Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/152

 four years his senior), and a brother (Giles Malpas), who died in infancy. Thomas was born in a small tenement immediately behind Pyle Street charity school, of which his father had been master, and was baptised on 1 Jan. 1753 at St. Mary Redcliffe. For nearly two hundred years his paternal ancestors had been hereditary sextons of the church. Chatterton's father has been described by one of his pupils as a roystering and rather ‘brutal fellow,’ who was remarkable for having so wide a mouth that he could put his clenched fist inside it. He was, however, a man of ability. He was a skilled numismatist and collected several hundred Roman coins, afterwards in the museum of Sir John Smith, bart., of Ashton Court. Southey has preserved ‘A Catch for Three Voices’ by him (iii. 495) in the 1803 edition of the Works of Chatterton. He read Cornelius Agrippa, affected a belief in magic, and was fond of books.

Chatterton's mother—who was born in 1731 and died on 25 Dec. 1791, aged 60—early in 1753 removed to a house on Redcliffe Hill, opened a dame's school, and took in sewing. Mrs. Chatterton, the poet's grandmother, and Mrs. Edkins, formerly Miss James, who assisted Mrs. Chatterton as a sempstress, and who is usually spoken of as Chatterton's foster-mother, lived with the family. They soon removed to a smaller house, up a court, at the back of No. 50, thenceforth memorable as Chatterton's home at Bristol. Chatterton was at first regarded as stupid. At four he knew but one or two letters of the alphabet. At five he was sent as a day scholar to Pyle Street school, of which Stephen Love became master in 1757. He was soon returned as a dull boy. He was regarded by his mother until the age of six and a half as ‘little better than an absolute fool.’ One day, seeing his mother tearing up as waste paper an old French musical folio of her husband's, the boy, as she said, ‘fell in love’ with the illuminated capitals. From that moment his dormant powers seem to have been awakened. He rapidly learned to read, and was taught from the Gothic characters of an old black-letter Bible. At seven he was remarkable for his brightness, and at eight had become an insatiable reader. He sat for hours as if he were in a trance, and would break abruptly into passionate weeping. He even then systematically neglected both food and sleep. At home his favourite haunt soon came to be a dusty lumber-room, overlooking a little back garden. He held this room before long under lock and key as his own exclusively. Another favourite haunt was the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, to which he had at all times ready access. The sexton was the boy's uncle, Richard Phillips, to whom Chatterton had peculiarly endeared himself. His sister has related how, on a pedlar promising to bring presents to herself and her brother, Chatterton answered, ‘Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet to trumpet my name over the world.’ Though grave in manner he loved a joke. Edward Smith's aunt Martha spoke of him years afterwards laughingly (Gent. Mag. new ser. x. 603) as ‘a sad wag of a boy.’ Though at times passionate, he was always singularly winning in his manners. In his eighth year he was nominated to Colston's Hospital, the bluecoat school of Bristol. He was admitted as a scholar on 3 Aug. 1760, on the recommendation of John Gardiner, vicar of Henbury. To his annoyance he was only taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and the church catechism. He told his foster-mother that he could have learned more at home. The junior usher, Thomas Phillips, gave him encouragement. Whenever the boy was released from school he locked himself up in his attic. There he was busily engaged, with a great piece of ochre in a brown pan, a bottle of black lead, and pounce bags of charcoal, in making up heraldic designs and in teaching himself to draw knights in armour, castles, and churches. From his earliest childhood Chatterton had been familiar with the heraldic escutcheons upon the tombs in St. Mary Redcliffe, and intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of various kinds of mediæval palæography. Early in that century seven old oak chests in the muniment room over the great north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe had been broken open by the authorities in order to get at some important deeds. Conspicuous among these chests was a huge one bound with iron, and secured with six keys, ‘cysta serrata cum sex clavibus,’ known since the wars of the Roses as Canynge's coffer. The keys had been lost, the locks were forced, and the documents were thenceforth left unguarded. Gradually the whole of the contents of the seven receptacles had disappeared, the poet's father carrying off the last sweepings of the muniment room. The boys' bibles were covered by the schoolmaster with many of the parchments, while with the remainder his widow made thread papers for herself and dolls for her children. In the winter of 1762 Chatterton was confirmed by the Bishop of Bristol, and was greatly impressed by the ceremony. It happened at the same time to be his turn for the week to be doorkeeper at Colston's. Then it was that he wrote his first poem, ‘On the Last Epiphany, or Christ coming to Judgment.’ It appeared in ‘Felix