The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [57]
Chatterton committed suicide in 1770. Debates about the authenticity of the Rowley poems continued throughout the next decade, with almost all scholars and editors of the period attributing them to Chatterton. Horace Walpole jokingly called the poems Chatterton’s “trouvaille” in a conversation at the Royal Academy in 1771—though Oliver Goldsmith maintained that the poems were genuine and that Rowley was their author.50 Dr. Samuel Johnson, also present at this gathering, was “a stout unbeliever in Rowley, as he had been in Ossian,”51 the supposed author of a cycle of early Gaelic poems that the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have discovered in the Highlands of Scotland in the same years, and translated into English.
In 1776 Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell, traveled to Bristol; Boswell’s lively account of his learned friend’s investigations is worth quoting in some detail:
I was entertained with seeing him enquire upon the spot, into the authenticity of “Rowley’s Poetry,” as I had seen him enquire upon the spot into the authenticity of “Ossian’s Poetry.” George Catcot, the pewterer, who was as zealous for Rowley as Dr. Hugh Blair was for Ossian, (I trust my Reverend friend will excuse the comparison,) attended us at our inn, and with a triumphant air of lively simplicity called out, “I’ll make Dr. Johnson a convert.” Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton’s fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr. Johnson’s face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret, the surgeon, and saw some of the originals as they were called, which were executed very artificially; but from a careful inspection of them, and a consideration of the circumstances with which they were attended, we were quite satisfied of the imposture, which, indeed, has been clearly demonstrated by several able criticks.
Honest Catcot seemed to pay no attention whatever to any objections, but insisted, as an end of all controversy, that we should go with him to the tower of the church of St. Mary, Redcliff, and view with our own eyes the ancient chest in which the manuscripts were found. To this, Dr. Johnson good-naturedly agreed; and though troubled with a shortness of breathing, laboured up a long flight of steps, till we came to the place where the wondrous chest stood. “There, (said Catcot, with a bouncing confident credulity,) there is the very chest itself.” After this ocular demonstration, there was no more to be said. He brought to my recollection a Scotch Highlander, a man of learning too, and who had seen the world, attesting, and at the same time giving his reasons for the authenticity of Fingal:—“I have heard all that poem when I was young.”—“Have you, Sir? Pray what have you heard?”—“I have heard Ossian, Oscar, and every one of them.”
Johnson said of Chatterton, “This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.”52
Notice that the “ocular demonstration” of the supposed provenance of the poems is viewed, by both Boswell and Johnson, with the scorn it deserves. The chest is no more evidence of the authenticity of the documents than is the floor jabbed repeatedly by the tourists of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Henry James’s short story (“ ‘And is this really’—when they jam their umbrellas into the floor—‘the very spot where He was born?’ ”53). What was required was textual evidence of authenticity, one way or another, which was