Brother Blake and Sister Blake and the lost Moravian history of William Blake's family

This paper (read at the Bentley Birthday Celebrations in Toronto in 2010) explores the links, some speculative, between William Blake’s extended family and the Moravian Church congregation in London.

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, there were thirty or forty Anglican religious societies in the City of London and its suburbs. One, the "Fetter Lane Society", met at the house of James Hutton in Little Wild Street, off Fetter Lane. In 1738, four Moravian Brethren, led by Peter Boehler, arrived in London on their way to the British colonies. The Brethren could not proceed immediately to Georgia, and came into contact with members of the Fetter Lane Society (Podmore 1988, especially pp. 133-36).

Boehler enrolled eight of the Society, including Hutton, John Wesley, and others, into a Moravian-style band or religious fellowship group (Lockwood, 1868, p.35). By mid-October it had grown to 56 members, mostly small tradesmen and artisans—though the membership included some clergymen and a handful of mercantile and gentry families (Podmore, 1992, p.1). Growing disagreements within the Society came to a head in July 1740, when John Wesley withdrew. Wesley’s departure precipitated a mass withdrawal of nearly all the women and a considerable number of the men, leaving the Society close to collapse.

The lost Moravian history of William Blake’s family (2006)

This is the text of a lunch-time talk given at Swansea University many years ago. Similar talks were given at Nottingham Trent University, and a few years later at Bishop Grosseteste. It's a little longer than my usual blogposts but I think its length is necessary as I survey how my research stood in 2006 and how it was documented..

⬧

Over the last five years [this was in 2006], we have seen important new discoveries relating to Blake's biography, to the circles of friendship in which he moved, and the circles of connoisseurship that defined his earliest audience. Today I shall discuss my pursuit through a number of archives what I call the lost Moravian history of William Blake’s family. I’d better begin by explaining who the Moravians were. The Moravian Church claims descent from followers of Jan Hus, martyred in Konstanz (traditionally known as Constance in English), in 1415. From the Hussites descend the Unity of the Brethren, or Unitas Fratrum, a church which was largely destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War. In 1722, a surviving remnant of the Unity took refuge on the estate of a German nobleman, Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Out of this group of religious refugees developed the Renewed Church of the Brethren, with Zinzendorf at its head. The Renewed Church, commonly known as the Moravian Church from its origins in the Czech lands of Moravia and Bohemia, developed into a Pilgrim Church, a world-wide missionary body. The church still exists today with just a few thousand members in England, but with an important presence in the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica and Antigua, in North America, and remarkably, with its largest group of adherents in Tanzania (a quarter of a million members).

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.)

The Chamber on the Wall

2 KINGS 4: 8-11 (King James Version)

8 And it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a great woman; and she constrained him to eat bread. And so it was, that as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread.
9 And she said unto her husband, Behold now, I perceive that this is an holy man of God, which passeth by us continually.
10 Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.
11 And it fell on a day, that he came thither, and he turned into the chamber, and lay there.

2 KÖNIGE 4: 8-11 (Luther Bibel 1545)

8 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß Elisa ging gen Sunem. Daselbst war eine reiche Frau; die hielt ihn, daß er bei ihr aß. Und so oft er daselbst durchzog, kehrte er zu ihr ein und aß bei ihr.
9 Und sie sprach zu ihrem Mann: Siehe, ich merke, daß dieser Mann Gottes heilig ist, der immerdar hier durchgeht.
10 Laß uns ihm eine kleine bretterne Kammer oben machen und ein Bett, Tisch, Stuhl und Leuchter hineinsetzen, auf daß er, wenn er zu uns kommt, dahin sich tue.
11 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß er hineinkam und legte sich oben in die Kammer und schlief darin

◆

Bunhill Fields—25 May 1708

Post Boy, January 10, 1708 - January 13, 1708; Issue 1975.

In early 1708, the religious group known as the French Prophets (a millenarian movement active in London from 1706), sensationally announced in the London newspapers that Thomas Emes, one of their number, who had died at the end of December 1707, would rise from his grave at Bunhill Fields on 25 May.