Beschreibung:

CHATTERTON (THOMAS)Series of autograph letters between Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) and Horace Walpole (1717-1797), comprising Chatterton's requests for the return of his Rowley manuscripts, and Walpole's unsent reply, the last known letters from this correspondence in private hands:
i) Autograph letter signed ("Thomas Chatterton"), to Horace Walpole ("Sir"), requesting he return his manuscripts, beginning "Being fully convinced of the Papers of Rowley being genuine, I should be obliged to you to return the copy I sent you having no other..." as Mr Barrett, a "very able" Antiquary writing a history of Bristol has asked for it ("...I should be sorry to deprive him, or the World indeed of a Valuable Curiosity which I know to be an Authentic Piece of Antiquity..."), with two desperate postscripts "If you will publish them yourself they are at your service" and "Apprentice to an Attorney Mr Lambert, who is a good master; I find engrossing mortgages etc a very irksome employ", integral address panel "For/ Horace Walpole Esq/ Arlington Street/ London", postmarked Bristol 17 April, docketed "Let: 2d", one page on a bifolium, dust-staining, remains of red wax seal, seal tear with loss not affecting text, 4to (198 x 162mm.), Corn Street, Bristol, April 14 [17]69
ii) Autograph letter signed ("Thomas Chatterton"), to Horace Walpole ("Sir"), "I can not reconcile your behavior [sic] to me, with the notion I once entertained of you. I think myself injured Sir & did not you know my circumstances you would not dare to treat me thus. - I have sent twice for a copy of the MSs – no answer from you – an explanation or excuse for your Silence would oblige...", docketed by Walpole at foot, further note at foot "Note/ The MSS were sent back 4th Augt", integral address panel "Mr Hor. Walpole/ Arlington Street/ London", docketed "Let: 3d", one page on a bifolium, watermark, dust-staining, ink blots, seal tear with loss not affecting text, 4to (202 x 160mm.), [n.p.], 24 July [1769]
iii) Autograph draft letter signed ("Hor Walpole"), to Thomas Chatterton ("Sr"), an unsent letter writing in the strongest terms, beginning "...I do not see, I must own, how those precious MSS of which you have sent me a few extracts, should be lost to the world by my detaining your letters..." and querying why Chatterton has not retained the original to make copies, questioning the credentials of the so-called antiquary Mr Barrett ("...who... cannot know much of antiquity if he believes in the authenticity of those papers..."), and asking further questions as to the age of the original and professing to have found no record of Rowley or "...the poetical monk, his ancient predecessor...", furthermore suspicious that the poetry is "...so resembling both Spencer & the moderns & written in a metre invented long since Rowley...", and that "...For myself, I undoubtedly will never print those extracts as genuine...", and accusing him of either trying to lure him into a trap, thus "...entertaining yourself at my expense...", or having the poor judgement to think the pieces ancient, with a later postcript ("N.B. The above letter I had begun to write to Chatterton on his redemanding his MSS, but not choosing to enter into a Controversy with him, I did not finish it, & only folding up his papers, returned them. Hor Walpole"), pencilled docket "Vol. 4. 237/ Printed", two pages on a bifolium, dust-staining particularly at edges, creased at folds, 4to (234 x 188mm.), [n.p., n.d. but probably August 1769]
iv) Manuscript visiting card of Lady Lyttleton, reused by Walpole to note the return of Chatterton's manuscripts on 4 August ("To Mr Thomas Chatterton in Corn Street Bristol. The two mss sent Aug. 4. 1769"); "Lady Lyttleton present hir [sic] comts to Mr Walpole and Returns Manny thanks for the Honour of his Enquires" on recto, dust-staining, marks and ink blots, 12mo (64 x 94mm.), August 1769Footnotes'CONVINCED OF THE PAPERS OF ROWLEY BEING GENUINE... A VALUABLE CURIOSITY WHICH I KNOW TO BE AN AUTHENTIC PIECE OF ANTIQUITY': A major rediscovery of letters from Thomas Chatterton to Horace Walpole, the last remaining of their correspondence still in private hands.
Thomas Chatterton, Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in its pride', has become a cult figure, the subject of debate and conjecture from the moment of his untimely death by his own hand at the age of seventeen in a London garret, impoverished and surrounded by scraps of his own writings. Unknown in life, in death he became the ultimate tragic romantic hero, inspiration to the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites and inspiring numerous novels, poems, plays, an opera by Leoncavallo and of course, Henry Wallis' famous painting of 1856. Coleridge wrote a monody to him, Southey and Cottle edited Chatterton in 1803, Shelley mentioned him in Adonais, Keats dedicated Endymion to him, and his writing, seen as prefiguring the Romantic movement, was praised by Byron, Scott, Rossetti and Browning who considered him a genius. '...At the same time, critics all but forgot him. Chatterton was condemned as a literary forger and, by a perverse logic, all his writings became fraudulent. Only recently has Chatterton begun to assume his rightful and important place in the English literary tradition. In a shockingly brief career he none the less gave voice to an unparalleled range of literary possibility. From the obsessive, lost world of Thomas Rowley to the immediate blood-red savagery of political satire, Thomas Chatterton showed what could be done...' (Nick Groom, ODNB).
