born Nov. 20, 1752, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.
died Aug. 24, 1770, London
English poet.
At age 11 Chatterton wrote a pastoral eclogue on an old parchment and passed it off successfully as a 15th-century work. Thereafter he created more poems in a similar vein, attributing them to a fictitious monk he called Thomas Rowley. After a mock suicide threat freed him from an apprenticeship to an attorney, he set out for London. There he had some success with a comic opera, The Revenge , but when a prospective patron died, he found himself penniless and without prospects and committed suicide at 17. Considered a precursor of Romanticism , he was praised by such poets as John Keats , Lord Byron , and {{link=Wordsworth, William">William Wordsworth .