Chatterton, Thomas 1752-70
English poet

Born in Bristol, he was a scholar of Colston's Bluecoat Hospital (1760-65), and then was apprenticed to an attorney. He wrote and published pseudo-archaic poems purporting to be the work of a 15th-century Bristol monk, Thomas Rowley, and in 1769 he sent a history of painting in England, allegedly by Rowley, to Horace Walpole, who was only temporarily deceived. He was released from his apprenticeship in 1770 and went to London, where he worked on innumerable satires, essays and epistles, and a burlesque opera, The Revenge, but later that year he poisoned himself with arsenic. His 'Rowley' poems, although soon exposed as forgeries, are considered to have genuine talent, and he became a romantic hero to later poets. His story was dramatized by Alfred de Vigny in 1835, and is the subject of the celebrated painting by Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1856, Tate, London).