SOURCE: “The Imaginative Matrix: The Rowley World and Its Documents, 1768-1769,” in Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History, Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 44-78.

In the following excerpt, Taylor draws a distinction between the documents Chatterton created to establish the medieval world in which the fictional Rowley supposedly lived and the pieces that the ancient poet was purported to have written; further, Taylor argues that Chatterton should not be regarded as a forger because he himself believed in validity of the world that he created.

In autumn 1768, after the four-and-one-half-year gap in the evidence, we are faced with documents indicating that the Rowley experiment is in full career. The literary works will be the subject of the next chapter, but those works presuppose a larger idea—Chatterton's imagined world of ancient Bristol—an idea not in itself literature and never fully recorded. That imagined world and the documents...