William Pattison

In Peasmarsh, was born William Pattison, a reprobate whose poetry could not save him. Born here in 1706, son of a small farmer who was too poor to educate him.

His landlord, the Earl of Thanet, detecting genius in the boy, sent him to Appleby school, Westmorland, where his gifts won him the friendship of scholars who grounded him in the classics before he went on to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

He had been there only two years when, a violent quarrel with a tutor involving his possible expulsion, Pattison cut his name from the college books and, hanging up his gown as his representative, pinned on it a rhyme that he scorned his precious minutes to regale With wretched college wits and college ale.

 

At twenty he set up as a professional poet, mingled with the London wits, sent home letters glowing with hope and happiness, wrote odes, satires. epigrams, imitations of Pope, Bird, Waller, Gay, and other master singers, and thought the world his own. But the unguided youth fell into evil ways and soon found himself shelterless and starving, compelled to plead, not only for patronage, but for bread.

 

In his despair he wrote:

 

Good heaven! this mystery of life explain, Nor let me think I bear the load in vain: Lest, with the tedious passage cheerless grown, Urged by despair, I throw the burden down.

 

Curll the bookseller, realising that the unhappy starveling was a true poet, sheltered and fed him in his own home, where Pattison contracted smallpox and died before he was 21. He had slept with herds in St James's Park, and was kept alive by the bookseller while writing such verse as:

 

Oppressed with grief, with poverty and scorn, Of all forsaken and of all forlorn, What shall I do? or whither shall I fly?

 

As he lay dying his father answered no letters and he perished alone, the father afterwards paying expenses and sending with the money a sponge.

His works were published in two volumes after his death, and attracted attention for more than a century; but "the Chatterton of Sussex" is now little remembered, and figures no more in representative collections of English poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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