Chartists

and Chartism, a radical reform movement in England about 1830-48. The name is derived from a charter. or declaration of needed reforms. It was drawn up by a joint committee of six workingmen and six members of Parliament. The reformers insisted on what now seem matters of course to an American, but they were then deemed revolutionary, and, indeed, they went further than most of the literary deception which he practiced upon his contemporaries. It is not an uncommon thing for a person to claim the authorship of that which has been produced by others. This boy--he was not yet eighteen when he died--produced poems, many of them of merit, and pretended that they were the work of writers of a bygone age. When his story is known he is not apt to be blamed greatly.

Chatterton was born at Bristol. His father, a schoolmaster who had been something of an antiquary, something of a musician, and something of a poet, died before the boy's birth. The mother worked hard to care for her two children. Thomas was so unlike other children that he was regarded as lacking in intelligence. He attended a charity school for a short time, and before he was ten years old had developed into a dreamy, imaginative, sometimes melancholy, bookworm, who, if let alone, spent his entire time in reading. When he was about eleven years old he was stirred up by the removal of a beautiful but very ancient cross from the churchyard of St. Mary Radcliff. The indignant boy wrote and published in a local journal a very clever satire on the parish vandal, alluding to the churchwarden who had caused the removal of the ornament. Other contributions followed.

In the muniment of this same church, whose sexton was Chatterton's uncle, were several old oaken chests filled with parchment deeds and records. With these the boy had amused himself from babyhood. The beautiful old church was his favorite haunt, and it was doubtless here that he conceived the beginnings of an ingenious romance which came to be a large part of his life. This romance was of an imaginary monk, supposed to have lived in the fifteenth century. His name was Thomas Rowley, and his life and various experiences were worked out with wonderful skill by the precocious boy. The many beautiful poems, which Chatterton claimed that Rowley had written and he had discovered in the old chests, were probably produced from 1764 to 1768. Many of the boy's credulous contemporaries accepted them without question, and they occasioned discussion for a full century. Soon the boy went to London. Here, while some of his work was accepted, he was poorly paid. He became discouraged and, before he was quite eighteen years of age, took his own life. He was buried by strangers in a pauper's grave. Later his remains were removed to the old churchyard of St. Mary Radcliff. A monument was erected to his memory, inscribed with lines from his own pen: "To the memory of Thomas Chatterton.--Reader, judge not! If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable."