London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Daily word time.
And today’s word is garret.
A garret is a room immediately under the roof of a house.
An attic room.
Usually a small one. A cheap one. A cold one in winter, an oven in summer.
In literature, the garret is where the penniless poet lives.
Where the unsuccessful painter paints.
Where the unknown genius shivers, starves and creates his masterpiece while London carries on below, entirely unaware that greatness is three flights up.
The word comes to us from the Old French garite.
A watchtower.
A place high up.
A lookout.
And today we’re going to one of the most famous garrets in English history.
A room in Brook Street, Holborn.
Though Brook Street was often spelled Brooke Street in those days.
And we’re going there on the morning of August 25th, 1770.
The door is locked.
The landlady knocks.
No answer.
She gets into the room.
And finds a boy lying dead.
Not a man.
A boy.
Thomas Chatterton.
Seventeen years old.
Seventeen years and nine months, to be exact.
Dead before his eighteenth birthday.
Dead in a London garret.
And destined to become one of the great romantic images of the doomed young genius.
But there’s an immediate complication.
The image you almost certainly have in your mind isn’t Thomas Chatterton.
It’s George Meredith.
And the garret you’re looking at isn’t Chatterton’s garret.
It’s a room in Gray’s Inn.
And the view through the window isn’t the view Chatterton saw.
The view was chosen because it gave the painter what he wanted.
A glimpse of St Paul’s Cathedral.
London rearranged for art.
Now, let’s go back.
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol in 1752.
His father died before he was born.
The boy was precocious.
Wildly, dazzlingly precocious.
He read voraciously. He wrote poetry. He steeped himself in the medieval past of Bristol and especially in the great church of St Mary Redcliffe.
And then he pulled off one of the most extraordinary literary deceptions in English history.
He invented a fifteenth-century monk-poet called Thomas Rowley.
Invented him.
Then wrote Rowley’s poems himself.
Not modern poems pretending to be vaguely old-fashioned.
Chatterton created an entire medieval literary world.
Ancient spelling. Ancient language. Ancient documents. Ancient personalities.
Except they weren’t ancient.
They came out of the head of a teenager.
He even stained manuscripts and treated them to make them look old.
It was forgery.
But forgery touched by genius.
Chatterton sent some of his supposed medieval discoveries to Horace Walpole.
Walpole was initially intrigued.
Then suspicious.
When the truth emerged, he wanted no part of it.
Chatterton, meanwhile, had decided that Bristol was too small for him.
The world was waiting.
Or so he thought.
And for Chatterton, as for so many ambitious young people before and since, “the world” meant London.
He arrived in the capital in April 1770.
Seventeen years old.
Confident.
Productive.
Hungry for fame.
And convinced that his pen would support him.
At first he lodged with relatives in Shoreditch.
Then, in June, he moved west to Holborn.
To 39 Brook Street.
That’s the address.
39 Brook Street, Holborn.
Not the fashionable Brook Street in Mayfair.
This was a cramped, crowded street in the densely packed London behind Holborn.
Chatterton took a garret room there.
A room of his own.
For the first time, privacy.
He could write through the night.
And he did.
Poems. Political writing. Satire. Essays. Songs. Anything an editor might buy.
He bombarded London’s publishers.
He earned a little.
But not enough.
London wasn’t waiting for him.
London rarely waits for anybody.
The city could be exhilarating. It could also be pitiless.
Editors rejected his work.
Money ran short.
Food ran short.
And on the night of August 24th, 1770, Thomas Chatterton died in that garret.
Arsenic and opium were involved.
For generations, the accepted story was suicide.
The starving young poet, rejected by the world, poisons himself.
Modern scholarship has complicated that picture.
It may have been an accidental overdose. Arsenic was used medicinally at the time, including in the treatment of venereal disease. Opium, usually taken as laudanum, was readily available.
We don’t know with absolute certainty what Chatterton intended.
But we do know what happened next.
On the morning of August 25th, his body was discovered.
Around him were torn scraps of paper.
Whatever he had been writing, he had ripped it to pieces.
He was seventeen.
His body was taken away.
He was buried in the workhouse burial ground attached to the parish of St Andrew, Holborn.
The burial ground disappeared.
The grave disappeared.
The house disappeared.
Much of the street disappeared.
The site of 39 Brook Street is now buried beneath Holborn Bars, that enormous red-brick Gothic pile on Holborn.
There’s a plaque.
But the room is gone.
The view is gone.
The boy is gone.
And yet Chatterton is still there.
Because eighty-six years later, a young painter called Henry Wallis brought him back.
Wallis was twenty-six.
Young. Ambitious. Not yet famous.
He chose Chatterton’s death as his subject.
Perfect Victorian material.
Youth.
Genius.
Poverty.
Neglect.
Beauty.
Death.
The young artist destroyed by an unfeeling world.
Wallis didn’t paint the actual room in Brook Street.
That room either no longer existed or wasn’t available to him.
Instead, he used a friend’s chamber in Gray’s Inn.
And that was an inspired choice.
Because Gray’s Inn gave him London.
Through the open garret window, beyond the rooftops, you can see the dome of St Paul’s.
Just a glimpse.
But it matters.
Chatterton lies dead in a little room.
Outside, London stretches away.
The mighty city.
The city he came to conquer.
