London: T. Payne and Son, 1781. First Edition.
Two volumes.
Fine leather bindings. Full brown leather, gilt spine decorations,, gilt borders on boards.  Octavos, Vol 1: iv, 305 pages, Errata; Vol. 2: pages 306-597, 2 folded leaves. Errata.
Note, Volume 2 has only a half-title page for Part 2 of the work. This is as issued.
Pasted to the front pastedown of each volume is the armorial book plats of John Elphinstone Erskine. (See below.)

Very scarce copy of the original edition.

Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet who committed suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Although fatherless and raised in poverty, Chatterton was a studious child, publishing work by the age of 11. He was able to pass off his work as that of a fictional 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.

At 17, he sought outlets for his political writings in London, having impressed the Lord Mayor, William Beckford, and the leader John Wilkes, but his earnings were not enough to keep him, and he poisoned himself. His life and death attracted much interest among romantic poets, and Alfred de Vigny wrote a play about him. The oil painting The Death of Chatterton by Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis was inspired by him.

The first of his literary mysteries was the dialogue of "Elinoure and Juga," which he showed to Thomas Phillips, the usher at Colston's Hospital, where he was a pupil, pretending it was the work of a 15th-century poet.

Chatterton soon conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, a fictional monk from the 15th century, and adopted for himself the pseudonym Thomas Rowley for poetry and history. Psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan suggested that Chatterton being fatherless played a great role in his imposturous creation of Rowley.

The death of Chatterton attracted little notice at the time as the few who cared for the Rowley poems regarded him as their mere transcriber. He was interred in a burying-ground attached to the Shoe Lane Workhouse in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, later the site of Farringdon Market. There is a discredited story that the body of the poet was recovered, and secretly buried by his uncle, Richard Phillips, in Redcliffe Churchyard. There a monument has been erected to his memory, with the appropriate inscription, borrowed from his "Will", and so supplied by the poet's own pen. "To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader! judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable."

It was after Chatterton's death that the controversy over his work began. Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777) was edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt, a Chaucerian scholar who believed them genuine medieval works. However, the appendix to the following year's edition recognises that they were probably Chatterton's own work. Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry (1778) included Rowley among 15th-century poets, but apparently did not believe in the antiquity of the poems. In 1782 a new edition of Rowley's poems appeared, with a "Commentary, in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended," by Jeremiah Milles, Dean of Exeter.

The controversy which raged round the Rowley poems is discussed in Andrew Kippis, Biographia Britannica (vol. iv., 1789), where there is a detailed account by George Gregory of Chatterton's life (pp. 573–619). This was reprinted in the edition (1803) of Chatterton's Works by Robert Southey and Joseph Cottle, published for the benefit of the poet's sister. The neglected condition of the study of earlier English in the 18th century alone accounts for the temporary success of Chatterton's mystification. It has long been agreed that Chatterton was solely responsible for the Rowley poems; the language and style were analysed in confirmation of this view by W. W. Skeat in an introductory essay prefaced to vol. ii. of The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (1871) in the "Aldine Edition of the British Poets." The Chatterton manuscripts originally in the possession of William Barrett of Bristol were left by his heir to the British Museum in 1800. Others are preserved in the Bristol library.


Jacob Bryant (1715–1804) was an English scholar and mythographer, who has been described as "the outstanding figure among the mythagogues who flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

His chief works were A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–76, and later editions), Observations on the Plain of Troy (1795), and Dissertation concerning the Wars of Troy (1796). He also wrote on theological, political and literary subjects.

Bryant was a believer in the authenticity of Thomas Chatterton's fabrications. Chatterton had created poems written in mock Middle English and had attributed them to Thomas Rowley, an imaginary monk of the 15th century. When Thomas Tyrwhitt issued his work The Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others,' Bryant with Robert Glynn followed with his Observations on the Poems of Thomas Rowley in which the Authenticity of those Poems is ascertained (2 vols., 1781).