Fragments, Reliques, & MSS: Chatterton and Percy

Abstract

Vicesimus Knox, an eloquent commentator on, among other things, eighteenth-century letters and the Rowley Controversy, found considerable entertainment in the antiquarian scramble for scraps of old literature and the ensuing uncritical eulogies sung over ancient poetry in the later eighteenth century. He laid blame for this revolution in literary taste clearly, if discreetly, at the door of Thomas Percy and his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an anthology of ballads and songs first published in 1765.² When Knox published his essays in 1782, Percy, a persistent social climber, had just been promoted from Dean of Carlisle to Bishop of Dromore and over the next 30 years of life in his corner of Ireland, would assiduously distance himself from his early antiquarian interests. But the influence of Percy’s Reliques remained palpable – not simply in the encouragement it offered to subsequent collectors of antique literature (including Walter Scott), but to the succeeding generation of Romantic poets (notably in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). And yet perhaps the most significant impact of the Reliques was on Thomas Chatterton.

He who venerates a contemptible relique is actuated with a degree of the pilgrim’s superstition, less pernicious indeed in its effects, but scarcely less absurd in its principle.

Vicesimus Knox, ‘Objections to the Study of Antiquities when Improperly Pursued’.¹