Oscar Wilde's Chatterton:
Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgeryby Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. MitchellYale University Press, 2015Professors Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell open their decorously rabble-rousing new book Oscar Wilde's Chatterton with a packed house: it's 1886 London, and the theatrically well-known writer and dramatist Oscar Wilde is scheduled to give a talk at the Birbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, and the talk has drawn an audience nearly a thousand strong, ready to hang on every word Wilde says.The key to the lecture's success wasn't the lecturer – it was the subject. Wilde was giving a talk about Thomas Chatterton, the 17-year-old Bristol poet who was as famous for his suicide in 1770 as he was for his brilliant forgeries of the works of fictitious 15th-century poet Thomas Rowley. Chatterton's name has been forgotten by the general reading public of the 21st century (you couldn't pack a hall for a Chatterton lecture today if you brought Wilde back to life in order to deliver it), but Wilde's Victorian audience was fathomlessly fascinated with “the marvellous Boy.” They'd eagerly read books about him, including David Masson's Chatterton: A Story of the Year 1770, and Daniel Wilson's Chatterton: A Biographical Study; they'd read fictional treatments and tribute poems; and they'd stood in crowds to gaze upon Henry Wallis's iconic 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton. They were ready to listen to Wilde's comments.We have the extensive little notebook Wilde kept about Chatterton. It reflects his fascination with the young poet, and for 150 years, that notebook has raised an added specter of fraud to the whole story; it contains pasted-in clippings from Masson's book and Wilson's, and for decades Wilde scholars have regarded it, as Bristow and Mitchell say, as “a barefaced example of Wilde's literary larceny.” Accusations of this kind of literary larceny had dogged Wilde throughout his professional career, and our authors very enjoyably relate that contentious history, including letters to the editors of literary journals in which authors complained about liberties Wilde the reviewer had taken with their work. His audience that night in 1886 might not have been making this connection when they went to hear his lecture, but scholars have been harping on the connection ever since, as Bristow and Mitchell write:
To say that Wilde's clippings from both Masson's and Wilson's book-length studies of Chatterton have caused an affront to those literary historians who have consulted the notebook (as well as several critics who have evidently never looked at it at all) would be an understatement … several commentators have jumped to the bleak conclusion that the excerpts from the aforementioned critical volumes remain incontrovertible evidence of his supposedly habitual, and thoroughly shameful, plagiarism.
Plagiarism was a hot topic in Wilde's era, and it's necessarily central to Bristow and Mitchell's intensely interesting account in all its complexity – a complexity neatly dramatized by bestselling novelist Charles Reade in an account by a friend of his:
“Of course I am a plagiarist. Chaucer was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was a plagiarist. Moliere was a plagiarist. We all plagiarise, all except those d—d idiots who are too asinine to profit by learning from the works of their superiors!”
Bristow and Mitchell take a broad and extremely balanced view of this hot topic, and their main aim is to distance Wilde from the taint of plagiarism that's clung to him all these years, at least when it comes to the Chatterton notebook. They lay out a convincing case for the ways Wilde used his various notebooks as “a testing ground for ideas and phrasing,” rather than “evidence of a embarrassing, if characteristic, instance of literary laziness.” They make some thrilling observations about what Wilde found in Chatterton's Rowley poems, a “consummate art that strove to invent, not imitate, reality.” They seek to free the Chatterton notebook from the low-key intellectual scandal that's kept it from being studied with the prominence they believe it deserves, and the case they make is positively eye-opening. And as a happy added bonus, they reprint the notebook itself, heavily annotated, in its entirety.We don't have a YouTube video of that Birbeck Institution speech Wilde gave; there'll never be any 21st-century instant fact-checking, no 'gotcha' moment prompting Wilde to take a Twitter walk-of-shame. We can't even be certain he'd have anything to be ashamed about; he kept a detailed notebook about Chatterton, a notebook that included long snippets from the work of other people, but he was also Oscar Wilde – and this remarkable book is a breath of fresh air in understanding him.
