The Collinses, father and son (and both called John) had been farming Wyldes since 1793. John Collins, the younger, was a small scale dairy farmer, owning 16 cows which grazed on the heath. He also sold strawberries, apples, currants and fresh water at a penny farthing a pail from one of the wells near the house. It is said that “J. Collins cow Keeper & Dairyman North End” can still be seen scratched on the window of his kitchen.
At the end of the 18th century Hampstead was a fashionable playground for the rich, and North Enders cashed in by renting out rooms and even whole houses. Collins soon realised he could do the same. The first tenant we know of came in August 1823. He was John Linnell, the painter, who wanted the house for the summer. He later decided to move his family there permanently. By the time Linnell first came up to Wyldes, he and Blake were already close friends. Blake could be found at Wyldes on most Sundays and quite often during the week as well.
On 12th August 1912, the first Blake Society held its inaugural meeting at Old Wyldes. The members of the present Blake Society had the opportunity to visit Old Wyldes in June 1993. The Society was greatly obliged to Mr Bernard Roseborne, the then owner, and his family for their hospitality on that occasion. For our entertainment, I put together a narration/performance about William Blake in Hampstead. Tim Heath and Andy Vernède did the voices. I remain immensely grateful for their assistance. It wouldn’t have worked without them.
The text delivered in the garden of Old Wyldes in 1993 was reprinted in the first issue of the Blake Society Journal. For ease of reading, minor changes, mostly of punctuation but also of Blake’s idiosyncratic spelling, were made to the texts quoted. This revised version reverses some of those changes and slightly modifies the narration. The illustrations and commentary are mostly new.
Ordnance Survey. First series. Sheet 7 (detail)
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“All pleasant prospect at North End”: William Blake and Hampstead
BLAKE
He loves to sit and hear me sing,Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;Then stretches out my golden wing,And mocks my loss of liberty.
How sweet I roam’d from field to field,And tasted all the summer’s pride,’Till I the prince of love beheldWho in the sunny beams did glide!He shew’d me lilies for my hair,And blushing roses for my brow;He led me through his gardens fair.Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage;He caught me in his silken net,And shut me in his golden cage.
I begin with this remarkable lyric by the 13 year old William Blake, not because of some imagined connection with Hampstead, but rather to suggest that the woods and fields so easy of access in his boyhood were the real basis of his pastoral vision. And when, later, he tries to overcome the traditional distinction between lyric and epic, it’s always London’s countryside beneath his feet.
The lyric moment of inspired vision, with its direct intuition of reality, was the beginning of poetry for Blake. Blake’s Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, tells us that it was in the countryside south of London
Another vision is associated with the open fields to the north. The lawyer Henry Crabb Robinson, who knew Blake well, notes in his diary
But Hampstead, and other locations in London, only enter Blake’s work by name after his return from Felpham in 1803. Urban industry has begun to overshadow agriculture; the loom and the furnace now dominate Blake’s world, as in these lines from Milton
The lyric moment of inspired vision, with its direct intuition of reality, was the beginning of poetry for Blake. Blake’s Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, tells us that it was in the countryside south of London
GILCHRIST
On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his “first vision.” Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. … Another time, one summer morn, he sees the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking. If these traits of childish years be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits from the spiritual world of later years, in which the grown man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten.
Another vision is associated with the open fields to the north. The lawyer Henry Crabb Robinson, who knew Blake well, notes in his diary
CRABB ROBINSON
The wildest of his assertions was made with the veriest indifference of tone as if altogether insignificant—It respected the natural and spiritual worlds—By way of example of the difference between them he said ‘You never saw the spiritual Sun—I have. I saw him on Primrose Hill—He said ‘Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?’ No! I said—That (pointing to the sky), That is the Greek Apollo—He is Satan—’
But Hampstead, and other locations in London, only enter Blake’s work by name after his return from Felpham in 1803. Urban industry has begun to overshadow agriculture; the loom and the furnace now dominate Blake’s world, as in these lines from Milton
BLAKE
From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternalIn immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling,Thro Albions four Forests which overspread all the Earth,From London Stone to Blackheath cast: to Hounslow west:To Finchley north: to Norwood south: and the weightsOf Enitharmons Loom play lulling cadences on the winds of AlbionFrom Caithness in the north, to Lizard-point & Dover in the south.
