). Writing about Eliot gave Ackroyd the
confidence to employ imitation, quotation and pastiche in his subsequent fiction. "The history of English
literature," Ackroyd has said, "is really the history of plagiarism. I discovered that when I was doing T.S.
Eliot. He was a great plagiarist...I see nothing wrong with it" (Smith 60).
Ackroyd has some particularly illuminating things to say about the passages excised from The Waste
Land. "Its first four sections," he writes, "had been introduced by poetry which is as close to parody as he
ever got." Nevertheless, he continues, there is a difference between Eliot's use of parody and pure
imitation. Eliot's use of parody amounts to "the creative borrowing of another style and syntax which
releases a plethora of 'voices' and perceptions." So, Ackroyd concludes, "Eliot found his own voice by
first reproducing that of others" (117-118). All biography reflects, however indirectly, the personality and
obsessions of the biographer. Ackroyd is here describing the process by which he too found his own
literary voice - by his creative borrowing of the style and syntax of first Dickens, then Oscar Wilde.
The connection between the fiery young author of Notes for a New Culture and the biographer of T.S.
Eliot surfaces in the latter book when Ackroyd defines biography there as "a convenient fiction" (239).
Clearly a writer who believes that the subject is purely a textual construct will be drawn to a poet like
Eliot who speaks through an array of "characters" or personae. It was Eliot's later subscription to extratextual values that led Ackroyd to denounce his eventual betrayal of the modernist revolution. What is of
most interest here is Ackroyd's refusal to distinguish between the genres of biography and fiction.
Elsewhere, in an interview, he has echoed this conviction that "they're much the same process." He goes
on provocatively to suggest that "fiction's often more factual than biography and far more precise,"
because "biography has to be an act of interpretation. No one ever knows what happened." Both employ
the same technical skills in their writing. "There's no reason" even, he argues, "why you shouldn't use
pastiche or parody of the subject's style within the biography" (Smith 59). "I just think of them
[biographies] as other novels," he has said elsewhere (McGrath 46). Ackroyd's Notes, his biographies and
his fiction, then, are of a piece. They all assume a linguistically constituted universe in which concepts
like originality, authenticity and objectivity dissolve, to be replaced by the irridescent surface of language
and its endless reformation in the works of the great wordsmiths of literature.
The biography of T.S. Eliot was followed the next year (1985) by his third novel, Hawksmoor. This book
won him the Whitbread, Guardian Fiction and Goncourt awards, and made him a figure to be reckoned
with on the literary scene, especially in Britain. The novel alternates between chapters set in early
eighteenth century London and those set in the twentieth century. The former concern the architect,
Nicholas Dyer, who was charged by Parliament with building seven new churches, churches historically
built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the exemplar of English Baroque architecture. Dyer is a Manichean whose
mystical belief in the pervasive power of evil stands opposed to the more established Sir Christopher
Wren's subscription to the empirical, scientific and rational ethos of the Royal Society. Dyer enacts his
opposition to the spirit of the Enlightenment, his belief in the powers of darkness, by secretly sacrificing
to the demonic powers a virgin boy in the foundations of each of his new churches. His modern
counterpart, Nicholas Hawksmoor, is a Detective Chief Inspector who is investigating a strange series of
strangulations of boys and child-like tramps that occur on the sites of Dyer's churches. Hawksmoor is Sir
Christopher Wren's modern counterpart whose belief in the power of reason fails to solve the murders.
His failure brings him close to insanity, but ultimately he is granted a kind of telepathic insight into the
mysteries of Dyer's dark world.
Numerous reviewers of the novel have remarked on the influence of Eliot's vision on Ackroyd's portrayal
of London past and present. It is as if Ackroyd were re-doing not just the police but London past and
present in different voices, transforming his modernist predecessor's disillusioned vision into his own

postmodern Gothic rendering of it. One reviewer cited the lines from the last stanza of Section 1 of The
Waste Land evoking the "unreal city" at dawn with its ghostly figures flowing down KIng William Street
to "where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour." He comments: "The novel at a crucial point reaches the
same mood as well as the identical locale," and suggests that Stetson's corpses are "likewise mimicked in
the plot" (Rogers 18). It is natural for a writer who sees no difference between biography and fiction to
allow the one book to cast its linguistic and imaginative (if distorted) shadow on the other. There is a
passing reference to "hollow men". Dyer has a servant called Eliot. Above all the numerous parallels
constructed between time past and time present in the novel seem to be informed by Eliot's meditation on
the same theme in Four Quartets. Alan Hollinghurst comments: "What Ackroyd may be saying is that
time present and time past are both present in time future, and that the essence of Dyer's possession of
Hawksmoor is the simultaneity of experiences centuries apart, to which Dyer's churches are perversely
capable of granting access--as all great art may be thought to transcend time" (1049).
Ackroyd has said that when he writes a novel he's "primarily interested in the formal shape of it, the way
things are balanced against each other" (McGrath 46). He saw the writing of Hawksmoor "as a sort of
linguistic exercise" (45), in which the principal task was to construct an intricate web of parallels between
past and present. At the level of ideas, Dyer and Hawksmoor begin as opposed to each other's belief in
Satanism and rationality respectively and are drawn together by the end of the book. There are numerous
topographical coincidences of which the use of the churches Dyer built are the most obvious. Dyer works
at the Board of Works in Old Scotland Yard, Hawksmoor at police headquarters in New Scotland Yard.
Both live around Seven Dials. Dyer journeys from London to Stonehenge, Hawksmoor from Stonehenge
to London. Each of the two characters glimpses his double in passing as a reflection in a glass. Both hear
the same children's songs. At the end both protagonists find themselves in Little St Hugh (the only
imaginary church of the seven), both imagine themselves as a child again, and both confront one another
as each other's complementaries:
They were face to face, and yet they looked past one another at the pattern which they cast upon the
stone; for when there was a shape there was a reflection, and when there was a light there was a shadow,
and when there was a sound there was an echo, and who could say where one had ended and the other had
begun? (289)
Ackroyd here puts into practice his finding in Notes - that the modernist breakthrough was to show form
interrogating itself. In terms of what Genette calls histoire or story the ending of the novel is enigmatic,
inconclusive, baffling to many of its reviewers. But seen in terms of narration, of its formal organization
of parallel motifs and linguistic patterns, it is an artistic triumph.
In all his books Ackroyd is consistent in the way he treats his various subjects. In Notes he proclaimed
that "the emergence of LANGUAGE as the content of literature....has already determined....the death of
Man as he finds himself in humanism and in the idea of subjectivity" (9). In The Great Fire of London
Audrey is possessed by the fictional character of Little Dorrit so completely that she starts the fire that
consumes symbolically and literally the director of the film for his attempting to recreate Little Dorrit
within his art form. Ackroyd's Wilde, as was seen, describes himself as an "effect" merely, a linguistic
construct that takes shape only in the interpretative minds of others. In his biography of T.S. Eliot
Ackroyd was only concerned with creating "an Eliot." He dismisses the very idea that a historical,
coherent composite known as the Eliot ever existed.
The same is true of Dyer in Hawksmoor. Ackroyd has claimed that his voice "is a patchwork of other
people's voices" as well as his own, "an echo from about three hundred different books" that he had read
in preparing to write the eighteenth century portions of the novel. "He doesn't really exist as a character-he's just a little patchwork figure..." (McGrath 44). As always Ackroyd is exaggerating. Nevertheless
Dyer is constructed as much from Dr Johnson's Dictionary in particular and numerous obscure eighteenth
century treatises on such subjects as gout and necromancy as he is from Ackroyd's inventiveness. A

perfect example of the way Ackroyd puts together his characters by a combination of intertextual
borrowing and personal adaption of those sources was pointed out by Alan Hollinghurst when he
reviewed the novel: "Few will recognize that Dyer's chance exclamation, 'Curved lines are more beautiful
than Straight,' is an inversion of a dictum in one of Wren's Tracts, that 'Strait Lines are more beautiful
than curved'..." (1049). Ackroyd's ascription of the opposite of what Wren wrote to Dyer is not simply a
clever use of sources but thematically pertinent to the novel's ongoing debate between the doctrine of the
Enlightenment and the previous era's subscription to superstition.
2
In choosing Chatterton as the subject for his next book, Chatterton (1987), Ackroyd has focused on a cult
figure celebrated by the Romantics as the apogee of neglected genius. At first this might seem anomalous
in a writer dedicated to the destruction of the humanistic conception of an originating subjectivity. But on
reading the novel it becomes obvious that Ackroyd has specifically chosen this Romantic hero in order to
demonstrate how the poet disappears into his own texts which survive him. Within the novel textuality
rules.
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol, England in 1752. He only lived to the age of eighteen when he
took his own life by swallowing arsenic (whether accidentally or on purpose remains an open question) in
a London garret. Given some scraps of manuscript that his mother had found in the muniments room of
their local church when he was seven, Chatterton fell in love with antiquity. At the age of fifteen or
sixteen he invented a fifteenth-century monk called Thomas Rowley whose poems he wrote in authentic
medieval style that took his admiring readers in. During his last year when he moved to London, he failed
to make a living for himself by writing despite a prolific output. His forgery of the imaginary Rowley's
poetry was exposed within a few years of his death and with it he was quickly transformed into a
Romantic emblem of the fate of neglected genius.
Wordsworth devotes an entire stanza of one of his best known poems, "Resolution and Independence," to
Chatterton and Burns, both poets who in their youth "begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end
despondency and madness." Ackroyd has one of his characters, Harriet Scrope, a modern woman novelist,
quote these two lines in a brief section that precedes the opening of the main narrative of the novel.
Having just misquoted the Chorus's epilogue from Marlow's Dr Faustus ( "Cut is the branch that might
have grown full straight."), she proceeds to get Wordsworth's word order wrong in an attempt to prove
that she can quote correctly when she chooses. Ackroyd is evidently concerned to show from the start of
his book that we all appropriate the past for our own purposes and in our own ways. There is no such
thing as an objective past, let alone a recoverable figure of Chatterton. Wordsworth and his fellow
Romantics had constructed their legend around the recently dead poet, a legend which is itself subject to a
sea change by a subsequent age. Ackroyd is intent on undermining the Romantic image of Wordsworth's
"marvellous boy," Coleridge's "spirit blest," Keats's "child of sorrow," de Vigny's pote maudit, Oscar
Wilde's "pure artist." All that survive from the Romantics' elevation of the alienated gifted artist reliant on
his innate imagination are the texts and these are themselves forgeries.
Where Hawksmoor employed two distinct time periods, Chatterton has three. The first of these concerns
Chatterton's own brief life span and uses late eighteenth century patterns of speech. The second centers on
the the year 1856 when Henry Wallis completed his portrait of a dead Chatterton that was to supplant in
the public imagination the only portrait of the poet to have survived from his lifetime. Wallis used as his
model the poet George Meredith whose wife left him for Wallis after the portrait was completed. The
third is located in the present with yet another (failed) poet, Charles Wychwood, and his circle of
acquaintances that include Harriet Scrope, a novelist who plagiarizes the novels of an obscure Victorian
writer, Philip Slack, a failed novelist, and Andrew Flint, a novelist and biographer of--no other than
Meredith. Clearly Ackroyd wants these three temporal strata to interact and generate meaning by
reiteration beneath a surface difference. One of the most obvious ways this occurs is in the parallels he

