Telling Tales Page 3

  Critics and historians have now proved conclusively that Macpherson did some admirable and interesting things. He did love the poetic folklore of his native lands, and did indeed travel there extensively, recording songs and poems told to him by locals. He probably even used his not very brilliant knowledge of the Gaelic language to translate snatches of what he heard into English prose. And he inspired such important figures as Sir Walter Scott in their grand literary projects. But he had neither the linguistic skills nor the imaginative ones to do what he claimed to have done: to translate a great lost work of folk literature into the English language. All he wanted was fame enough to have his name echo down the corridors of future libraries. Which it still does, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

  THOMAS CHATTERTON

  THE MOST FAMOUS image of England’s most romantic hoaxer is of him lying dead in his Holborn garret, flame-haired and pale-faced, surrounded by torn-up pieces of manuscript. Outside the little window London’s grey rooftops stretch into the distance. The scene in the bare room is pitiful. But the real locus of the story is in Bristol, in the muniments room of the beautiful parish church at St Mary Redcliffe.

  Sextons of this church had been members of the Chatterton family for generations, and at the time of Thomas’s birth in 1752 it was in the hands of the poet’s uncle. Thomas was born after his father had died, and his impecunious mother, with a daughter to raise as well as her son, had to take in sewing to make ends meet. Finding a way to put food on the table was therefore of greater concern than giving her son a literary education, but Thomas, the quality of whose literary output would lead many to call him a genius, was drawn to letters as if by fate. Specifically, he was drawn to some fragments of illuminated manuscript which fell into his hands one day as he played in the vicarage. His mother had been tearing the pages up for scraps, but when she saw the child’s wonder at their content she set about teaching him to read.

  Before long, despite being constantly undermined and teased at his tough school for the poor boys of Bristol, Chatterton was composing verses of his own and borrowing from the library book after book of medieval poetry and history. His school, Colston’s Charity, was a brutish place, and although many considered the quiet and melancholy Chatterton to be soft in the head, one master, Mr Philips, was a writer of poems himself and so encouraged his boys to experiment with writing. At twelve, Chatterton showed him ‘Elinoure and Juga’, a poem he claimed to be by a little-known fifteenth-century author. Philips was impressed. Chatterton began to work on more such compositions, forming in his mind the apocryphal story of how he had found the manuscripts in an old stone chest in the church’s store room. In fact he probably did take the bare materials for his forgeries from there, just as he took the imaginative ones from his excursions into the works of Spenser, Chaucer and John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum.

  The story he would tell was that the poems he found were by a young man called Rowley, also of Bristol, who several hundred years before had written under the patronage of real-life local burgher Master William Canynge. Chatterton inhabited this fantasy quite fully, even imagining a vision of the young Canynge as a boy genius like himself, as these lines from ‘The Storie of William Canynge’ illustrate:

  When the fate-marked babe acome to sight, I saw him eager gasping after light. In all his sheepen gambols and child’s play, In every merrymaking, fair, or wake, I kenn’d a perpled light of wisdom’s ray; He ate down learning with the wastel-cake; As wise as any of the aldermen, He’d wit enow to make a mayor at ten.

  But even before he started composing the poems in earnest, he submitted another object trouvée to a local newspaper, and had it not only accepted but roundly praised by all who saw it. This was the supposed account of a twelfth-century mayor crossing a new bridge over the Avon in Bristol, which would have been of interest to local historians because the new bridge which had just been built in that one’s place was currently the talk of the town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  WILLIAM HENRY IRELAND

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

  William Henry was brought up by Samuel Ireland, a socially and intellectually ambitious man from East London who may or may not have been his real father, and Samuel’s ‘housekeeper’ Mrs Freeman, who may well have been his mother. Raised to believe his birth mother had died, the naturally weedy and shy William fought a constant battle for attention at home. At school, his main aim was to avoid the attentions of his masters, so impossible did he find it to excel or even keep up in any of his classes. Also sharing the family house at Norfolk Street, just off the Strand, were Mrs Freeman’s two delightful and intelligent daughters; and if they weren’t enough to take attention away from poor William, at the centre of it all was Samuel’s beloved collection of books and antiquities which he protected and nurtured with the single-minded obsession of a new mother. He made a living by selling books of engravings and historical relics to the aristocrats and intellectuals whose company he craved, and the house had become something of a museum by the time the likes of Boswell came to view the priceless Shakespeare papers he claimed to own. Mrs Freeman herself was an occasional writer of satire, the girls were keen artists, and most evenings the family would sit amongst Samuel’s treasures disporting and bettering themselves by reading aloud from Shakespeare.

