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..

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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).

Good morning, Doctor Haydn.

 

In a recent Global Blake event, a symposium, Blake and Music, on the musical reception of William Blake, Camila Oliveira gave a paper “William Blake & Visionary Cover Arts”, that drew attention to the use of Blake’s images on the covers of classical recordings. Of note was the fondness of record companies to use Blake for recordings of works by Haydn, even when there was no obvious link between the composer’s work and William Blake himself.

“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.)

Another Engraver in South Molton Street

I recently purchased the engraved trade-card of John Claude Nattes, (c 1765-1839), topographical draughtsman, drawing master, print dealer, and occasional print-maker, who lived in South Molton Street from c 1787 to some time after 1795. The card  shows a monument with two hooded figures on top flanking a group of art-related objects including a palette and brushes, a pyramid behind; trees in the foreground to the left. The plinth of the monument is inscribed "Mr Nattes, 49 South Molton Strt.".

The card has been trimmed to the image  (50 x 79 mm.) but other copies now in the British Museum supply an imprint: "C.N. [i.e. Claude Nattes] del.    W. Angus sc.".

The Whore Next Door: William Blake’s Neighbours in South Molton Street.

I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear

In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets.

William Blake, Jerusalem (E 180)

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In September 1803, after an absence of three years in the coastal village of Felpham in Sussex, William and Catherine Blake returned to London. Initially they lodged with William's brother and sister, James and Catherine Elizabeth Blake, at 28 Broad Street, later Broadwick Street, Carnaby Market. Less than a month later, William and Catherine moved into a two-room flat on the first floor of 17 South Molton Street, off Oxford Street. During their 17 years of residence there, the Blakes printed and coloured their most ambitious illuminated books.

The house was shared with their landlords, successively the tailor William Enoch (c 1803-4) and his family, and the staymaker Mark Martin (c 1805-21), his wife Eleanor and their family. There were presumably other lodgers on the upper floors.

In 1958 the Westminster voters’ list records the following persons as resident at 17 South Molton Street: Ida Golz, Anthony S. Gotlop, Frank Holland, Leah Laden, Minnie Sandground, and Stanley V. Sandground. I believe at this time the residents occupied cold-water flats on the upper floors, with commercial premises on the ground floor and basement.

William Blake and smallpox : the disease in Blake’s London and in Blake’s art

Smallpox was the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain, accounting for more deaths than any other infectious disease, even plague and cholera. In London, Europe’s largest city by 1700, smallpox increased from 4-6% of all burials in the mid-seventeenth century to over 10% in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and the frequency of epidemics increased from roughly four-yearly to a biennial cycle over the same period.

Smallpox was an acute, highly contagious, and frequently fatal disease (killing one-seventh to one-quarter of its victims) but conferring lifelong immunity on survivors. It appeared initially as an infrequent epidemic disease affecting all ages, but as the frequency of epidemics increased, a growing proportion of the adult population acquired immunity to the disease, and smallpox was clearly a childhood disease in the London-born population of the eighteenth century, with children under five the main victims. Among those who survived it, morbidity from smallpox was severe in many cases; victims could be left blind or disfigured for life. Few native Londoners would have survived to adulthood without encountering smallpox.

[Indeed, are there any depictions of smallpox in Blake’s work?]