draws between the way Chatterton disappears into his writings and the way Wallis disappears into his
paintings. Charles seeks to make his name through the forged writings of a Chatterton who lived on after
his own forged death, and is likely to survive only in the novel Philip hopes to write about Charles's
theory of a resurrected Chatterton, a theory that has already been relegated to the realm of fiction. Even
Harriet loses herself in the maze of intertextual borrowing that constitutes her fictional output. In every
case the subject disappears into the work of art.
Why is this? Because the work of art is itself a reordering of other works of art from the past. Texts, seen
as Ackroyd sees them in a poststructuralist light, are not the inventions of unique writers of genius, of the
artistic imagination at odds with society. Texts are rearrangements of other texts. Chatterton as a subject
only survives through his writings. In Notes Ackroyd quotes approvingly Lacan's dictum: "'I identify
myself in Language, but only by losing myself in it like an object'" (139), and concludes, "language
speaks us" (140). Of course Ackroyd is simply agreeing with those French theorists who claimed that the
notion of what Julia Kristeva termed intertextuality has come to take the place of the notion of
intersubjectivity. She proclaims that "every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts"
(Kristeva 146). Ackroyd expressed a similar conviction when discussing The Waste Land in Notes:
...in their combination these words cease to be a collection of sources...they have become a new thing. It
is not that they possess a meaning which is the sum of their separate parts, nor that they embody the poet's
own voice within a tradition of voices. The words have acquired their own density, and their force comes
from differences of diction which, although staying in evidence, are mediated by the life of the whole.
The source of this life is language itself (52).
He gives artistic body to this proposition in a highly intricately plotted novel where none of the many
texts and works of art turns out to be the simple product of an originating artist. "Writing," as Ackroyd
wrote in Notes, "does not emerge from speech, or from the individual, but only from other writing" (61).
Chatterton uses intertextuality to show how it operates. An excellent example of this occurs in a passage
in which Chatterton is describing the moment when he discovered that he could do more than transcribe
the medieval manuscripts he discovered in the muniments room; he could continue writing in the same
style on his own: "The very words had been called forth from me, with as much Ease as if I were writing
in the Language of my own Age. Schoolboy tho' I was, it was even at this time that I decided to shore up
these ancient Fragments with my own Genius: thus the Living and the Dead were to be reunited." (85)
Ackroyd employs an anachronistic reference to the the fourth line from the end of The Waste Land
("These fragments I have shored against my ruins") to underscore the difference between the Romantic
cult of "Genius" and the modernist sense of a self in ruins. Besides, it turns out that Chatterton's
autobiographical "Account" of his life is a forgery committed by Chatterton's Bristol publisher to revenge
himself for slanders against him left behind in Chatterton's papers after his death. So the papers are a
bookseller's attempt "to fake the work of a faker" (221). As if this double act of forgery were not
sufficient, the reader also knows that the bookseller's faked "Account" of Chatterton's memoirs is itself
faked by Ackroyd who spent considerable time in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum
reading through Chatterton's papers and other contemporary documents.
Ackroyd has been much admired for his ability to mimic the voices of his seventeenth century architect in
Hawksmoor, of his eighteenth century poet in Chatterton, and of his nineteenth century wit and writer in
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. He, however, claims that it is relatively easy to reproduce these
voices from the past. He says this is because "the speech we use today contains or conceals previous
levels of speech, from the most recent to the most ancient. They are as it were implicit in modern speech,
modern writing, and it only takes a little effort to peel back the layers" (McGrath 46). The modern writer's
job is to give free rein to the natural play of language in all its historically layered complexity, just as the
reader's role, according to Barthes whom Ackroyd quotes approvingly, "does not consist of the subjective
experience of an object...but rather of the relation between one text and another" (Notes 114).

In Chatterton Ackroyd gives satirical and frequently camp expression to this essentially Nietzschean view
of the triumph of the autonomy of language. Andrew Flint, in particular, is constituted as a fictional
subject through his endless quotations from mainly classical writers. He even makes fun of his own
reliance on quotations, as when he says to Charles,"The years are incorrigible, aren't they? They never
cease. Was it Tennyson who said that? No. Horace. Horace Walpole" (75). Flint's inability to respond to
life without resorting to the responses of his classical forebears is parodied at Charles's funeral by Harriet
despite, or with the help of, her lack of classical learning.
"Exeunt omnes -" he began to say.
"In vino veritas."
She was clearly parodying him, but he did not mind; in fact he welcomed it. He positively invited it.
"Dies irae," he added (177).
Flint welcomes her parody because in this way she becomes a member of his confined/refined intertextual
commonwealth. Of course it is only too appropriate that Harriet, nearly all of whose books are prime
examples of intertextuality, should enter with such instinctual enjoyment into Flint's intertextual wordplay.
At the same time Harriet is one of the leading instances of what Harold Bloom has termed "the anxiety of
influence," an anxiety felt among writers seeking to deny the influence of their literary predecessors on
their own work. In his book of that name Bloom claims that among poets "the anxiety of influence is
strongest where poetry is most lyrical, most subjective, and stemming directly from the personality" (62).
Bloom sees the strong poet in precisely the terms that Ackroyd condemned in Notes. The strong poet's
"Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being," according to Bloom, "must be unique to him, and
remain unique, or he will perish as a poet" (71). To create a space for his or her own uniqueness each new
writer is forced to misread his literary forbears, to deny his or her indebtedness to the past. Ackroyd uses
the key phrase, "the anxiety of influence," at a critical juncture in the novel to represent the guilt felt by
all writers forced to appropriate the writings of their predecessors in their work. Charles has just quoted a
phrase of Eliot's to Harriet who has mistakenly attributed it to Shakespeare. She defends herself:
"Well, you know these writers. They'll steal any..." And her voice trailed off as she looked down at her
trembling hands.
"Anything, that's right." He leant back in his chair, and smiled benevolently in her general direction. "It's
called the anxiety of influence."...
"And of course it must be true of novelists, too." She paused, and licked her lips. "No doubt," she went
on, "there are resemblances between my books and those of other writers."
"You mean like Harrison Bentley?" Charles only just remembered Philip's remark of the previous
evening, and now brought it out triumphantly as an indication of his wide reading (100-101).
Harrison Bentley is the Victorian novelist whose plots Harriet has been plagiarizing all these years.
Charles sees nothing wrong with what he considers a perfectly natural act of literary appropriation. In fact
he opens his preface to his planned book on Chatterton: "Thomas Chatterton believed that he could
explain the entire material and spiritual world in terms of imitation and forgery, and so sure was he of his
own genius that he allowed it to flourish under other names" (126). How fitting that Charles's defence of
plagiarism should itself be a double act of plagiarism. In the first place the opening half of Charles's
sentence has been lifted verbatim from the catalogue to the exhibition of Art Brut at the art gallery where
Charles's wife, Vivien (cf Vivien Eliot), works (cf 109-110). In the second place Ackroyd himself is
indebted to his own earlier novel, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, in which he has "Wilde" describe
Chatterton as "a strange, slight boy who was so prodigal of his genius that he attached the names of others
to it" (67). This in turn is indebted to Wilde's lecture of March 1888 on Chatterton: "He had the artist's
yearning to represent and if perfect representation seemed to him to demand forgery he needs must forge.
Still this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-efacement" (Ellmann 285).

Ackroyd's plagiarism of his own books does not stop here. When Philip accidentally comes across
Harrison Bentley's novels in the library the first title he reads is The Last Testament (a flagrant piece of
self-plagiarism), a book in which a poet's wife is discovered by his biographer to have been responsible
for writing the verses produced at the end of his life that had brought him eternal fame. This is similar in
situation to the discovery within the novel that the painter Seymour's assistant, Merk, has painted all of
Seymour's last pictures. Another of Bentley's novels is called Stage Fire in which an actor believes
himself to be possessed by the spirits of Kean and other famous performers of the past which result in his
own triumphant career on the stage. Of course Stage Fire is a sly reference to Ackroyd's own The Great
Fire of London in which a character thinks she is possessed by another character from the past. That is not
to mention the remark Harriet makes to herself when observing a blindman early in the novel: "'All you
need, old man,...is a circle of stage fire'" (30). Ackroyd appears set on overwhelming his readers in a
plethora of unending literary borrowing or plagiarism in which he freely admits his own involvement.
Charles, for example, consumes pages of Dickens's Great Expectations as he finishes reading them, a trait
that Ackroyd told an interviewer was stolen from Oscar Wilde. "That was one of his habits...I use it as a
kind of joke. In one of the reviews someone said it was a symbol of what I did with my own fiction--take
bits of other people's books and eat them" (Smith 60).
It is significant that when Philip discovers Harriet's plagiarism he casts no blame on her. This stems from
his own past attempt to write a novel which he abandoned after some forty pages because they "seemed to
him to be filled with images and phrases from the work of other writers whom he admired." He is
obviously suffering from a bad case of the anxiety of influence. His novel "had become a patchwork of
other voices and other styles, and it was the overwhelming difficulty of recognizing his own voice among
them that had led him to abandon the project" (70). So long as he subscribes to the romantic concept of
originality Philip is terrified of the the spectral world of language. In the library he has a nightmare vision
of books that "seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where
there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning" (71). It takes Charles's death and the exposure
of the forgery of Chatterton's papers to bring Philip to realize that "The important thing is what Charles
imagined, and we can keep hold of that. That isn't an illusion. The imagination never dies." Even more
pertinent is Philip's insistence that he must tell the story in his own way. "'And you know,'" he adds, "'I
might discover that I had a style of my own, after all'" (232). Style, the creative use of language, is
ultimately the writer's principal contribution to the world. Just as Ackroyd has found himself as a writer
by exposing himself to the writings of Wilde, Eliot, and Dickens, so Philip finds himself by exposing
himself to the real and forged writings of Chatterton. Intertextuality is not inimical to writing but an
inextricable part of it.
Ackroyd reiterates this position throughout the novel, sometimes in somewhat improbable contexts. For
instance, the church leaflet on Chatterton that Philip picks up concludes uncharacteristically: "'Chatterton
knew that original genius consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than in searching after
thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before'" (58). Yet behind this reiterated message lies a
serious comment on the false value that the world attaches to originality and authenticity. The Victorian
episodes in which Wallis uses Meredith to pose as the dead Chatterton offer a perfect simulacrum of the
world as Ackroyd conceives it in his fiction, fiction which is itself - as Chatterton's publisher says of his
forgeries - "an imitation in a world of Imitations" (91). Ackroyd is not adopting a radically idealist view
of existence. He readily admits through his character, Meredith, "'Of course there is reality...But...it is not
one that can be depicted'" (133). Instead the dead Chatterton is brought to life for succeeding generations
by Wallis's realistic depiction of Meredith pretending to be dead. "'I see,'" Meredith observes to Wallis,
"'So the greatest realism is also the greatest fakery" (139)? Equally the greatest fakery becomes the
greatest realism when Harriet's cat, unable to tell the difference, leaps on the stuffed bird decorating her
hat and demolishes it.
In Ackroyd's novels not only is art an autonomous world of its own creation, but art spills over into life,
usurps it or becomes indistinguishable from it. Meredith and his wife are in the process of separating

