Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) was only seventeen when he died of arsenic poisoning. Among his family and friends he was known as a versifier with a fascination for medieval manuscripts, but none suspected the true scope of his work. At eleven, he was already writing poetry, and by the end of his life his love poems, eclogues and forged medieval pieces numbered in the hundreds. They were to influence the Romantics for decades after his death. This three-volume collection of his work, edited by Joseph Cottle and Robert Southey, first appeared in 1803. Volume 2 contains the Rowley poems, for which Chatterton is best known. Ironically, they were never published under his own name in his lifetime: he claimed that the poems were transcripts he had taken from the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk. The value of these ambitious forgeries is still underappreciated.
