Documents and papers relating to Chatterton started to be collected soon after his death. Bristol's museum was set up in 1823 and located until the 1870s near the foot of Park Street. Mary Russell Mitford saw there early in the century 'very interesting relics of the unhappy writer':
A most painful irreligious paper, called his will, written, let us hope, under the influence of the same phrensy that prompted his suicide, is shown in a glass case in the museum at Bristol; and I saw, at Mr. Cottle's, two very interesting relics of the unhappy writer; the Berghem (or, as he called it, de Berghem) pedigree, one of his earliest forgeries, curiously and skillfully emblazoned; and a tattered pocket-book, in which the poor boy had set down with careful exactness the miserable pittance he had gained by writing for magazines and newspapers while in London, a pittance so wretched as to render it certain that utter destitution, utter starvation (although with characteristic pride he had refused a dinner from his landlady the day before) was the immediate cause of the catastrophe.
(From Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life; or Books, Places, and People (1852), pp. 390)
'Mr Cottle's' refers to Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who published Lyrical Ballads and assisted Southey with his edition of Chatterton. By this date, he was living at Firfield House, with his married sister, and kept their his 'literary treasures'.
In 1904, Sir George White donated a catalogue of autographed manuscripts to the Museum and Art Gallery. The Museum already had Chatterton’s will and the Catcott collection of Chattertonia.