ABSTRACT
The Victorians responded to the high Romantic iconic treatment of Thomas Chatterton by wanting two things: both icon and a more troubled, troubling vision, a figure who haunted Victorian narratives with his suggestible ‘pictures’. Chatterton’s sister collected ‘anecdotes’ which show him to have been a remarkably robust personage–on a Delft cup he was given as a five-year-old he wanted to have painted ‘an angel with a trumpet “to blow his name about”.’ In Wilkie Collins’s hugely popular novel, The Woman in White, the direct reference to Chatterton sits in the midst of ‘The Second Epoch’. Count Fosco’s reference to Chatterton goes–his actual words are seemingly unheeded; but they gather together a focus and a mood: the reference is a hint and a warning. Chatterton’s ‘unmarriageability’, unlike Canynge’s, was ordered by the outer, prohibitive world, the laws governing the conduct of all apprentices.