The city that defeated him.
The room is cramped.
The horizon is immense.
That glimpse of St Paul’s turns the whole of London into a silent character in the tragedy.
And look at the body.
The long auburn hair.
The pale face.
The white shirt open at the neck.
The brilliant purple breeches.
One arm lies across the chest.
The other hangs down, lifeless, the fingers almost touching the floor.
There’s a poison bottle nearby.
There are torn papers.
Dawn enters through the window.
It catches the dead boy’s face and transforms an ugly, lonely death into something beautiful.
Too beautiful, perhaps.
This isn’t reportage.
It’s legend-making.
And here comes the trapdoor.
The dead poet in the picture isn’t Thomas Chatterton.
It’s George Meredith.
Wallis’s friend.
The future great Victorian novelist and poet.
At that point Meredith wasn’t yet the grand old man of English letters.
He was twenty-eight.
Handsome.
Slim.
Red-haired.
Perfect casting.
So George Meredith posed on the bed.
George Meredith let one arm hang towards the floor.
George Meredith became Thomas Chatterton.
Which means that when you stand in Tate Britain and look at one of the most famous dead poets in English art, you’re actually looking at one of the most famous living novelists of Victorian England.
Or rather, the future novelist.
Meredith would go on to write The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways.
He would become one of the literary lions of the Victorian age.
Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells would make pilgrimages to see him at his home near Box Hill.
But here he is at twenty-eight.
Playing dead in a garret.
The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856.
On its frame were words from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:
“Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.”
The public loved it.
The critics loved it.
John Ruskin called it “faultless and wonderful”.
Crowds gathered in front of it.
Reproductions carried it into Victorian homes.
Henry Wallis became famous almost overnight.
It was the picture that made him.
And then the painting’s story took a sensational turn.
Because Wallis didn’t just borrow George Meredith’s body.
He took up with George Meredith’s wife.
Mary Ellen Meredith.
She was clever, beautiful and strong-minded.
The daughter of another novelist, Thomas Love Peacock.
She and Meredith had married in 1849.
The marriage was unhappy.
Wallis met Mary Ellen through George.
And not long after Meredith had posed as the dead Chatterton, Wallis and Mary Ellen became lovers.
Think about that.
Meredith lies motionless while Wallis paints him as a tragically dead young man.
Then Wallis runs off with Meredith’s wife.
You couldn’t make it up.
Or rather, if you did make it up, an editor might tell you it was a little too much.
Mary Ellen left Meredith for Wallis.
They travelled in Wales.
They went to Capri.
In 1858, Mary Ellen gave birth to Wallis’s son.
He was registered as Harold Meredith because Mary Ellen was still legally married to George.
Later he was known as Felix Wallis.
But the relationship between Mary Ellen and Wallis didn’t last.
She returned to England.
Her health failed.
She died of kidney disease in 1861.
She was just forty.
Neither Meredith nor Wallis attended her funeral.
Just three mourners were there.
Three.
The whole story begins with a lonely death in a garret and ends with another desperately lonely scene.
Wallis lived until 1916.
Meredith lived until 1909.
And the painting outlived all of them.
Chatterton.
Wallis.
Meredith.
Mary Ellen.
Four lives caught in a single canvas.
And London holds every part of the story.
Brook Street, Holborn, where Chatterton died.
Gray’s Inn, where the death was recreated.
St Paul’s, floating in the distance.
Great James Street in Bloomsbury, where George Meredith had lived at Number 26 in the 1840s.
Great James Street is London Walks territory.
One of those almost miraculously preserved London streets.
Early Georgian houses. Iron railings. Fanlights. Doorcases. Old brick.
A street that looks as though it remembers everybody who ever lived there.
And then there’s Tate Britain.
That’s where the painting is.
Henry Wallis’s Chatterton.
Usually called The Death of Chatterton.
And that gives us the perfect London Walks recommendation.
Rick Jones’s Tate Britain Tour.
That’s Rick Jones, the distinguished arts critic. And for good measure artist, musician, writer, performer and guide par excellence.
Exactly the person you want standing beside you when you look at a painting like this.
Because it isn’t enough merely to identify what’s in the frame.
You want somebody who can open it up.
The colour.
The composition.
The theatricality.
The symbolism.
The London skyline.
The artifice.
The biography.
The scandal.
The living man pretending to be the dead poet.
And the painter who would shortly run away with that living man’s wife.
That’s not just a painting.
That’s a whole Victorian novel hanging on a wall.
Except the Victorian novel happened.
So, August 25th.
We’re standing outside a locked garret room in Brook Street, Holborn.
The landlady knocks.
No answer.
The door opens.
Thomas Chatterton is dead.
Seventeen years old.
Eighty-six years later, Henry Wallis moves the scene to Gray’s Inn, puts George Meredith on the bed, opens the window onto St Paul’s and creates one of the most famous pictures of the nineteenth century.
The garret was lost.
The house was lost.
The grave was lost.
But the image survived.
And if you go to Tate Britain, there he is.
Thomas Chatterton.
Except he isn’t.
He’s George Meredith.
London’s dead poet who wasn’t there.
You’ve been listening to the London Walks podcast.
From Brook Street, from Gray’s Inn, from Great James Street and from that open garret window looking across the rooftops to St Paul’s, goodbye.