Loud sounds the Hammer of Los, & loud his Bellows is heardBefore London to Hampsteads breadths & Highgates heights ToStratford & old Bow: & across to the Gardens of KensingtonOn Tyburn’s Brook: loud groans Thames beneath the iron ForgeOf Rintrah & Palamabron of Theotorm[on] & Bromion, to forge the instrumentsOf Harvest: the Plow & Harrow to pass over the Nations.
Now Blake begins to map his private mythology on the city he knew. Hampstead becomes part of a litany of London place names that echoes through both Milton and Jerusalem. And in the compelling prophecy of Jerusalem Chapter 4 he sees the Empire that exploits and extends the commercial power of loom and forge as slaying Jerusalem universally
During the years that Blake wrote these lines, Hampstead was prospering as a sedate middle-class resort. The former dwelling of the painter George Romney was converted to assembly rooms in 1807 and the surgeon John Bliss sought to publicize the curative properties of the Hampstead waters. Keats, Hunt, Shelley, Lamb, Coleridge, and Constable were all attracted to Hampstead and its neighbourhood.
Blake, following the disastrous reception of his exhibition in 1809, had spent nearly a decade in deep obscurity. Now, his old friend George Cumberland was to introduce him to the young artist John Linnell, who supported him with commissions in his final years.
Their friendship began in 1818, when Linnell was living in Rathbone Place in Soho. Linnell’s journal records a visit to Hampstead with Blake in May 1821, perhaps to look for a house for his growing family. For in the summer of 1822 Linnell took lodgings for Mrs Linnell and the children at North End, Hampstead, at Hope Cottage. The following year he took lodgings at Wyldes (then called Collins’ Farm), for a couple of months. He did not stay there all the time himself, but visited Hampstead occasionally and made sketches there. Then, in March 1824, Linnell took his family to live permanently at Collins’ Farm, retaining a house at Cirencester Place, Paddington, as a studio, and going to and fro by coach.
Linnell introduced Blake to some of the best friends of his declining years. It was Linnell, at dinners here at Wyldes and at Cirencester Place, who introduced Blake to John Varley, Frederick Tatham, George Richmond, Edward Calvert, and Samuel Palmer. Blake’s impression on all these young men was profound, but no one else was affected by Blake in the same way, to the same extent, or so permanently as Palmer. Despite the differences between nineteen years and sixty-seven, Palmer and Blake rapidly became firm friends. Palmer’s son remembers
The little girl was Hannah Linnell, who was to marry Samuel Palmer in 1837. Her son continues
Blake’s visits to the Linnell’s in Hampstead on Sundays were apparently quite regular, even though Blake believed that the air of Hampstead was unhealthy. For even whilst enjoying Hampstead’s quiet in the bosom of his friend’s family, or its beauty from the garden or summer-house, he would sometimes be tempted to inveigh against its unpropitious qualities. And his views on this, as upon other subjects, would be expressed with a brusqueness and force altogether at variance with his usual amiable manner. On one occasion, for instance, when Mrs Linnell ventured to express her humble opinion that Hampstead was a healthy place, Blake startled her by saying
Gilchrist, Blake’s biographer, describes the scene at North End in 1825
Dr Robert Thornton was Linnell’s friend and family physician. In 1821, Blake had completed a series of seventeen tiny woodcuts for Thornton’s school edition of Virgil. Gilchrist continues
These visits continued on a regular basis until Blake fell ill, early in 1826.
Linnell was becoming more and more concerned about Blake’s health. He received this letter in May 1826.
During this time he was at work upon his illustrations to Dante. A clump of trees on the skirts of the heath was long known to old friends as the “Dante wood”. Blake did not receive much benefit from his stay. He was, indeed, gradually getting weaker and weaker.
The last of his letters to Linnell was written in July 1827
Six weeks later, on August 12 1827, Blake died.
Let us end as we began, with Blake’s pastoral vision—recollected now in late middle age. Blake’s vision of paradise is no lost traveller’s dream but the sunny side of eighteenth-century London life experienced by a boy given to roaming the adjacent fields and living in an indulgent family in a Broad Street on a square named Golden.