  William himself did not seem to have inherited any of the talents of his family, his only passion being to sit in his bedroom making pretend suits of armour. However, the family had connections in the Drury Lane Theatre and it was here that William seemed most at home, revelling in the make-believe world of the back-stage scene-builders and costume designers, and even getting the odd walk-on part in a play. But most of the time he found himself centre of attention for all the wrong reasons: rarely able to get his family’s attention, never the recipient of anyone’s praise and always wondering about the true nature of his parentage, he must have cut a forlorn figure as he sloped around the city on errands for his father. When he was eventually allowed to leave school he was apprenticed to a law firm in one of the nearby Inns of Court, a job he hated. He had already read about Chatterton (who had the same job and also lacked paternal love) and, he wrote in his confession years later, was already wondering what other similarities there might be between them.

  At nineteen years old, William was plugging away at his dreary job and coming home to a family who had little time for him. Yet outside this little world, as he must have known from his father’s doings, England and Europe were in the grip of an obsession with literary and historical relics which would ultimately enable him to make his mark. The fall of the great French families in the Revolution meant the international market in objets d’art was suddenly flooded with the flotsam of their grand existences. Collectors were going wild for paintings, furniture and books with impressive pedigrees and grand connections. At the same time, as a reaction to this, some ingenious Englishmen were trying to create a market in home-grown arts and artefacts which celebrated the landscape, history and culture of their own land. Samuel Ireland, engraver, artist and inveterate collector was one such man, and the success of his collections of sketches of places such as the Avon valley were what enabled him to buy the house in Norfolk Street.

  The chief obsession of the day, however, was Shakespeare. The emerging cult of bardolatory was sweeping the land, thanks largely to the irrepressible actor-manager David Garrick. In 1769 this famous Shakespeare-lover had staged an exuberant jubilee celebration at his hero’s birthplace in the Midlands. Statues were erected, encomia were written, celebrities were invited to attend balls in remembrance of the playwright and, as an offshoot of this grand affair, a crooked industry sprang up selling spurious bits of tat to tourists. The Irelands themselves were duped by one such tradesman when they made a trip to Stratford and came away with a chair said to have been sat in by Shakespeare as he wooed his wife.

  Unsurprisingly, then, the one thing that William’s father lusted after but could never get his hands on was something written in Shakespeare’s hand. A whole play would be too much to hope for, of course, but even a single signature or scribbled note, he was fond of saying, would be worth exchanging his whole library for. His son was listening. And some time between the family holiday to Stratford in 1793 and the autumn of 1794, he came up with a perfect way to win the respect of the bardolatrous Samuel
.

  William had sense enough to begin with a dry run. From one of the many local booksellers near his house he bought an old book of prayers, written by a member of Lincoln’s Inn, which bore the stamp of Queen Elizabeth. By faking a note from the author to the queen, he would be able to say it was a rare presentation copy rather than merely one which had been bought for the royal library. He did so, trying his best to imitate the spidery handwriting of the sixteenth century, and took the results to a bookbinder in New Inn Passage for approval. To this man, a Mr Laurie, he quipped that he was planning to play a trick on his father and wanted to know if his creation looked authentic enough to pass muster. Laurie and his assistant agreed that it did, but recommended he rewrite it using a special ink preparation, well known to scribes of the day, which would make it look more genuinely aged. The solution was sold to him in a vial and he was instructed to hold the written sheet up to the fire to make the antique-looking writing come up a satisfyingly dark mottled brown. He did as he was told, and his father was fooled and delighted.