ABSTRACT
During his brief life, Thomas Chatterton produced an impressive body of work that has continued to fascinate and frustrate readers and critics. Whether he disguised himself behind the voice of his creation, the fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, or wrote satirical verse in the style of Charles Churchill, Chatterton demonstrated a prodigious poetic skill that has often been obscured by the myth generated from his early death. Chatterton's background was not, strictly speaking, labouring-class. In so far as both Chatterton and the labouring-class poets wrote within (and against) eighteenth-century notions of 'natural' or 'untutored genius' it is important to include Chatterton in any collection of labouring-class writing. Chatterton's brief formal education was supplemented by his voracious reading. Chatterton's readings of Macpherson and Percy, as well as his 'discovery' of the collection of parchments taken by his father from the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe church, further inspired the poetical productions of Rowley and his circle.
