“O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd”: Blake, Border ballads, and the reinvention of relief etching.

In a prospectus addressed To the Public, and dated 10 October 1793, William Blake described his invention of “illuminated printing” in these words:

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
    This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public, who has invented a method of printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one-fourth the expense.
    If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward. (E 692; see NOTE at end.)

George Whitefield, the Moravians, and “Andrew the Negro boy”

A version of this paper was presented to the Bethlehem Conference on Moravian History & Music in Bethlehem PA in October 2010. It was my second attempt at a Bethlehem Conference paper; I had tried to get to the history conference of 2008, but a broken ankle kept me away. On that earlier occasion a paper on Moravians and Swedenborgians in 18th-century London was read on my behalf by Lorraine Parsons, archivist to the Moravian Church Centre in Muswell Hill. The 2008 paper was later published in a collection of essays issued by the Swedenborgian Society in London. It, coincidentally, incorporates some account of the Moravian minister Francis Okely, also referred to in the following.

This second conference paper represents a first tentative exploration of the vexed issue of George Whitefield and the Moravians. It examines an incident in the career of the evangelist George Whitefield, the eighteenth century’s most sensational preacher—the incident of “Andrew the Negro boy” and the Moravian Church. (On his return to England from the American colonies in 1742, Whitefield brought with him a twelve-year old black boy, Andrew, whom he left with the Moravians to bring up and educate until Andrew was twenty-one. “Negro” was the term most often used by Whitefield in speaking of enslaved blacks. In this paper it is employed only within the context of his and his contemporaries’ discourses.)