Chatterton

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The English poet Thomas Chatterton, who forged medieval-style verse and died young in 1770
2. Thomas Chatterton was an eighteenth-century English writer known for fabricated medieval poems attributed to a fictional monk
3. A literary figure of eighteenth-century England, famed for pseudo-medieval poetry and his tragically early death at seventeen

Etymology: Thomas Chatterton was a Bristol boy who, in the 1760s, claimed to have found medieval poems written by a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley. He produced them himself, filling them with invented Middle English-style vocabulary and archaic spellings, and presented them to antiquarians and publishers as genuine treasures of the past. Many scholars were taken in for a time, and the poems were widely admired before the hoax was exposed. The name itself is a surname, not a coinage, and it is the name of the person rather than the word for a trick. Because his deception was so celebrated, "chatterton" has come to be used as a noun for the kind of literary forgery he practised, so that a modern writer or critic might speak of a chatterton in the sense of a fake antique. Chatterton died in 1770 at the age of seventeen, reportedly by suicide, in poverty in London. His fame grew afterwards, and poets of the Romantic period, including Keats and Wordsworth, praised him as a tragic genius.