Letters by Thomas Chatterton are exceptionally rare and very few have come to auction. The present letters are a significant addition to the ten or twelve complete Chatterton autograph letters, written in the space of only two years from 1768 to 1770, known to survive. Of all the recorded letters, over half are thought lost or known only by fragments or copies, which makes the survival of our letters all the more remarkable. Our letters form part of a short exchange lasting just five months, from 25 March to 4 August 1769, which was fated to cause Horace Walpole embarrassment and unhappiness for the rest of his life and coloured his reputation in the eyes of posterity. The Chatterton/Walpole correspondence included in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, edited by Donald S. Taylor (1971) and in the Yale edition of Walpole's Correspondence online consists of ten letters in all, seven from Chatterton to Walpole (including two dated 14 April 1769 which were unsent and are variations of ours of the same date) and three from Walpole, one of which is thought destroyed. Not only do the present letters, two from Chatterton and one from Walpole, complete the known correspondence between them, they are believed to be the last letters from the correspondence remaining in private hands.
Chatterton first approached Walpole on 25 March 1769, sending him extracts from 'several Curious Manuscripts'. These were the so-called Rowley manuscripts, purporting to be a prose discourse on the rise of painting in England, written by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowleie, carried out under the patronage of Sir William Canynge, a celebrated mayor of Bristol, but actually composed and forged by Chatterton himself on medieval parchment found in the muniments room of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol. Walpole responded courteously and enthusiastically three days later asking him if he could see more of Rowley's poems. Chatterton duly obliged, sending further verses and an account of his circumstances on 30 March. On hearing of his impoverished background, Walpole's suspicions were aroused, and he showed the poems to Thomas Gray and William Mason who recognised them immediately as modern forgeries. Not knowing whether Chatterton was attempting to extort money from him or was just a precocious sixteen-year-old playing an elaborate hoax to bring him into public ridicule, he replied a few days later, around 4th April, with what he later claimed was a kindly letter suggesting that he knew the manuscripts were not authentic, and that he should return to his studies and continue in his profession. This letter has not been traced and it is believed Chatterton may have destroyed it in anger. Chatterton quickly wrote back on 8th April (a 'peevish letter' according to Walpole) to assure him of their authenticity and threatening to destroy all his 'useless lumber of literature'.
Our first letter from Chatterton to Walpole, in which he demands the return of the papers for the first time, is dated 14 April (Correspondence, Vol.16, p.116), and is the shortest of three existing versions, two of which, marked 'Never Sent', show that a longer and more controversial letter was first intended: one in Chatterton's hand (BM Add. MS 5766B, f.48), the other in the hand of William Barrett, an antiquary of Bristol and collaborator of Chatterton (BM Add. MS 5766B, f.50) which was evidently written in Chatterton's presence. There is then a gap of some three months in the correspondence. Scholars have debated at length as to the reason for the delay in Walpole's response. Maybe Walpole had mislaid the papers or had simply forgotten to reply, but he later put the delay down to his preparations for an imminent journey to Paris. When he returned from Paris at the end of July, Chatterton's letter dated 24 July, the second in our series and the last he wrote to Walpole, was waiting for him (Correspondence, Vol.16, p.116). This letter, wherein Chatterton claims to have written twice to ask for the return of the manuscripts (although only one request survives) was considered by Walpole as '...singularly impertinent. He demanded his poems roughly; and added that I should not have dared to use him so ill, if he had not acquainted me with the narrowness of his circumstances...' (E.W.H. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 1930, p.266). He responded with our final letter, undated but written sometime between his return from Paris on 27 July and 4 August, when he said he returned the manuscripts (Correspondence, Vol.16, p.117). It was never sent – at first Walpole claimed he had burnt it fearing that Chatterton might print it and use it against him and merely wrapped up the poems and letters, without taking a copy of either 'for which I am now sorry' and returned them forthwith – but it later resurfaced amongst his papers and was included in Vol.IV of his Collected Works: '...It is the restrained letter of an incensed eighteenth-century public man, alive to imposition, but quite justified...' (Meyerstein, pp.267-268). There was, according to Taylor, '...no evidence of chicanery behind this discovery of a letter previously thought to be burnt; it was clearly a lapse of memory...' (Complete Works, p.999). The exact date that Chatterton's manuscripts were returned has also been the subject of much debate among scholars - theories ranging from 4 August, as given in Mary Berry's The Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford of 1798, to 11 October. Walpole stated that he had packed up the pages and returned them on his return from France, which Meyerstein believes was later than Walpole remembered, possibly around 11 October. The existence of our visiting card bearing a note by Walpole stating clearly "The two mss sent Aug. 4. 1769", shows that Mary Berry had taken her information direct from the primary source. Its discovery means that speculation on this particular point can now be finally put to rest.
