William Blake and Co.

William Blake.—Proverbs of Hell = Proverbes de l’Enfer : calligraphie de Lalou.—Bordeaux : Alias ; William Blake and Co., 1996.—English and French text. French translation by Angela Esdaile.—ISBN 2841030601

William Blake and Co. is a French publishing house specialising in poetry, literature, and contemporary art. It cultivates an artistic and experimental approach, favouring original creations and crossovers between text and image.

Richard Gough: scholar, antiquary and man of violence

The British Antiquities are now in the Artist’s hands; all his visionary contemplations, relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.—WILLIAM BLAKE(1)

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, interest in antiquities developed into the common pursuit of the educated man: Bishop Thomas Percy was collecting his Reliques; Thomas Warton collecting materials for histories of Winchester and of Kidlington, writing a history of English poetry, and exposing the forgeries attributed to Thomas Rowley; John Sherwen collecting materials to establish the authenticity of the Rowley poems; Horace Walpole assembling a catalogue of the works of royal and noble authors; John Nichols preparing his monumental history of Leicestershire; Joseph Ritson contributing to the creation of a real scholarly study of folk song and the ballad tradition; Francis Douce reviving interest in village traditions such as games and mummers' plays; and all of these men, along with almost everyone who was doing any writing at all, were looking up information for each other, copying inscriptions, collecting anecdotes, and writing innumerable letters.(2)

Blake scholars have long been engaged in an illuminating discussion of the way Blake and the other Romantics used in their works the often wonderfully perverse conclusions of contemporary antiquaries and mythologists such as Stukeley, Bryant, and the rest.(3) My concern here is with the intersection of Blake’s life and work with that of a more sober figure, Richard Gough. Gough’s life is exceptionally well-documented. And some details of Gough’s life can illumine that of the obscurer William Blake.

Newton and “Newton”

Newton, [probably after 1804], Tate Collection.

Throughout the 1790s, the illustrations in Blake’s prophetic books grew progressively larger, until he devised a means of making very large colour monoprints and created a pictorial cycle of twelve such prints with no text. These twelve large colour-prints are among the most problematic of Blake’s visual works. They represent the culmination of Blake's technical experiments with colour-printing. They also demonstrate the breadth of his imagination, drawing their subjects from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and his own invention. Although no single interpretation of these images seems convincing, nevertheless all concur that the prints allude to the fallen state of humanity.

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..

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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.)