In his 17 years of life, the “rock star” writer Thomas Chatterton lit a path for all the Romantic poets yet to come. His obsession with the mysteries of the past helped fuel a neo-Gothic boom in English creativity; William Wordsworth sealed the dead teenager’s reputation by referring to him as “the marvellous boy”; and in modern times postcards of Henry Wallis’s dramatic painting of Chatterton’s lonely deathbed have been pinned above many a bookish student’s desk.
Now “mega-rare” letters that spell out the poet’s sad story in his own hand are to be sold at auction for the first time. The correspondence to go under the hammer this November is evidence of a clash between Chatterton and a notable literary figure that scholars still suspect led to his suicide. “These are the missing piece of the jigsaw,” said Bonham’s head of books and manuscripts, Matthew Haley. “The whereabouts of these letters has been unknown, although we understood the sequence of events. In 20 years in the business I have never seen Chatterton letters offered for sale, despite the huge interest in him. He is a rock star, really.”
