Thomas Chatterton: The Myth of the Doomed Poet, BBC Four

The young casualty of genius fires imaginations and fills coffers. Last year Dylan Thomas’s centenary was vastly celebrated. The Amy Winehouse industry is still shifting units. The spell cast by Sylvia Plath seems not to diminish. A Janis Joplin biopic project is staggering through the law courts. And then there are Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all the sundry other singers and poets who, by accident or design, cut themselves down in their prime.

Chatterton’s was a career consisting mainly of slumps. As a young Bristolian, he was taken up by Horace Walpole, the antiquity-fancier and author of the proto-Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, then dropped like a stone. The vast medieval poem by one "Thomas Rowley, priest" (pictured below), inscribed on ancient parchment Chatterton claimed to have unearthed in a chest in his local church in Bristol, was deemed by Thomas Grey to be a fake. His creative career was over before it started. He then made his way up to London and became a political journalist writing anti-establishment rants under such provocative pseudonyms as Vamp and Harry Wildfire. But that too suffered a blow when a powerful patron, Mayor of London William Beckford (father of the author of Vathek), died of a fever. Chatterton soon followed him to the grave.

The impression left behind was of a genius who could serve his artistic purpose only by dying young

And it was then, contended poet Michael Symmons Roberts in this thoughtful documentary, that Chatterton’s career really started. Keats and Shelley doffed their caps. Wordsworth dubbed him “the marvellous boy”. When the Victorians, and specifically the Pre-Raphaelites, started to take a morbid interest in death, a romantic portrait of Chatterton on his deathbed by Henry Wallis toured the nation. With searing blue breeches, a bright white chemise and a shock of flaming red hair, his corpse looked like a French tricolour. The colours came up a treat when James Robinson, a dental surgeon turned photographer, recreated the touching scene for the new-fangled art of stereoscopy, in which depth of focus was added to postcards when seen through a special viewfinder. “Give me a Chatterton attic,” wrote Dylan Thomas.

Symmons Roberts set out to interrogate the myth of the poet as doomed risk-taker. His most startling revelation came in Bristol library, where Chatterton’s pocket book from the year before he died was shot through with brown stains containing opium. The conclusion is that, rather than take his own life in an act of creative despair, it’s more likely that he overdosed on laudanum he was taking to dull the pain of his anti-venereal medication. Chatterton had the clap.

Oh for more such half-hour documentaries. Chatterton’s brief life was covered in a brief essay in which Symmons Roberts said what was needed (he was given much longer to explore the convolutions of William Carlos Williams in his excellent meta-drama recently on Radio 3). There were interviews with a curator at Tate Britain and with Brian May, who in another life is a leading stereoscopy collector. A little bit more on the quality or otherwise of Chatterton’s poetry might have been welcome.

The impression left behind was of a great pretender who could serve his artistic purpose only by dying young. A genius at literary mimicry, he should have been alive today, when a postmodern career peddling fakery would have sat more comfortably among the halls and mirrors of contemporary art.