during the period in which Wallis is using him as a model. Wallis's representation of Meredith as dead
carries a prophetic force that leads to the real death of his marriage to Mary. She attributes the failure of
their relationship to his endless play acting: "'he is always in masquerade'" (160). But that is a
simplification of the way art and life become necessarily entangled with one another. During one of their
bouts of endless banter while Meredith is posing, he says to his wife: "'tragedy is my forte.'" She quips
back, "'And comedy is your vice.'" Ackroyd comments: "It seemed to Wallis that this was some theatrical
performance they were displaying for his benefit, but then at the same moment he realised that they were
also in earnest" (143). Art irrupts into life repeatedly in this book, blurring the boundaries between reality
and mimesis. The scene of Chatterton's death is rehearsed three times in the novel. First comes the painted
reconstruction of it by Wallis. Next comes Charles's death where he dies in exactly the same posture in
which Wallis painted Chatterton. Finally comes Ackroyd's own imaginative reconstruction of Chatterton's
death. In the New York Review of Books David Lodge took Ackroyd to task for using "his authority as a
story-teller to decide the historically undecidable mystery of Chatterton's death" (16). But the whole point
of this novel is to assert the supremacy of the verbal imagination over the irretrievable world of facts.
Lodge might have kept in mind Charles's revelation after reading a whole range of mutually contradictory
biographies of Chatterton: "it meant that everything became possible. If there were no truths, everything
was true" (127).
The novel as a whole is structured to reflect this essentially deconstructive view of the world seen through
contemporary spectacles. The book is divided into three parts. Part One entails the discovery first of the
painting of a supposedly fifty year old Chatterton and then of manuscripts of his (including a poem by
Blake) that Flint dates as early nineteenth century. Essentially Part One questions the authenticity (a
dangerous word in Ackroyd's vocabulary) of both painting and manuscript. Part Two confirms the
authenticity of Chatterton's continued forgeries of poets like Blake. Part Two is an extended meditation on
the authenticity of artistic forgery, using Wallis's faked death scene of Chatterton as its principal extended
(possibly over-extended) metaphor. Part Three, half the length of the other two parts, ingeniously
deconstructs the whole concept of authenticity. Harriet's response to discovering that the painting of the
older Chatterton is a fake is to attempt to fake its restoration only for the painting to completely dissolve
in the course of removing its anachronistic details. Similarly after Philip has learnt that the Chatterton
manuscripts are forgeries he proceeds to start writing a book based on the imagined assumption that they
are authentic. Part Three celebrates the dissolution of the distinctions between authenticity and forgery,
originality and imitation, reality and its representation in art. It ends with the historical Chatterton
anachronistically imitating Wallis's representation of his death - down to the unlikely smile on his dead
face.
Ackroyd shares the poststructuralists' distrust of history as something recoverable. He takes a similar
stance to that adopted by Hayden White who ridicules the traditional attempt to authenticate historical and
other such discourses by checking them for their fidelity to the facts, because, as White writes, "the
discourse is intended to constitute the ground whereon to decide what shall count as a fact in the matters
under consideration and to determine what mode of comprehension is best suited to the understanding of
the facts thus constituted" (White 3). Harriet puts this viewpoint succinctly to Philip when she admits that
none of the story concerning Chatterton's survival beyond his supposed death made much sense: "None of
it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for
ourselves" (226). Did not Chatterton make up the past, invent the Middle Ages in eighteenth century
terms, just as Wallis invented his own version of Chatterton's death scene in 1770 in essentially Victorian
terms? Equally Ackroyd's Chatterton expresses a twentieth century postmodernist view when he
confesses: "so the Language of ancient Dayes awoke the Reality itself for, tho' I knew that it was I that
composed these Histories, I also knew that they were true ones"(85).
Ackroyd's vision is essentially atemporal; past and present interact in the moment. Or you can say that the
present consumes the past. Charles jokingly tells his son that he is "eating the past" when licking the dust
from the forged painting off his finger (15). Ackroyd has said, "We can live only in the present, but the

past is absorbed within that present so that all previous moments exist concurrently in every present
moment" (Appleyard 54). Chatterton offers an intricate demonstration of how the past continually
surfaces in present-day speech and actions. Chatterton's life and writings radically affect the subsequent
lives and work of Wallis, Meredith, Charles and Philip. Just as contemporaries of Chatterton found his
supposedly medieval poems more historically authentic than some actual medieval verse, so Mary
Meredith finds her husband less real than either Wallis's representation of him on paper or his own poetic
writing. The past can best be recaptured by the imaginative act of the artist, not the painstaking researches
of the historical scholar. As Karl Miller has put it, "human history is 'a succession of interpretations', a
piling-up of imitations, an accumulation of metaphor which will be received as reality" (17).
Ackroyd's attitude to the past, then, is one he shares with postmodern artists and thinkers at large. The
past is unrecoverable, being constantly amalgamted into contemporary experience to suit the needs of that
experience. Ackroyd's lack of interest in historical fact, his acceptance of history as a discourse subject to
linguistic play just as are other more overtly imaginative discourses, has led Denis Donoghue to argue
that Ackroyd's novels are not historical novels at all. They are "historical romances, because they refuse to
discriminate between the life a character apparently lived and the other lives he or she performed." He
goes on to argue that Ackroyd "seems to reject the implication, in the historical novel, that people
coincide with themselves and settle for the one life which the decorum of historical narration gives them"
(40). Certainly Ackroyd's novels refuse to differentiate between historical fact and imagined fact, between
Chatterton the poet who wrote the Rowley poems and Chatterton the poet who wrote some of Blake's
poems. Each Chatterton lives and writes as vividly. There is no narrative bias favoring the "historical"
over the invented poet.
But "historical romance" is both too confined and too derogatory a label to affix to his fiction. Ackroyd
has said of all his historically situated novels, "My own interest isn't so much in writing historical fiction
as it is in writing about the nature of history as such... I'm much more interested in playing around with
the idea of time" (CA 3). For him the world and its past are constructed within language. Language does
not reflect any external sequence of cause and effect. Language produces its own similarities and
differences, its own parallels and patterns. And these are what fascinate Ackroyd. The past resolves itself
into a series of texts which themselves interact bringing past to bear on present and occasionally present
to bear on past - or at least the past as it is textually constituted in and by the present. So Charles comes to
glimpse the same (or is he?) child in the house that Chatterton attempts to help just before he dies. Is this
the same child painted by Seymour (or should it be Merk?) that Harriet is convinced she has seen before?
Charles's son visits the Tate Gallery after his father's death and sees his father lying on the bed in place of
Chatterton (who at any rate is Meredith). Meredith dreams that he passes Chatterton on the stairs, just as
Charles has a vision of Chatterton in the park. In the final page Chatterton recalls these meetings as his
corporeal existence is ending and reflects, "I will not die, then" (234). Evidently he will live on in future
representations of him such as those painted by Wallis or passed on from Charles to Philip. But he will
live on in the invented image of Wallis's portrait, not dying with the grimace produced by the effects of
arsenic but with the smile that both Wallis and now Ackroyd bestow on him. He has entered the free play
of art, the web of language.
Does Chatterton, then, qualify as a fully fledged postmodernist work of art as defined by Fredric
Jameson? postmodernism...ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older
cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other
books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts--such is the logic of postmodernism in general... (96)
Not entirely. The fact is that Chatterton displays, as has been shown, a structural patterning, a carefully
ordered division between three sections, that disqualify it from Jameson's definition of postmodernism as
a work allowing the free flow of signifiers. Ackroyd might well be problematizing such signifiers as "the

authentic" or "the original," but he subordinates the resulting free play between, say, "the authentic" and
"the forged" to an aestheyic structure that contains within its confines that free play and limits the
problematization of meaning.
This does not imply that Ackroyd is a half-hearted postmodernist. Rather it undermines Jameson's overneat categorization of the postmodern phenomenon. For instance Ackroyd's scrupulously impartial
narrative stance artistically embodies the postmodernist assumption that the subject disappears into the
work of art. As William Pritchard has pointed out, each of Ackroyd's fictions "refuses to put forth a
central, reliable narrative voice that stands up and delivers judgments about life, that is firmly anchored in
a particular historical time" (39). The sections recounting Chatterton's eighteenth century life are told
entirely from Chatterton's focus. There is no attempt to distance the reader from Chatterton even
indirectly by the use of irony. Similarly the Wallis-Meredith sections are recounted by an unobtrusive
narrative voice that employs vocabulary (but not spelling or punctuation) suited to the historical period.
Ackroyd wants to disappear into his own work of art, leaving a seamless garment that is both a patchwork
of various cloths and yet invisibly sewn together. The only subject allowed to surface in the novel is a
textual construct. Even the unification of the three strands of narrative in the book is achieved by a
textually contrived and wholly imaginary meeting of Chatterton, Wallis and Charles at the end that
transcends temporal logic by bringing the latter two back in time to join Chatterton at the moment of his
death. Imaginary closure is achieved by purely fictional means, means that defy any attempt to read the
novel in a mode of realism. The ending celebrates the triumph of art and the autonomy of the literary
work over the contingencies of life.
3
Ackroyd went on to write another novel, First Light (1989), a pastoral comedy combining gothic horror,
science fantasy and camp satire. Its defiant mixing of genres and its range of wildly divergent voices
testify to Ackroyd's continuing postmodern belief in the supremacy of language. This was followed by his
massive biography of Dickens (1990). Once again Ackroyd has written a biography in the belief that
"there is no truth to tell." He asserts that "because Dickens was such a large figure, such an amorphous
figure, he takes whatever shape you want him to take." He hopes "it will read like a novel" (McGrath
46,7). But he does include five Interludes in which he conducts imaginary conversations with Dickens,
Dickens has imaginary conversations with the literary pillars of Ackroyd's own writing career, Wilde,
Eliot and Chatterton, or with some of his own characters, and one in which Ackroyd recounts a dream he
had about Dickens. It is clear that throughout his writing career to date Ackroyd has remained consistent
to the principles he outlined in Notes for a New Culture. In Dickens he continues to demonstrate obliquely
the truth of what he asserted with such assurance at the start of his writing career: "Once language has
retrieved its history, it emerges as its only subject, it is literature, it is about 'nothing'" (59).
____________________________________________________________

