Chatterton, Ossian, Africa

Abstract

This essay tracks the intimate tie between Englishness and violence from Thomas Chatterton’s earliest “Rowley” poems to his late African Eclogues. In judging violence essential to English national character, Chatterton takes seriously the Ossianic poems’ characterization of England’s founders as piratical savages. Chatterton then struggles, in his overt imitations of Ossian and his African poems, to find an alternative way of understanding national character. Finally the reversibility of Ossian’s own fundamental plot (dangerous invaders arrive by sea; indigenous people defend themselves) permits Chatterton to reimagine the British slave trade and to imagine a critique of James Macpherson’s nationalist determinism.