Walter Thornbury's 
Review of Dix's Life of Chatterton

Temporary position for John Dix - he will be getting his own barn page.​

"It is necessary to sometimes nail up fresh vermin on the barn-door of infamy, already sufficiently crowded.

One of the most shameless literary forgers of the present century was John Dix, alias John Ross–a man who wrote a short 8vo Life of Chatterton, which was published in Bristol in 1837. This writer, who many years ago fled to America, was first publicly exposed by that acute critic Mr. Moy Thomas in The Athenæum of Dec. 5, 1857, when Mr. Thomas proved a report of the proceedings of the inquest on the body of Chatterton, forwarded by this Mr. Dix to Mr. J. M. Gutch of Worcester, and afterwards published in "N. & Q.," to be a shameless and badly invented forgery. Mr. Thomas, with the keen sagacity that distinguishes him, showed that except where Mr. Dix follows the scanty notes of Warton, or that not very scrupulous literary adventurer, Sir Herbert Croft (himself a great mixer of truth with fiction, vide his Love and Madness, his spurious and absurdly romantic imaginary letters of the Reverend Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich), he was always inventing.

Mr. Dix, in the aforesaid report, mentions the "Three Crows" in Brooke Street—a public-house which there is every reason to suppose never existed, and he makes the date of the inquest Friday, August 27, 1770, when it happened, unfortunately, to be a Monday, the 27th of that year. He also makes the house where Chatterton died No. 17, whereas, as Mr. Thomas most ingeniously and convincingly proved, it was really No. 39.

In reply to this exposure, Mr. Dix, still in retirement in America, wrote a letter to the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, impudently agreeing with Mr. Thomas that the report of the inquest was a fraud. It had been given to him, he said (credat Judaeus) by the late Robert Southey at the time he, Dix, was writing the Life of Chatterton. Considering it unauthentic, he, Dix, did not use the copy of the report taken by him from the anonymous document returned by him, or said to be returned by him, to Southey, who was then, by-the-bye, lying in a quiet place where no persons are either asked or answered.

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Mr. Thomas, in a second letter to The Atheneum, January 23, 1858, complained with natural anger that Mr. Dix had let five years since the publication of the report elapse without explanation; and also that, considering the document a forgery, he gave a copy of it without comment to Mr. Gutch of Worcester; moreover, like all literary men of London or Boston, that he must have known that the romantic report of the inquest had been interwoven into an elaborate essay on Chatterton by Professor Masson, and had been made the basis of an elaborate pamphlet on the boy poet by Dr. Maitland.

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In the above-named letter Mr. Dix had the shamelessness to almost openly avow that the portrait of Chatterton affixed to the first edition of the Life was also a forgery. The likeness was really taken from the hydrocephalous son of a poor Bristol printer named Morris (?), who in mere caprice had written "Chatterton" on the back of the portrait and sold it for a mere song to a Bristol broker. From him it reached Dix, who instantly jumping at it, had it engraved. No authentic portrait of Chatterton exists, and in Dix's edition of 1851 the likeness was left out. It took, it appears, Mr. Dix years to discover this fact about the portrait, which was known to several Bristol people the very year of Dix's publication.

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After these disclosures, how can we place any reliance on the Chatterton traditions in Dix's book? How can we credit the doubtful and miserable verses found after the poet's death, the legend of his body being carried secretly to Bristol and buried in Redcliffe churchyard, or even the pretty story of the poet when a mere child, on being asked what device he would have painted on a mug, exclaiming, with the fire of genius "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world."

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Indeed in this last almost too good story I think I detect a Dix flavour. Dreadful doubts also come into my mind about the appendix to the Life, "Communicated by G. Cumberland, Esq.," that once used to delight me, and which pretends to be notes of conversations with the scholars and friends of Chatterton's mother, written down as early as 1808. I doubt half the letters, even the interesting anecdote (too interesting, I fear) about how the boy forger used to lock himself in a back room and in Redcliffe church with old parchments, and reappear with hands and face begrimed with ochre and charcoal.

The career so gallantly commenced by Dix in 1837 was continued somewhat subterraneanly. In 1846 the noble exile produced Local Loiterings and Visits in Boston, by a Looker on. We cannot trace him again in his dark windings, till 1847, when the Bristol Museum cataloguer notes John Dix, author of The Poor Orphan, as the printer or author of Jack Ariel, or Life on Board an Indiaman. This book reached a second edition in 1852, and a third edition in 1859. The last edition has on the title page, "By the author of Travels in America"---a work not catalogued at the British Museum. In 1850 appeared a book full of most impudent fabrications, called Pen-and-Ink Sketches of Eminent English Literary Personages, by a Cosmopolitan; in 1852 he produced A Handbook to Newport and Rhode Island, and the same year a work of imagination, still more slovenly than usual, and called Lions Living and Dead—a book abounding in mistakes of all kinds, and full of imaginary conversations between the author, Coleridge, Hazlitt, &c. According to the author's own account, he was actually present when Shelley tried to induce an old gentleman at Hampstead to take care of a poor woman whom the poet had found fainting in the streets. Thom, the weaver poet, who had befriended Dix, is cruelly maligned. Altogether the work is below contempt. In 1853 Dix wrote a feeble book which he named Passages from the Diary of a Wasted Life, but which is little more than a fulsome eulogy of the American temperance orator, Mr. John B. Gough. In 1854 this miserable man produced Pen Pictures of distinguished American Divines, and probably not long after died, for he has since that forged no more.

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In his Lions Living and Dead, Dix says of Bristol that "It is a place which has damned more talent than perhaps any other place in Queen Victoria's dominions. I speak strongly, but I do so with all my heart and soul." There writes the exile of a city which had seen his disgrace. It is as well that American literary men should know how miserably unreliable are the imaginary conversations of this literary chevalier d'industrie, who has muddied so many subjects with wilful untruths.

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It is curious to see how lies breed lies. As Macpherson led to Chatterton, so Chatterton was followed by Dix. It is to the eternal disgrace of this John Dix, alias John Ross, that he has confused, entangled, and corrupted the subject of Chatterton's life in such a way that only the last day can ever set it right.

WALTER THORNBURY. "