Chatterton, Thomas
Chatterton, Thomas, 175270, English poet. The posthumous son of a poor Bristol schoolmaster, he was
already composing the Rowley Poems at the age of 12, claiming they were copies of 15th-century
manuscripts at the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. In 1769 he sent several of these poems to
Horace Walpole, who was enthusiastic about them. When Walpole was advised that the poems were not
genuine, he returned them and ended the correspondence. After this crushing defeat, Chatterton went to
London in 1770, trying, with small success, to sell his poems to various magazines. On the point of
starvation, too proud to borrow or beg, he poisoned himself and died at the age of 17. An original genius
as well as an adept imitator, Chatterton used 15th-century vocabulary, but his rhythms and his approach to
poetry were quite modern. The Rowley Poems were soon recognized as modern adaptations written in a
15th-century style, but the vigor and medieval beauty of such poems as Mynstrelles Songe and
Bristowe Tragedie revealed Chatterton's poetic genius. This gifted, rebellious youth later became a hero

to the romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poets, several of whom, notably Keats and Coleridge, wrote poems
about him.
See his complete works, ed. by D. S. Taylor with B. B. Hoover (2 vol., 1971); biographies by E. H. W.
Meyerstein (1930, repr. 1972), J. C. Nevill (1948, repr. 1973), and P. Ackroyd (1989); I. Haywood, The
Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in
Relation to 18th Century Ideas of History and Fiction (1987)

CHATTERTON
Chatterton Summary | Plot Summary
Chatterton begins in modern time, following a young English poet into an antique shop where he
hopes to make a little extra cash for his financially struggling family. Instead he finds a portrait of a
middle-aged gentleman that catches his attention so completely that he forgets the money he came to earn
and instead makes an even trade for the portrait. Charles Wychwood, the poet, quickly becomes obsessed
with the portrait when he discovers, with the help of a friend, that it resembles the poet Thomas
Chatterton, who reportedly died when he was only seventeen.
Charles travels to meet the original owner of the painting and receives a set of documents from the
owner's lover. While sorting these documents, Charles discovers a manuscript with the initials T.C. signed
across the bottom. The manuscripts appears to be a confession of sorts, Chatterton's confession of having
faked his own death and continuing to write under the guise of many famous poets of the time period,
including William Blake. Charles takes these documents to an old friend of his from college and asks him
to examine them and determine when the documents were written. His friend confirms that the documents
were written around the turn of the century, which was more than thirty years after Chatterton's death.
Charles's employer, an elderly novelist, learns of these documents and makes it her single-minded
mission to get possession of them and write a book about them. It is the discovery of the century, she
believes, one that will change the world of literature and poetry forever. This novelist, Harriet Scrope,
goes to Charles's wife to plant the seeds of her deception and finds a woman deeply troubled. Charles has
been sick, she confesses. Charles's wife, Vivien, is terribly afraid for his health.
It is not long after this conversation between Harriet Scrope and Vivien that Charles invites his
closest friends to dinner: Harriet, the manuscript expert, Andrew Flint, Charles's old college chum Phillip,
and his wife Vivien. Dinner becomes a discussion of poetry and the state of modern literature. With the
aid of wine and gin, the arguments become heated until Charles suddenly rises from the table clutching
his head. He returns after a moment to resume the conversation, only to mumble a few syllables and
collapse on the floor. Soon after, Charles dies from a brain tumor.
All through Charles's obsession with the painting and the manuscript, the reader is also allowed
little peeks into the creation of the only known portrait of Chatterton, which in reality is a portrait of
George Meredith, another poet, pretending to be Chatterton. During these flashbacks, the reader watches
the artist, Henry Wallis, grow increasingly fascinated with Meredith's wife, Mary Ellen Meredith. This
fascination grows while Wallis works on the portrait, culminating in an affair between the two when the
portrait is completed. It is later rumored that Meredith was so distraught over his wife's betrayal that he
attempted to commit suicide inside the church where Chatterton grew up and is saved by Chatterton's
ghost.
Throughout the end of the novel, the narration also visits Chatterton's last day of life. Chatterton
was an intelligent young man, full of life and enthusiasm for his chosen profession. It is only a bad
decision and a night of too much drink that causes him to take an overdose of a homemade medical
remedy that results in his death.

Phillip, Charles's best friend, returns to the home of the gentlemen who gave Charles the Chatterton
manuscripts shortly after Charles's death and asks about their true origin. Phillip learns that the
manuscripts were a joke written by the man who published the majority of Chatterton's work during his
life and many years afterward, a Mr. Joynson. He apparently became upset when a rival book publisher
published some of Chatterton's letters that accused Joynson of taking his manuscripts and then
abandoning him. Joynson believed should his joke ever become public it would humiliate Chatterton's
reputation and save his own. Phillip returns the manuscripts to the original owner. The painting, however,
is destroyed when an artist attempts to restore it.

Characters
Charles Wychwood
Charles Wychwood is a poet. Charles is married and has a child, but he is immature and lacks the
ambition to become a published poet. Charles's wife Vivien works to support the family while Charles
stays home to work on his poetry. However, after he finds the painting in the junk shop, he becomes
obsessed with the idea that Chatterton continued to live after his reported suicide and puts his own writing
aside to find the answers. During this time, Charles has begun to have terrible headaches that only grow
worse until the night he collapses in an Indian restaurant.
Charles is a lot like Chatterton in that he is a poet who is obsessed with the idea of success.
However, unlike Chatterton, Charles is not prolific with his work and only becomes published in the
sense that his wife photocopied his work and stapled it together so they could leave copies in local
bookstores. Charles is also like Chatterton in the fact that he died before his poetry could bring him fame.
Chatterton had moderate success during his lifetime, but it wasn't until twenty years after his death that a
collection of his original poems was published and garnered fame. Similarly with Charles, his wife
continues to attempt to have his poetry published, even after his death.
Vivien Wychwood
Vivien is the devoted wife of Charles. Vivien and Charles have been married twelve years and have
a child together. Vivien does not mind working to support her family because she believes in her
husband's work. There is no doubt in Vivien's mind that Charles will one day be a published poet.
Vivien is a lot like Mary Ellen Wychwood in that she is the long-suffering wife of a young,
impetuous poet. Unlike Mary, however, Vivien is not unhappy in her marriage, though there are moments
when she clearly is not happy with Charles's behavior. Vivien is also like Mary in the fact that she has a
male friend she can turn to in moments of stress. Just as Mary had Henry Wallis, Vivien has Phillip Slack.
Edward Wychwood
Edward is the young son of Charles and Vivien Wychwood. Edward is a child mature beyond his
years, more mature in some ways than his father. It is Edward to whom Charles first reveals his beliefs
that the painting will change their fortune forever. Edward is his father's confidant, his partner in crime,
and one of his closest friends.
Phillip Slack
Phillip Slack is Charles Wychwood's friend from college. Phillip is extremely shy to the point of
anti-social behavior. Phillip is the one who convinces Charles the painting he has found looks like
Thomas Chatterton as an older man and Phillip who encourages Charles to research the painting to find
the truth. Phillip admires his friend and his family. Phillip is a single man who is very nervous around
Vivien and in awe of her. When Charles dies, it is Phillip who steps in and helps Vivien and keeps her and
Edward from falling too deeply into depression in their grief. Phillip is also the one who steps in and
helps Vivien do the right thing with the Chatterton papers.

Harriet Scrope
Harriet Scrope is a novelist with whom Charles once worked as an assistant. Harriet has been asked
by her editor to write a memoir but is deathly afraid to do so because she has secrets in her past that she
does not want revealed. Harriet hires Charles to be her ghostwriter so that he might fill in the spaces of
her memory and hide the truths she does not want revealed. Harriet is an outrageous old woman
concerned only with her own well-being. When she discovers what Charles has found in the Chatterton
papers, she decides she has to be the one to reveal them to the world, going so far as to con a newly
widowed woman into handing them over to her.
Mr. Cumberland and Mr. Maitland
Mr. Cumberland and Mr. Maitland are co-owners of the gallery, Cumberland and Maitland, where
Vivien works. Cumberland finds out that the Seymour paintings he has bought to sell in his gallery are
fakes and plans to sell them anyway. When Harriet Scrope finds out about this fact, she uses him to help
her authenticate the portrait Charles found.
Stewart Merk
Steward Merk is the attractive, suave final assistant Seymour employed before his death. Merk is a
very talented artist who knows Seymour's style so well that he has been able to flawlessly copy it. Merk
created a group of paintings and sells them to Cumberland and Maitland as Seymour's and is caught by
Seymour's original dealer. It is decided, that because it cannot, beyond a reasonable doubt, be proven the
paintings are fakes that they will be sold as the real thing. When Harriet Scrope comes to Cumberland and
Maitland and tells them she knows about the fakes, it is Merk they assume told her and Merk they send
the Chatterton portrait to so he can restore it and help them authenticate it. Merk is the one who destroys
the painting by accident.
Henry Wallis
Henry Wallis was a successful painter who worked in the middle part of the nineteenth century.
Henry Wallis painted the only known portrait of Chatterton, a depiction of his death scene that utilized the
poet George Meredith as the model. It was during the rendering of this portrait that Henry Wallis met
Mary Ellen Meredith and allegedly had an affair with her.
George Meredith
George Meredith was a poet and novelist who lived in the middle part of the nineteenth century.
George Meredith posed for Wallis's famous Chatterton. Meredith's wife had an affair with the artist. It is
said that Meredith went to St. Mary Redcliffe where there is a monument to Chatterton and planned to kill
himself in a similar fashion. Chatterton's ghost appeared to Meredith and talked him out of it.
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton was a poet who lived from 1752-1770. Chatterton is most well known for his
manuscripts that he created to appear to be medieval writings of a fictional monk. Chatterton grew up in
Bristol and moved to London a few months before his death. Chatterton committed suicide at the young
age of seventeen.

