Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery by Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery by Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell John Paul Riquelme (bio) Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell. Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+470. 16 B&W illustrations. $50. This monumental, revisionist, hybrid volume—at once archival, literary historical, speculative, and interpretive—warrants the attention of scholars interested in Romanticism’s canon and history, Oscar Wilde’s relation to Romanticism, and forgery’s relevance to aesthetic creation. It does considerably more than meticulously present in an appendix an authoritative annotated transcription of Wilde’s lengthy notebook from the mid-1880s concerning Thomas Chatterton, held by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Besides transcribing the notebook (with corrections to an earlier transcription by another scholar) and Wilde’s notes on D. G. Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets, the authors present, in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, extensive background regarding Chatterton’s place in the history of Romanticism (emphasizing Victorian attitudes) and interpret the notebook’s relevance for Wilde’s later writings. The book exhibits an exceptionally wide range of reference, knowledge, and insight regarding poetry of the long nineteenth century and critical debates about Wilde. Although Wilde is primary, Chatterton and Romanticism are integral to the discussions throughout in ways that provide an extended reminder of Chatterton’s importance in Romanticism’s history, especially among the Victorians, some of whom were enthusiastic about him. The authors describe Rossetti’s admiration for Chatterton and suggest, based on mixed evidence, Swinburne’s positive view. Wilde’s high regard for Rossetti influenced his engagement with Chatterton. Bristow and Mitchell are the first to take significant interpretive advantage of Wilde’s reliance in his notebook on the views that Rossetti’s close friend Theodore Watts expressed in his introduction to the Chatterton segment of Thomas Humphrey Ward’s The English Poets (four volumes, 1880), the first major anthology of British poetry. Watts’s essay poses challenges to views of poetic creation and value that emphasize originality and play down impersonal, masked expression and the thorny matter of forgery. The authors contrast Victorian attention to Chatterton with his current all but invisibility in major North American anthologies of British literature (Broadview, Longman [End Page 479] , Norton). The authors slip in a small way when they claim that Chatterton has never appeared in the Norton Anthology, whose current version includes “An Excelente Balade of Charitie” in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century rather than the Romantic Period. The period placement supports their point that Chatterton has virtually disappeared from the Romantic canon, despite the admiration of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti. His forgery and dramatic masking appear to pose an insurmountable obstacle at the moment to treating him as more than an anomalous footnote to Romanticism. Wilde’s notebook warrants the revisionist treatment that the authors compellingly and thoroughly pursue by challenging the dominant scholarly view that it exhibits Wilde’s would-be plagiarizing tendencies. The charge of plagiarism against Wilde, which has never died down entirely, originated in response to the highly derivative quality of the book of poems that he published in 1881. The notebook consists of pasted-in pages from two biographies of Chatterton with here and there Wilde’s stylistic revisions (that the authors suggest are his habitual copyediting) and also additional sentences and phrases in Wilde’s hand. Rather than copying the pages by hand or making extracts or summaries, Wilde produced a kind of scrapbook. Earlier scholars and collectors have assumed that it is closely related to the lectures that Wilde delivered on Chatterton in London and Bristol in 1886 and 1888 but never published or to a projected article on Chatterton that never appeared. Bristow and Mitchell argue effectively instead that the notebook bears an unclear relation to the lecture and article, and that it is evidence of Wilde’s research on Chatterton, not of plagiarism. In their well-sustained argument, the notebook records information and attitudes that resonate with aspects of Wilde’s later writing. Part of the argument against plagiarism rests on their identifying portions of the...