Brooding over the perceived wrongs afforded him by Walpole, Chatterton penned some savage lines intending to send them to Strawberry Hill but was dissuaded from doing so by his sister. The lines begin 'Walpole! I thought not I should ever see So mean a heart as thine has proved to be...' and makes reference to Walpole's own deception, that of the authorship of The Castle of Otranto (see lot 61) - '...Say, didst though ne'er indulge in such Deceit? Who wrote Otranto?... But I shall live and stand by Rowley's side – when Thou are dead and dammed' (John Dix, The Life of Thomas Chatterton, 1837, p.264). Chatterton's biographers make much of this: '...Mr Walpole, who had himself attempted to deceive the world, could not bear than one so humble as Chatterton should deceive him...' (Dix, p.88). Others declare that Walpole in this case was proceeding with caution and with good cause. He was only too alert to the possibility of being duped, well-remembering the furore surrounding a fake letter he himself had written three years earlier to Jean-Jacques Rousseau purporting to be from Frederick, King of Prussia and offering him asylum. This jeux d'esprit had sparked a very bitter and public quarrel between Rousseau and David Hume (see lot 59).
After this correspondence, Chatterton moved to London and supported himself by miscellaneous journalism mostly for Town and Country Magazine, and took this opportunity to write several satirical attacks on Walpole, thinly disguised as Baron Otranto or Horatio Otranto. By the end of August 1770, at the age of seventeen, however, Chatterton was dead, a tragic end for this brilliant but unstable character. With his death, the Thomas Rowley poems took on a new interest for the literati. Walpole entered the controversy in 1777 when he mentioned in the Monthly Review that he had already seen the poems and thought they were forgeries. This led George Catcott, a Bristol antiquarian, who believed implicitly in the authenticity of the manuscripts, to accuse Walpole, the heartless aristocrat, of single-handedly driving the impoverished and youthful genius to despair and suicide. The issue rumbled on for several years afterwards with Walpole forced to justify his contact towards Chatterton, firstly in A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton, printed privately at Strawberry Hill in 1779 and then, in 1782, a public version printed in four instalments in the Gentleman's Magazine. Whatever his motives for rejecting Chatterton's approaches, Walpole later wrote of his admiration for Chatterton's writing: '...He had generally genuine powers of poetry; often wit and sometimes natural humour... He was an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age...' (Walpole to Mason, 24 July 1778, Meyerstein, p.282).
Although the whereabouts of the originals has, until now, remained unknown, the text of our letters has been widely published, firstly in Mary Berry's The Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, 1798, Vol.4, p.236-238, and in several collections and biographies thereafter, including The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton (Vol.I, pp.274-275, 340, 376), E.W.H. Meyerstein's seminal A Life of Thomas Chatterton, 1930, pp.263-264, and the most recent Yale edition of Walpole's correspondence (Horace Walpole's Correspondence, Vol.16, pp.115-118). The writer Mary Berry inherited the letters direct from Horace Walpole and therefore was able to refer to the originals in her possession for the publication. They then disappeared from view, passing into the collection of Lady Maria Theresa Lewis (née Villiers) (1803-1865), in whose family they have remained until now.
Provenance: Horace Walpole (1717-1797); Mary Berry (1763-1852); Lady Maria Theresa Lewis (née Villiers) (1803-1865); her son Sir Thomas Villiers Lister (1832-1902); thence by descent.
Lady Lewis' collection was initially formed through the amalgamation of two significant collections of letters: royal and political correspondence from that of her mother the Hon. Theresa Villiers (1775-1856), and that of her close friend, the writer Mary Berry (1763–1852). Mary Berry's bequest included correspondence from Horace Walpole, most notably his correspondence with Thomas Chatterton and David Hume, hitherto thought lost, and three poems dedicated to her. To this inheritance Lady Lewis subsequently added her own correspondence and collection of autographs gathered through her wide circle of social, political and literary connections entertained at her home, Kent House, St James's. Not seen outside the family until now, the collection is a remarkable survival and tells the story of a family at the heart of English society. An intricate web of connections and alliances is revealed, bringing together the worlds of royalty and politics, the arts and literature. It is also a story of influential women both as collectors and as correspondents: Theresa Villiers as keeper of royal secrets, Mary Berry and her circle of intellectuals, and, importantly, Lady Lewis as collector and salonnière bringing them all together in one extraordinary collection.