‘Al under the wyllowe tree’: Chatterton and the Ecology of the West Country

Abstract

In considering English Romantic poets and their relationship with the West Country, the place of Thomas Chatterton appears at first sight to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Chatterton is the Bristol poet. He was so in the eighteenth century; he remains so today. Eighteenth-century commemorations such as The Ode, Songs, Chorusses, &c. for the Concert in Commemoration of Chatterton … performed at the Assembly-Room, in Princes Street, Bristol characterised him as Bristolian, ‘the Celebrated Bristol Poet’.¹ Recent work continues to site Chatterton in the city; indeed, the subtitle of an edited collection published in 2005 is Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol.² He made the city and the city made him — and in a sense, Chatterton quite literally made its history: William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (1789) includes medieval material ‘forged’ by Chatterton.