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As a genre, the territory of psychobiography is strewn with traps inviting calamity. Louise Kaplan has artfully charted her course without misadventure in this fascinating, delightful, and authoritative study of the life, times, and work of Thomas Chatterton, a posthumously renowned eighteenth-century poet from Bristol who committed suicide in London at the age of 17. She has done her work carefully, assembling the bits and pieces of relevant evidence, falsification, motivation, and previous biographies; she contemplates the whole with the aid of her clinical sensitivity and her considerable understanding of development, especially adolescent. She has consulted primary sources in England and in the United States, and her scholarly work is further buttressed by non-intrusive chapter notes at the back and by an excellent index. From all this the reader gains a sense of conviction that the author, like George Gregory, one of Chatterton's previous biographers (p. 200), is aware of the influence Chatterton's life, behaviour, and writing can and does exert on someone trying to tell his story.
The bare outlines of this story are enough to excite interest in most analysts. Chatterton was born three months after his schoolmaster father's death 'of a cold and fever' (p. 232), one day short of his thirty-ninth birthday. Chatterton's mother was 21 years old at the time, and his sister Mary was 2 years old. A brother, born about one year after his sister, died at four months and Thomas' christening was arranged for the same date as his dead brother's. At 5 he was thought to be an incorrigible illiterate, but at the age of 8 he was sent to Colston's, from which his father had graduated. This was a boarding school within walking distance, allowing Thomas a visit home to his adoring mother and sister once weekly; Colston's trained boys in those basic skills required for a seven year apprenticeship beginning at age 14 or 15. Younger boys there slept three to a bed, older on