Objects/Places
Bristol
Bristol is the small town where Thomas Chatterton was born and raised.
St. Mary Redcliffe Church
This is the church where Chatterton's father worked until three months before Chatterton was born. It is
also where Chatterton found fragments of manuscripts that inspired his "Rowley" sequence.

The Garret on Brooke Street, Holborn

This garret is where Chatterton committed suicide.
Arsenic and opium
This is the cure Chatterton took to cure his clap and in his drunken state accidentally overdosed with.
Leno Antiques
Leno Antiques is the junk store where Charles traded his books on flutes for the portrait of the unknown
gentleman.
The Cumberland and Maitland Gallery
This is the art gallery where Vivien works and where Harriet Scrope takes the painting to have it
authenticated.
Painting of an Unknown Gentleman
This is the painting Charles Wychwood finds that leads him to research Thomas Chatterton, and is later
destroyed when an artist attempts to restore it.
Henry Wallis's painting, Chatterton
This is the only known portrait of the poet, though the model was actually George Meredith, another poet.
The Chatterton Manuscripts
These are the papers Pat gives to Charles that confirm his idea that Chatterton did not die at the age of
seventeen as originally believed.
The Last Testament by Harrison Bentley
This is Bentley's novel that Harriet Scrope plagiarized for her second novel.

Themes

Forgery in Art and Literature

Forgery is a huge theme in this book. It seems every character is involved in it in one way or another.
Chatterton created medieval documents and passed them off as genuine, even going so far as creating a
fake monk to act as the writer. Stewart Merk copied his boss's painting style to copy his previous works
and create a few of his own. Harriet Scrope took the plot of someone else's novel to create a new work of
her own. All three of these people created these works in order to make money, as the definition states.
Merk and Chatterton where honest about their creations to at least a few people and did not go out of their
way to hide their actions. Harriet strove to create a work of fiction of her own memoirs rather than admit
the truth.
Throughout the novel, the reader reads of these deceptions and finds regret from only one participant.
Merk is proud of what he has done, as is the young Chatterton. Chatterton is even praised for what he has
done. At one point, Phillip points out to Charles that if he had lived and created works under the names of
other poets, he is a fraud. Charles argues that not only is he not a fraud, but he is the best poet to ever
have lived. Imagine, he explains, how much talent it must have taken to copy those other poets so
completely, so accurately. No one ever had a clue until now and that makes him a genius. Harriet is the
only person who seems to realize how shameful her actions are. However, even she is not ashamed of the
actual act of forgery; instead she is afraid it will tarnish the truth of her real work. It is readily accepted
that forgery is wrong, though, in the course of the novel, it is left to the reader to determine what is truly
right and what is wrong.

Suicide
Suicide is another theme of this novel. The title character, Chatterton, reportedly committed suicide at the
age of seventeen. According to historical accounts, Chatterton was despondent over the lack of money
and fame he had acquired through his writing and drank a phial of arsenic and opium. The writer of this
novel, however, fictionalizes what is known about the poet's death and what can be assumed by
knowledge of the time period and suggests that Chatterton's death was an accident. Chatterton mixed and

drank the poison himself, however he was drunk and could not remember the proper dosage. This death,
whether it was an accident or not, can, however, still be labeled a suicide.
Another historic character in the novel also attempted suicide by similar means, however, it is reported
that Chatterton himself talked him out of the act. George Meredith, the model for the Wallis portrait,
Chatterton, supposedly attempted to commit suicide in the church where Chatterton spent most of his
youth over an affair between his wife and the artist. Chatterton then appeared to him and told him he still
had more work to do, effectively ending the attempt.
Finally there is the main character of the novel, Charles Wychwood. Though he does not commit suicide
in the traditional sense, his death is a sort of suicide in the fact that he never went to a doctor to help him
with the illness he suffers through the majority of the book.

Family
Family is another theme of this novel. Charles Wychwood is a family man. If not for the support of his
wife, he might never have had the chance to work as a poet or the opportunity to find the portrait that
began his journey to find the truth about Chatterton. However, this obvious family unit is not the only
family in the novel.
Family is traditionally defined as parents and children, or persons who are related and live in the same
household. However, this definition broadens every day. In this novel, the theme of family extends from
the Wychwood household to their good friend Phillip who steps in and takes care of Vivien and Edward
when Charles dies. It also extends to Harriet and the cat she dislikes most of the time but cannot live
without, and to her dear friend Sarah who would rather not go out in public with her but still remains her
good friend. Family is also present in Chatterton's time, through the friend he has made in the local
publisher and his sister with who Chatterton lives with when he moves to London. And it is Meredith's
family that drives him to nearly commit suicide when he discovers his wife is having an affair with the
artist he thought of as a friend.
The theme of family is best illustrated at the end of the novel, however, when Chatterton dies and finds
himself accompanied by two other poets, George Meredith and Charles Wychwood. This is a family
created despite the distance of time. They are a family because of their poetry and their similarities.

Style

Points of View
The point of view in this novel is third person seen through the eyes of most of the main characters. The
narration is omniscient and reliable. The story is told through both dialogue and the inner thoughts of the
main characters, relying equally on both.
At first the main character of the story appears to be Charles Wychwood. The reader spends the majority
of the first two parts of the book following Charles through his days of obsession as he attempts to
discover the true identity of the man in the portrait. However, even in this early part of the novel the
writer jumps from character to character sometimes in the middle of a single scene. It is sometimes
difficult for the reader to know whose eyes he is viewing the scene through. However, by writing the
novel in this fashion, the reader is not left stranded when Charles dies or is the reader forced to get to
know a new character as the main narrator.

Setting
The majority of the novel is set in London, England, with the occasional excursion to Bristol. The setting
is similar to what one would expect to find when reading about and/or researching Thomas Chatterton.
The fact that Charles Wychwood lives in the same city where Chatterton lived adds to the mystery and the
curiosity Charles feels toward the man. When you add to it the fact that Charles is a poet like Chatterton,
it seems too coincidental that Charles would be the one to expose Chatterton's last secret.
The majority of the novel takes place in either Charles's home or Harriet's and in the flashbacks the
setting is either the large studio where Wallis paints or the garret where Chatterton died. The difference

between these two settings highlights the difference between the rich, the one who has it all and still
wants more and the poor who is fighting for what little he has. The symbolism of the different settings
reflects the differences throughout the novel, including the contrast between Meredith and Chatterton, and
to some extent, Charles, between Vivien and Mary Ellen Meredith, and between Phillip Slack and Henry
Wallis.

Language and Meaning

The language throughout the novel is proper English with a few common words thrown in from time to
time. The novel is set in England and the majority of the characters are well-educated people, therefore
the language is educated and easy to read. Andrew Flint, one of Charles's friends, often uses Latin phrases
to express himself, often phrases that the people around him either do not understand or choose to ignore.
Flint uses these phrases to make himself appear more intelligent than those around him, a fact Charles
notes when he discusses the man with Phillip.
In the flashbacks, the reader is taken to place in time when language was more formal than it is in modern
times. However, the writer chose not to write in this stiff dialogue, instead remaining with the clear and
proper English he has used throughout the novel. Ackroyd more than likely made this choice to keep the
transition from past to present less of a jolt to the reader. However, when Charles reads the manuscript
where Chatterton confesses to the plot to fake his own death, it is read in old English just as it might have
been written. This choice keeps the authenticity of the manuscripts real to the reader.

Structure
The novel consists of three parts and fifteen chapters. There is a brief biography of Thomas Chatterton
before the first chapter as well as small samples of the enclosed chapters. There is also a list of other
books by the same writer and a brief biography of the writer at the end.
Each part of the book is introduced with different quotes from the works of Thomas Chatterton.
Throughout the book there are also many different ways in which the writer introduces a switch in scene.
In the first part, each switch in scene throughout the separate chapters is introduced with a snippet of
narration contained in the following scene or small phrases that relate to the following text. In the second
part, a simple star heralds each change in scene by, except for the sections in which the author writes
about Henry Wallis and George Meredith. These scenes are introduced by quotations from Meredith's
poetry. In the third part of the book, only a simple star separates the scenes.
The narration throughout the novel is linear, though toward the end of the novel there are many
flashbacks to the times of Henry Wallis and Thomas Chatterton. These flashbacks are interwoven into the
narration that takes place in modern time in such a way that the reader almost feels as though both stories
take place at the same time. This narration plays on the similarities between the stories of the past and the
future which again makes the flashback seem more like it has taken place in the same point of time as the
modern day narration carrying on the linear aspect of the novel.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Charles Wychwood goes to an antique store to sell some classic books on flutes to help his family through
a tight financial situation. While attempting to talk the owner of the store into giving him more for the
books than she thinks they are worth, Charles spots a painting abandoned in a corner. Charles rescues the
painting from its hiding place and studies it, suddenly fascinated by the mysterious man it portrays.
Forgetting about his family's precarious financial state, Charles trades the books for the portrait.
At home, Charles finds his son waiting for him on the front stoop, unable to go inside since he gave his
keys to his father the day before because he had lost his own. Edward, Charles's son, does not share his
father's fascination with the painting. Despite his father's belief that the portrait is some great work of art
that will make them all rich, Edward believes the painting is a fake. When Vivien, Charles's wife comes
home, her only concern is how much money it cost and whether or not Charles worked on his poems that

day. Vivien also asks Charles if he had a headache that day. Apparently, Charles had been suffering from
headaches quite frequently until he went to a doctor and received medication that relieved them.
That night, an old college friend of Charles's comes to dinner, a weekly ritual in the Wychwood
household. After dinner, Charles shows Phillip, his friend, the painting. Phillip studies it, certain he has
seen the man before just as Charles had been sure he had seen him before. Soon, Phillip remembers from
where he knows the man and becomes very animated, a state that is unusual for him. The man, he says, is
Thomas Chatterton. Phillip is positive of this fact because he has a reproduction of a painting hanging in
his own house of Chatterton at the time of his death. The only problem is that Chatterton died in 1770, a
very young man, and the man in the portrait is middle aged. Not only that, but when Charles cleans the
dust off the painting, they find the date 1802 printed on it. However, the man in the portrait sits before a
shelf of books and the names of those books are all volumes that Chatterton wrote.
The two men decide they must investigate further. However, before they can make any definitive plans,
the phone rings. The caller is Harriet Scrope, a novelist Charles once worked for asking to see him.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 1 Analysis

