Poets

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on November 20, 1752 and is generally regarded as the first Romantic poet in English.

Throughout his early childhood Chatterton showed no signs of talent. He was regarded as little better than an idiot until he was about six and a half years old, because he would learn nothing, refused to play with other children, and spent most of his time brooding in silence. He was expelled from his first school as a dullard.

It appears that he underwent a considerable transformation in his seventh year. The story goes that one day he found his mother tearing up for waste paper some old music folios which had been brought home from the church some years previously by his father for use as sewing-patterns, bookbindings and the like. According to his mother, Thomas 'fell in love' with the illuminated capitals and, his interest once aroused, his mother soon taught him to read with the aid of the manuscript. If the story can be trusted, it illustrates vividly both Chatterton's instinctive delight in medieval art and the philistinism of his surroundings. His reading progressed from the old folios to a black-letter Bible and then to any books he could obtain.

In August 1760 he began attending Golston's Hospital, a Bristol charity-school which formed probably the worst intellectual environment he could have had. This Dickensian personage had left behind him a school run like a prison, where the pupils were tonsured like monks and suspected leanin..