Panel C11
Chatterton in Shoreditch
25 April 1770 - 31 May 1770
Age 17, Lodging with Mrs Ballance
Iconic Moments 13 & 14
St Leonard's Church Shoreditch
Tom King's Coffee House (Morning) Hogarth 1730s.
It is Thursday 26th April, 1770
It seems Chatterton arrived in time
To visit four magazine editors
He mentions them all
Mr Edmunds, Middlesex Journal
Mr Fell, Freeholder's Magazine
Mr Hamilton, Town & Country Magazine
Mr Dodsley, Annual Register
Chatterton is on a Mission
It is clear he intends to do all he can
To make a success of this new start.
It has been claimed
That Hogarth Sketched Chatterton
(The Distrest Poet)
Impossible,
Hogarth was dead by 1764
Nevertheless, the
Hogarth Image is intriguing:
A young man holding a book
Heads for the door of a coffee house
Feels like it could be Chatterton
Also Impossible as it dates to the 1730s.
It does give a sense of what
Chatterton had to look forward to
Visiting the coffee shops of London
Shoreditch in 1755
No. 48 Shoreditch
Built on the site of
The House Chatterton Lived in
Chatterton Lodged in Shoreditch
With Mrs Ballance, a Relative
She herself was a Lodger
Of the main tenant, Mr Walmsley
Who lived in the house
With his wife, nephew and niece.
Chatterton Needed Space and Privacy
Instead he Shared the Nephew's Bed.
No Wonder he sat up Writing
Into the early hours
Writing, writing, forever writing.
It can't have been much of a surprise
When, 37 Days later and
Desperate for Privacy
He moved to his own,
Private, Attic Room, in Brooke Street
The landlord of the house was Herbert Croft
Author of Love and Madness
And so, the plot thickens!
In a letter Croft wrote to Stevens in 1782
He states he got much of his knowledge
About Chatterton from his Tenants.
He mentions Walmsley specifically.
Croft used the knowledge he gained
Along with Chatterton's Personal letters
To Thicken his Plot of Love and Madness.
The book became Irresistible
To 18th century readers.
Croft was not always a man to be trusted
He convinced Chatterton's sister
To lend him Chatterton's letters & Promised to return them Forthwith
Instead, he left town with the letters
And without Permission - the Devil,
He wove them into the plot of his book.
His methods were Devious it's True!
But we know so much more of Chatterton
Thanks to Herbert Croft