Charles is a writer who spends more time finding excuses not to write than writing. The portrait he finds
becomes a symbol of this procrastination. Charles is fascinated with the portrait, and fascinated with
whom it might portray and how much money it will bring him when he learns the truth about its
existence. It is ironic that he finds hope and fortune in someone else's work when he is a writer attempting
to make a career for himself with his own artful talent.
There is a lot of foreshadowing in this chapter, beginning with the portrait. Charles has decided by the end
of the chapter that he will find out who the man in it may be. This foreshadows the search the reader can
see coming in the next few chapters. Also foreshadowed here is Vivien's concern for Charles's health.
Charles waves off her concerns for his health by saying he was sick once but is no more. However, the
mere mention of the headaches warns the reader that this may become a more significant part of the plot.
Finally, there is the phone call from Ms. Scrope. This call sets the reader up for the introduction of
another character and a path in which the plot may follow next.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Harriet Scrope is trying to write her memoirs but cannot put them together on her own. Harriet asks her
new assistant, Mary Wilson, to fill in the spots between her memories and proper narration, but Mary
refuses, telling Harriet that it would be lying. Harriet sends Mary away and spends a few minutes talking
to her cat, Mr. Gaskell, and drinking gin from a teaspoon. Finally Harriet decides she will go visit a friend
of hers, Sarah Tilt.
On the walk to Sarah's house, Harriet runs into a blind man and makes up a story about who she is.
Harriet likes to tell stories, it seems, and enjoys tricking people into believing them. At Sarah's, they
discuss Harriet's own writing, her advanced age, and Sarah's writing. Sarah is writing a book about death
in art. Sarah is very afraid of death, but the work of putting together this book makes it easier for her to
face her own mortality. It is Sarah who suggests to Harriet that she should hire someone who knows how
to write to help her put together her memoirs. It is then that Harriet remembers Charles Wychwood and
gives him a call the moment she returns home.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 2 Analysis

Harriet Scrope appears to be a fascinating character. She is a writer and, like Charles, she is having
trouble sitting down to her own writing. Harriet is somewhat afraid to deal with her memories. It seems
her memories are a symbol of her old age and her own mortality. Not only that, but there are times when

she cannot remember clearly exactly what happened at certain moments of her life. There are also a few
things about her life she would not like to reveal to the general public.
There is foreshadowing in this chapter. The reader must wonder if Sarah's book subject might come into
play with Charles's search of who the man in his portrait may be since he closely resembles the man in
another portrait in which Chatterton is shown in his death bed. The reader must also wonder if Charles
will accept the job Harriet is to offer him, and if together they will get her memoirs written.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Harriet Scrope is fixing herself lunch when Charles Wychwood appears on her front door step for the
requested meeting. Harriet quickly tells Charles about the project she is working on and asks if he will be
willing to ghost write with her. Charles hesitates, not because of his own writing as Harriet assumes, but
because of the portrait and his new obsession in finding out who it portrays. However, he does agree to
take the job.
Charles takes Edward and goes back to the antique store where he traded his books for the painting.
Charles wants to know who sold the antique dealer the painting. She tells him the seller was a Joynson
from Bristol. Charles goes home and calls the only Joynson he finds listed in Bristol. An elderly
gentleman, who says Charles should come and visit him, answers the phone. Charles and Phillip plan to
go to Bristol the following Saturday.
The next morning, Charles oversleeps and wakes with a disorienting illness. At first, he is in bed with a
swollen tongue and a terrible headache. Later, he finds himself in an outdoor cafy barely able to walk.
Finally he ends up in a park passed out beside a fountain.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 3 Analysis

Charles agrees to work with Harriet, even though he cannot force himself to work on his own writing.
This is irony to a small degree. Charles is willing to do almost anything rather than do his own writing. At
least now he will be making a little money to help support his family.
There is some foreshadowing in Charles's attempt to trace the owner of the painting before the antique
store. This is another path the plot will take the reader along. There is also more foreshadowing in
Charles's illness. The reader must wonder if this illness has anything to do with the headaches he had been
having and if it will continue to grow worse through the course of the novel.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Charles and Phillip board a train that Saturday to see original owner of the portrait. Charles is in high
spirits, acting almost bizarrely as he rips pages of a copy of Great Expectations and eats them. Phillip, as
he normally can be, is quiet and reserved, bordering on pathological shyness. When they arrive in Bristol,
Charles rushes recklessly through town with Phillip close behind him until they reach the house they are
looking for. Charles decides to go on himself and asks Phillip to wait for him at the church. The church is
St. Mary Redcliffe Church, where Chatterton's father worked before his death and the place where
Chatterton's inspiration for his writing was discovered.
Charles goes to the house and finds an old man dressed in tights and a jogging suit jacket. This man, who
introduces himself as Pat, is more eccentric than Charles himself, talking quickly about odd things and
asking Charles, a complete stranger, to massage his neck. Pat tells Charles the painting belonged to his
lover and that he gave it away out of spite. He then tells Charles of a couple of bags of papers that he is
welcome to take as well. Charles takes these things and quickly leaves.
In the meantime, Phillip is exploring the inside of the church. Here he finds a plaque dedicated to Thomas
Chatterton. While reading the inscription, an old man comes over and starts to talk to Phillip about

Chatterton. The man tells Phillip that Chatterton's body was never buried, that it is gone. He then sells
Phillip a brochure about Chatterton and points out the front fazade of the house that was once
Chatterton's. Phillip leaves quickly, disturbed by this man's attitude, and runs into Charles.
Charles and Phillip board the train and Charles immediately begins sorting through the papers while
Phillip reads aloud from the brochure. Phillip discovers in the pamphlet that the man who originally
owned the manuscripts Charles's is sorting through has the same name as the publisher, who published
Chatterton's original manuscripts and a compilation of his poetry twenty years after his death. Charles
also discovers several handwritten pages of poetry that have the initials T.C. on them, though they are
clearly recognizable as William Blake's poetry.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 4 Analysis

Charles seems healthy once more at the beginning of this chapter despite his odd behavior. The reader
could assume it is only his natural peculiarities that cause this behavior, but again, the reader must wonder
if this might be a little more foreshadowing into his precarious health. When Charles meets up with Pat,
however, the eccentricities of this man make Charles appear to be the more mature of the two men. This
might mislead the reader into believing all people in this book are simply odd.
The reader is also served several small tidbits of information regarding Chatterton in this chapter. The
reader now knows where Chatterton was born, about the mystery surrounding the burial of his body, and
the influence of his work on later poets. The most exciting part of this information, however, is the
discovery of the manuscripts. The idea that Chatterton authored the poetry that was credited to William
Blake opens many doors that could turn the world of literature on its ear. Charles might have indeed
found the treasure he had been seeking. This is foreshadowing. It also touches on one of the themes of the
book, forgery.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Charles is sick again when he returns that night, however he is recovered by the next morning. Vivien
goes to the art gallery where she works and tries not to think about how sick her husband might be.
Charles calls her soon after she arrives and asks if it would be all right for him to have dinner with a
friend from college, Andrew Flint. Vivien assures him it will be fine. Cumberland, one of the owners of
the gallery, shows Vivien some paintings he has recently bought at auction after she finishes on the phone.
The paintings are by Joseph Seymour, a famous artist who recently passed away. His last assistant,
Stewart Merk has set a meeting with Cumberland and his partner, Maitland, to sell them other paintings
he inherited after the artist's death.
Phillip Slack is at work at the library that morning. He has gone down to the basement to look through the
stacks of old and neglected books hoping to find something that might help Charles in his search for
information about Chatterton. Phillip slips his fingers over the spines of the books, lifting one or two off
the shelves and replacing them. When he comes to a novel by Harrison Bentley, he reads through the
chapters quickly, picking at the plot of the story. It sounds very familiar to him. Then he reads the end
page and finds a summary for Mr. Bentley's next novel and finds this story line familiar as well. Then he
remembers from where he recognizes the stories. Harriet Scrope has written two novels very similar to
these plot lines.
Charles meets with Flint that evening; he an old school chum who is now a successful fiction writer and
biographer. Flint is currently at work on a biography of George Meredith. Charles shows Flint one of the
handwritten manuscripts he found that he believes to have been written by Chatterton and asks his
opinion of it without telling him what it is. In college, Flint always liked to look at handwriting and figure
out when and where it was written. He looks at this paper and guesses it was written sometime between
1790 and 1830. Charles is elated, since this lends credence to his theory that Chatterton did not die in
1770.

