The Boston Globe, January 27th, 1988
CHATTERTON, by Peter Ackroyd. Grove Press, 234 pp., $17.95 Peter Ackroyd's novel centering on Thomas Chatterton, the adolescent poet and forger, concerns, in a sense, death and resurrection -- Chatterton lives again through Henry Wallis' 1856 portrait in which George Meredith modeled as the dead Chatterton, and in the present century through the relations of a doomed young poet and his London circle. The novel is a brilliant if flawed tour de force. Ackroyd exhibits a mild tendency toward the forced aphorism (a previous novel was "The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde") and it takes a while for th...
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