Oscar Wilde's Chatterton

In Oscar Wildes Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore Wildes fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that Wildes substantial Chatterton notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of Wildes career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as The Portrait of Mr. W. H., The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources, Oscar Wildes Chatterton explains why, in Wildes personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Thophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.