Chatterton Summary | Part 1, Chapter 5 Analysis

Vivien has become quite concerned with her husband's health. The author mentions Charles's latest illness
as almost an afterthought, but the level of Vivien's concern is like an underscore to the foreshadowing this
latest illness offers the reader. Be on the watch out it seems to say. This illness also can be viewed as a
symbol of one of the minor themes of the work, procrastination. The illness is yet another reason why
Charles cannot work at his own writings.
The writer, in the meantime, uses Phillip to stumble onto another theme of the novel: forgery. Phillip has
discovered that Harriet more than likely stole the plot of two old novels to write her own novels. The
foreshadowing here begs the question, what will Harriet do when she discovers she has been caught.
Charles also finds more evidence of the theme when he visits his old friend Flint. Is it possible Chatterton
lived another fifty or sixty years after his reported death to write under the guise of other poets? The seed
of foreshadowing planted here asks the more serious question who really wrote the poetry society has
assigned to William Blake and others.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary

Thomas Chatterton wrote a history of his life in one of the manuscripts Charles found. Chatterton was
born on Pile Street in Bristol three months after his father died, who had been the singing master of St.
Mary Redcliffe church. Chatterton was very close to his mother, though he was a sort of outcast among
the children his own age. He was fascinated with the church where his father worked and was often there,
playing inside it and exploring its many rooms. When he wasn't at the church, he was at home going
through his father's old books or at Mr. Joynson's publishers borrowing his books. One day Chatterton
found some old parchments among his father's things and asked his mother where they had come from.
His mother told him they were in a room at the church. Chatterton went to that room and found many
more parchments that fueled the young man's imagination.
On these parchments, Chatterton could read snippets of poetry written in medieval times when the church
was newly built. Chatterton took these snippets and added his own words to finish them and then sold
them to the townspeople under the guise of being histories written by their own ancestors. Then
Chatterton invented a monk named Thomas Rowley and wrote songs and ballads and elegies under his
name and gave them to Joynson to print and sell. They sold well at first, giving the young poet a taste of
success. Chatterton decided then to move to London and find success under his own name.
Chatterton sold many pieces to the local magazines in London. However, he quickly became frustrated
with his lack of funds. He lived in a room at the home of Joynson's sister. Joynson came to see him one
day and made a proposal that would help them both become very rich. Joynson suggested that Chatterton
fake his own death and continue to write poetry under the names of other famous poets who had also died
in recent years.
Charles finishes reading the manuscript to Phillip and Vivien and suggests to them that these words would
turn the world of poetry on its ear. Charles wants to write a book with Phillip and publish these
manuscripts. They will all be rich and famous he tells them. Phillip suggests that Chatterton was a forger
and therefore not worthy of the fame he already had. Charles argues that he was not a forger but a great
poet. It is then that Phillip tells Charles about the novels he discovered with the same plots as Harriet's
novels.
Charles is ill again that night with a bad headache. He goes into the living room and reads through the
poems in the Chatterton manuscripts. After a while the pain is too strong for him to read and he begins to
cry. This is how Vivien finds him.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 6 Analysis

Again the theme of forgery jumps out here in several places. First there is the flashback of the young,
brilliant Chatterton who uses writing from the past to create his own incredible works of poetry. The
writer of this novel has already told the reader through the biography of Chatterton at the beginning of the
book that Chatterton did in fact create the Rowley papers that were a sort of forgery of medieval writings.
This truth adds fuel to the fiction written in the Chatterton manuscripts that Charles has found.
The theme of forgery is discussed with heated passion between Charles and Phillip. It seems here the
theme has switched from the idea of forgery itself to what forgery is defined as and whether or not the
form Chatterton and Harriet Scrope practiced is really forgery or simple imitation. Finally, we see more
foreshadowing with Charles's illness. Even Charles appears to have become quite concerned with his own
health.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary

Charles goes to work at Harriet Scrope's the next day and takes her the manuscripts and the painting.
Charles tells Harriet his theory that Chatterton did not die but carried on writing under the names of
others. At first she does not believe him, but begins to when he shows her the papers. Soon after she's
read them, Harriet tries several times to nonchalantly take the papers from Charles, supposedly for
safekeeping.
Harriet distracts Charles by turning his attention to her memoirs. Harriet hands him the notes her last
assistant typed up and tells him to ask her any questions. Charles begins by asking her about her
relationship with T.S Eliot, who helped her to get her first two novels published. When he quotes Eliot,
she puts it down as Shakespeare and he corrects her. Harriet then says maybe Eliot stole the line from
Shakespeare since she does not like to be corrected. This reminds Charles of what Phillip said about
Harriet borrowing her plots from Bentley and he comments on this. Harriet, suddenly in a panic, runs
from the room claiming a female problem.
Harriet, alone in her room, recalls a time shortly after her first novel was published when she was unable
to write a single word. Her success left her frozen and unable to create a plot of her own. One day she was
in an old bookstore and picked up at random a book by Harrison Bentley. After reading the novel, it
occurred to her that she could simply borrow the plot and no one would ever know as long as she made a
few changes. Harriet's second novel was a success and no one seemed to notice the forgery. Harriet took
another of Bentley's novels and did the same, without relying on the older plot as much as she had the
first time around, and found her own voice and was able to write the rest of her novels completely on her
own. This is why she had been so afraid to write her memoirs; she was afraid the truth would come out
and place her later novels and her first under a shadow they did not deserve.
Harriet returns to Charles in the sitting room and carefully questions him about his reference to Bentley
without giving herself away and is satisfied when Charles seems unconcerned with her possible forgery.
Sarah Tilt arrives a few minutes later and Charles announces he must leave, taking the manuscripts with
him much to Harriet's regret. Then Sarah, who is an art critic, tells Harriet that the Seymour painting she
had admired before was on sale at Cumberland and Maitland. Harriet demands they go and see it, not for
the painting, but because she is aware Charles's wife works there.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 7 Analysis

The theme of forgery is touched upon again in this chapter. Harriet offers the reader an excuse for her
own choice to steal a plot from another writer and it is left to the reader to decide if what she has done is
unethical or simply imitation, which can be construed as high praise. Harriet also opens up more
foreshadowing in her attempt to steal the Chatterton papers and in her plan to go see Charles's wife.
Harriet believes that she would have a better chance to get them published as a real writer. The reader
might also see here a little ego. Harriet wants the fame of publishing papers that will turn the literary
world on its ear.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary

Mr. Sadlier, Seymour's old dealer, calls on Cumberland and Maitland that morning. Sadlier claims the
Seymours that the gallery is trying to sell are fakes. Cumberland calls in Merk and invites them both to a
meeting.
Sadlier confronts Merk and tells him they had to be fakes because Seymour was too ill in his last days to
have been so prolific and produce so many paintings. Merk shows him the canvass numbers that prove
they belonged to Seymour and then shows him a painting that is at that moment hanging in Sadlier's own
gallery. The painting has all the same identification marks as the one Sadlier has. It would not be possible
to prove it is a fake except that Merk admits it and all the others he sold to Cumberland are fakes. Merk
painted them himself and because he has all the identification information he needs to mark the
canvasses, and there is nothing Sadlier can do to prove they are fakes.
Harriet Scrope and Sarah Tilt arrive at the gallery a few hours after the meeting with Merk and Sadlier.
Harriet is shown the painting by Seymour she had admired before but is reluctant to purchase it and is not
persuaded to by Cumberland. On the way out of the gallery, she realizes she has left her purse. Harriet
goes back alone and runs into Vivien. She can tell Vivien is upset and suggests they go on a walk.
Vivien confesses to Harriet that Charles has been very ill but refuses to go to a doctor. Harriet says she
will not have Charles work anymore but she will continue to pay him. Then, with Vivien in grateful
spirits, she casually asks about the Chatterton papers. Vivien dislikes the papers, dislikes that they take
her husband away from his own work. Therefore, when Harriet suggests that Vivien persuade Charles to
give her the papers, Vivien agrees. Then she accidentally tells Harriet the Seymours are fakes.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 8 Analysis

Forgery is a huge theme in this novel. Again we touch on this theme with Merk admitting that he forged
his employer's final few paintings. This time, however, the reader is faced with outright forgery rather
than the innocent imitations of Harriet Scrope. However, is there a difference? This seems to be the
question the writer is attempting to ask the reader.
Harriet desperately wants the Chatterton papers, desperately enough to put an anxious wife in an
awkward position. These papers seem to symbolize the ultimate fame for Harriet. With Charles they
symbolize riches for his family. To Vivien the papers symbolize a distraction for Charles, an obsession
that she sees as an obstacle to his health and his work. There is also more about Charles's illness here,
more foreshadowing into what the reader must realize is soon to play out.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary

Charles is having trouble seeing as he reads a book about Chatterton. Panic rising in his chest, he
puts the book down and instead fusses over his son. When his son pushes him away, he goes to his desk
and begins work on the preface for the book he will write about the Chatterton manuscripts. Charles
continues to work even when his pen runs out of ink, until the phone rings and shatters his concentration.
It is Harriet; she has called to tell him he does not need to come to their next appointed meeting time, she
is too tired to work. Charles then invites her out to dinner. He returns to his work and cannot concentrate.
He looks up and finds Edward watching him. Edward points to the portrait that began Charles's obsession
and tells him the man in it is hurting him.
To prove to his son the portrait is not evil, Charles takes Edward to a gallery and shows him the
Wallis painting, Chatterton. As Charles stands and stares at the painting, he becomes frightened. Edward
asks about the man in the painting and Charles explains that the model was George Meredith, another
poet.

In a flashback, Meredith and Wallis discuss the portrait Wallis wants to paint. Wallis finds himself
watching Mary Ellen Meredith, Meredith's wife, more than Meredith himself. Wallis finds Mary
extremely attractive and Meredith too wild and philosophical in his concerns over the idea of modeling
for a dead poet. Wallis finds the room where Chatterton died and asks Meredith and his wife to join him
there one afternoon so that he can do the preliminary sketches. Meredith comes alone, much to Wallis's
disappointment, and chatters non-stop while Wallis sets up the room for his sketches. Finally Wallis sits to
his work and asks Meredith to be silent. Just as Wallis is about to finish, the servant girl who lives in the
room knocks and says a lady has come to visit.
Mary Ellen Meredith enters the room and walks around, quite interested in the portrait but not the
model. Mary and her husband argue in front of Wallis, a fact Wallis finds interesting. When they all leave,
it is clear Mary and her husband do not wish to be alone together.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 9 Analysis

Charles has obviously become quite ill, sick enough that even his son sees it. Edward believes it is the
painting killing his father, the portrait and the papers then to him a symbol of his father's dire health.
Charles takes his son to see the only known portrait of Chatterton, which is actually a portrait of
Meredith, to soothe his fears. This painting creates a strong reaction from Charles; the painting itself
symbolizes not only Chatterton's death but Charles's impending death as well.
In the flashback, there is foreshadowing in the way Wallis reacts to Mary Ellen Meredith. It is clear Mary
is not happy in her marriage and it is also clear that Wallis is aware of this fact. Whether or not they will
act upon these pieces of knowledge is what has been foreshadowed.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary

