The most significant events in the history of books on the 20th of November
1752: Thomas Chatterton is born. This proto-Romantic poet was dead before his eighteenth birthday, by his own hand. Chatterton has a serious claim to being the most precocious English poet who has ever lived. In his early teens, he fell in love with all things medieval, and invented the figure of the fifteenth-century monk Thomas Rowley, who would become the teenage boy’s alter ego. Thereafter, Chatterton would write the majority of his poems as Rowley, and even succeeded in passing them off as genuine medieval poems … for a while, at least.