It is Friday night and Charles is in an Indian restaurant with his invited guests. Harriet is there, as well as
Vivien, Phillip, and Andrew Flint. While they eat the spicy food, a conversation about the current state of
literature erupts. Flint is of the opinion that fiction in today's market is a popularity contest rather than of
great intellectual value as it was in the past. Phillip and Charles argue with him, Charles nearly telling
him of the Chatterton papers several times. Harriet chimes in, though she is so drunk she has nothing of
value to add.
The conversation moves to the value of poetry in modern times. Again Flint's opinion is derogatory and
Charles nearly tells him of the Chatterton manuscripts. Charles suddenly announces to the table that he is
ill and apologizes to his wife for being stuck with him. Then Charles collapses and falls on the floor.
Henry Wallis invites the Merediths to his studio so he can paint Meredith for the Chatterton portrait.
Meredith is in wild spirits again and will hardly sit still. Mary excuses herself after a slow look around the
studio where she finds a copy of some of Wallis's more famous works, nudes. While they are working,
Wallis and Meredith suddenly realize there is smoke billowing outside their windows. They run out the
door to see what is on fire and find a small shed behind a neighbor's house, a female poet, is on fire.
Wallis watches Mary Ellen Meredith run out the front door of the poet's house with a child in her arms,
unaware that Meredith has left. Wallis speaks to Mary and learns that the child was a servant's child who
had become overwhelmed by the smoke.
When Wallis returns to his studio, he finds Meredith dressed in his own clothes rather than the costume he
wore for the portrait, ready to leave. Wallis watches Meredith and his wife leave, imagining Mary coming
back to him. Wallis begins the painting the next day, pondering Meredith's beliefs that the painting will
immortalize them both, but Meredith will be cheated since he is portraying Chatterton rather than himself.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 10 Analysis

Charles invites all his friend's to dinner and never really says why. This final dinner may have been a final
farewell for Charles, the symbol of a condemned man's last meal. It foreshadows the collapse that
happens at the end of the scene and what may happen in the following chapter.
The discussion about the modern state of poetry is ironic in the idea that if the Chatterton manuscripts are
real, it might turn the literary world on its ear as it stood in Chatterton's time. However, the reader must
ask in light of this discussion, would it really matter now, in modern times, if dozens of the most brilliant
poems and manuscripts of the past were written not by the person's credited with them but Chatterton.
Wallis has grown more attracted to Mary by this chapter. The progression of the painting seems to
symbolize a time frame that counts down the deterioration of the Meredith marriage and the growth of
Wallis's obsession with Mary, not to mention a countdown of sorts on Charles's health. The painting also
symbolizes infamy for both Wallis and Meredith, it is a fame that Meredith is concerned will be shadowed
by the fact that he is pretending to be someone else. He need not have worried.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary

Charles wakes in the hospital with Vivien and Edward by his side. Vivien went to the hospital with
Charles and Phillip, and Flint went to the apartment to retrieve Edward. The doctors did a brain scan on
Charles and found the source of his illness, a large brain tumor. Charles attempts to say goodbye to his
family, but he cannot speak. Quietly, unlike the horrible death Chatterton experienced, Charles dies as life
around him goes on.
Wallis has finished "Chatterton." Meredith and his wife, in the meantime, are at a fair to keep the
boredom and tension of their marriage at bay. However, Mary can no longer fight what she sees is true.
Mary begins to cry and when Meredith forces her to tell her troubles, she announces that she has decided
to leave him. Weeks later, Mary goes to Wallis to see the painting. It is then that their affair begins.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 11 Analysis

All of the allusions to Charles's illness have finally come to a head. The headaches and blind spots and
dizzy spells foreshadowed a battle with a brain tumor and possible death, which is exactly what has
happened. Without finding out the truth about Chatterton in a cruel and ironic fashion, Charles has died.
The foreshadowing of Mary's unhappiness and Wallis's attraction to the young bride have also come
together to the affair the reader could see whispered about throughout the previous chapters. The
symbolism of Wallis's painting has also burst upon the reader here. The deaths of Meredith's marriage and
Charles, are both interlaced with the symbol of the death scene Wallis has spent several months painting.
It is not a coincidence that Ackroyd chose this chapter for the culmination of Wallis's portrait.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary

The funeral is held at a crematorium. Flint and Harriet attend among Charles's family and close
friends. Phillip remains at Vivien's side throughout. Through the weeks after, Phillip remains a close
friend of the family, purchasing a car to take Vivien and Edward on rides on Sundays to keep their minds
off their grief.
One rainy afternoon shortly after the funeral, Harriet stops by the Wychwood's to discuss Charles's
papers with Vivien. Harriet convinces Vivien she would like to have her publisher look at the poems
Charles wrote and she would also like to unburden Vivien of the Chatterton manuscripts. Harriet even
manages to talk Vivien out of the portrait of the unknown gentleman.

Chatterton Summary | Part 2, Chapter 12 Analysis

The funeral is somber. However, Ackroyd tells the story through Flint's eyes, making it almost
comical as he watches Harriet steal a geranium from the crematorium grounds and make rude comments
about Charles's family. This touches on a theme of the book, family. Harriet and Flint are not related, but
they might as well be for the way they act together. They are like two peas in a pod, both hypocrites who
attend the funeral not out of respect for Charles but for their own amusement.
Harriet desperately wants the Chatterton manuscripts, sure in her own mind that she is the only one
who could possibly have them published with the authority they deserve. To Charles they represented
wealth and fame. To Harriet they are the symbol of a mystery waiting to be solved, a distraction for a
bored old woman.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary

Thomas Chatterton is a happy young man, excited about where his life is going and how well his
writing has been accepted so far. Chatterton lost his virginity a few nights before, a fact that both excites
and surprises him. However, he is afraid the experience has left him with a sexually transmitted disease.
Chatterton talks to an older friend about his situation and is told of a kill-or-cure that will help him. Four
grains of arsenic and a dessert-spoon of opium will cure his problem.
Chatterton goes out that morning and buys the ingredients for his cure, intent on taking it before he
goes to bed that night. Then he spends his day in pursuits of his work, writing an elegy about a benefactor
and preparing to deliver it to the magazine that has agreed to publish it.
Vivien is still on leave from the gallery when Harriet shows up to have her new painting
authenticated, so it is Vivien's assistant who shows Harriet to Cumberland's office. Cumberland tells her
immediately that the painting is a fake. Harriet slyly allows him to know that she is aware the Seymour's
are fakes as well. Cumberland immediately agrees to find an artist who can restore the painting to make it
appear that it is a genuine work of art. Cumberland decides to call Merk, certain he is the one who
allowed Harriet to find out about the Seymour's.
Chatterton walks to his publishers and passes a construction site. Just as a building is about to be
demolished, Chatterton sees a child walk into it. Chatterton screams for help, but the construction workers
assure him there could be no one in the building. Chatterton runs toward it anyway.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 13 Analysis

Chatterton is seen on his last day of life, clearly different than the young man described in history.
Historically, it is believed that Chatterton was severely depressed on his last day of life and that is why he
took his own life. However, the reader sees some obvious foreshadowing that suggests not only did
Chatterton not commit suicide, but also that his death might have in fact been accidental.
Harriet, in the meantime, is attempting once more to fake her way into fame. Harriet wants the portrait
authenticated to prove what the manuscripts say and to give more credence to any book she might write
about the manuscripts. The portrait is a symbol of fortune to Charles, honest fortune. To Harriet, it has
become another physical symbol of the depths of dishonesty she will go to, to make money and become
even more famous.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary

Chatterton pulls a boy from the wrecked house and discovers he is a street urchin who has a birth
defect called hydrocephalus. Chatterton saves him and gives him a coin to buy some food with and
promises to return to him the next day. Chatterton never returns.
Edward, Phillip, and Vivien are in the country on one of their Sunday drives. Phillip and Vivien
discuss the portrait and Chatterton manuscripts Vivien gave to Harriet. Vivien regrets having given them

away now and wants to set things right. Phillip decides to go back to Bristol and talk with the owner of
the papers and try to find out the truth. Then he will convince Harriet to give him the papers so he can
return them to the owner.
Chatterton goes out with his friend that night and tells him of the simple boy he met. They discuss
poetry and legend, the fact that Chatterton still has his whole life ahead of him and his friend is near the
end. They shake hands and his friend comments on how it is the past touching the future. Chatterton
walks home drunk.
Phillip goes to Bristol and meets the eccentric gentleman who originally owned the Chatterton
manuscripts. The man tells Phillip that twenty years after Chatterton's death, his poetry became in demand
again. During this time, Joynson, Chatterton's original publisher, created a compilation of the poems
Chatterton left him and sold some of the manuscripts he had left from when Chatterton was alive.
However, a rival bookseller began publishing some of Chatterton's letters that claimed Joynson bought up
Chatterton's work and then abandoned him. So Joynson forged the Chatterton manuscripts Charles had
found in the hopes that when Joynson died they would be discovered and would tarnish Chatterton's
reputation and save Joynson's. Phillip is not surprised by this truth and agrees to return the papers to
Joynson's relative. Phillip is glad Charles did not learn the truth.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 14 Analysis

Chatterton saves a boy from certain death only to face his own death later that night with no one around
to save him. This is irony and perhaps a little symbolism. The boy saves a boy but cannot save himself.
Phillip finally learns the truth the reader has been waiting for since the beginning of this journey. It is
again ironic that forgery was used to fight forgery, the forger tarnished by a forgery. Again, forgery is a
strong theme throughout this book and nothing symbolizes it more than the forged Chatterton
manuscripts.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary

Chatterton enters his room drunk and begins to drink even more from a bottle he keeps hidden in a
chest under his bed. He nearly forgets his kill-or-cure, but remembers just before he climbs into bed.
Chatterton cannot remember how much arsenic or opium to use so he simply guesses. Chatterton thinks
of the boy with hydrocephalus as he drinks his cure.
Phillip goes to Harriet and tells her the truth about the Chatterton manuscripts. Harriet is no longer
interested in the papers now that the mystery has been solved so she gives them back easily. Harriet also
returns Charles's poems without having tried to get them published. Stewart Merk, in the meantime, has
tried to clean the painting with alcohol so he can get down to the original paint and fix it. However, the
alcohol eats through all the layers of paint and destroys the painting.
Chatterton dies a slow, painful death in the throes of the arsenic. Edward goes to the Wallis painting
and tries to see it the way his father saw it. Phillip discusses the whole Chatterton mystery with Vivien
and decides to write a book about it from Charles's point of reference. Chatterton dies and finds himself
with both Charles and George Meredith, a smile on his face when they find him the next day.

Chatterton Summary | Part 3, Chapter 15 Analysis

All the foreshadowing in the previous chapters comes to a conclusion here. Chatterton does not
mean to kill himself, according to this version of events. Chatterton takes an overdose of his cure by
accident because he is too drunk to remember the portions his friend told him; the conclusion of
foreshadowing that took place two chapters ago when Chatterton bought his supplies and had a discussion
with the chemist about suicide.

Phillip returns the Chatterton manuscripts to their rightful owner, once again stopping a forgery
from becoming public knowledge. This again touches on the theme of forgery that has run through the
entire course of the novel. It is a satisfying ending to a unique novel.