Illustrations
Old Wyldes
Wyldes Farm is a Grade II* listed former farmhouse in the hamlet of North End, Hampstead, NW11, in the London Borough of Barnet (right on the boundary with Camden): coordinates: 51.5691°N 0.1817°W
The farmhouse is a rare survival of a timber framed building in London. It was weather-boarded externally, probably in the 18th century when a large barn was added to the east. Major alterations were made in the late 19th and 20th centuries, including the full conversion of the barn. In the late 1960s the farmhouse and barn were divided, and today are two separate properties known as Old Wyldes and Wyldes respectively.
Built in about 1600, it was the farmhouse for an estate granted to Eton College by Henry VI in 1449, soon after its foundation. The land was held in trust to provide funds for St James’s Hospital, which Henry VII demolished for St James’s Palace. Eton retained the Wyldes estate until 1907, when it was sold to the Hampstead Garden Suburb trust, which had acquired some property from the college in 1906, and to the trustees of the Hampstead Heath Extension.
From 1824 to 1828 it was rented by the painter John Linnell to house his growing family, though he continued to maintain a studio at his former residence at Cirencester Place. William Blake was a regular visitor to the house until his death in 1827. Other artists also used to visit, including John Constable, John Varley, and Samuel Palmer, who later married Linnell’s daughter Hannah whom he first met at Old Wyldes.
In 1837 Charles Dickens moved in with his wife following the sudden death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Overcome with grief, he dreamed of Mary every night in the upstairs bedroom at what was still called Collins Farm. He stopped writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and his friends were worried he had given up writing for good. Among those who came to see him at Wyldes were Harrison Ainsworth, Hablot Browne (also known as Phiz), Daniel Maclise, and his future biographer and friend John Forster. But he soon got back to writing and returned to his home in Doughty Street after about five weeks. In Oliver Twist, Bill Sikes sleeps in a field near Wyldes while fleeing from London. And in The Old Curiosity Shop, Dick Swiveller moves to a cottage in Hampstead which is probably based on Wyldes.
In 1884 Charlotte Wilson and her husband Arthur moved in. An early member of the Fabian Society, she also ran the Hampstead Historic Club, which mostly met at Wyldes. This socialist study group attracted a range of radical thinkers including Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Edith Nesbit, who described the kitchen as an idealised farm kitchen, where, of course, no cooking is done. In her history of Wyldes, Mrs. Wilson lists some of the other visitors including Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner, Ford Madox Brown, and Havelock Ellis. In 1886 Mrs. Wilson parted company with the Fabians and, with Prince Peter Kropotkin, founded The Freedom Group of anarchists. In 1895 she quit the movement, and started a programme of repairs and alterations to the house and barn, incorporating it fully into a single property.
Mrs Wilson moved out in about 1905 when the Wyldes estate and farmhouse were purchased by Dame Henrietta Barnett and her associates, with part becoming an extension to Hampstead Heath with the further area being developed as Hampstead Garden Suburb. The designer of the garden suburb was the architect and town planner Raymond Unwin, who lived in Wyldes until his death in 1940, using the barn as his office.
A Greater London Council blue plaque, placed in 1975, commemorates Linnell and Blake at the house. Another plaque also commemorates Unwin.
First meeting of the Blake Society
The photograph shows the inaugural meeting of the first Blake Society, at Wyldes, on 12th August 1912. Thomas Wright, founder and Secretary, is instantly recognisable, second row, extreme right. Next to him, with folded arms is, I think, Geoffrey Keynes. The man in a light suit, behind Keynes, I think is the publisher Herbert Jenkins, who spoke at the meeting on “The teaching of William Blake”. On the left, in profile, and facing Wright, is, I assume, Raymond Unwin. The elderly lady next to Unwin, and seated, I believe is Thomas Wright’s sister, Miss Bessie Wright. Next to her, the lady without a hat must be Ettie, Mrs. Unwin, the hostess on that occasion. (No lady would be expected to wear a hat or gloves in her own home.) Next to Mrs. Unwin is, I guess, Mrs. Angelina Wright, with a spectacular hat.
Names of others present include Adeline Butterworth (author of William Blake, mystic, Liverpool, 1911), Dr Wilfrid Hooper (lawyer and local historian), J. Foster Howe (who chaired the meeting), Walter K. Jealous (who spoke on “Blake and Hampstead”), George H. Leonard (spoke on “The art of William Blake”), Greville MacDonald (who addressed the meeting on “William Blake, the practical idealist”), William Muir (facsimilist), Dr Hubert Norman (psychiatrist), and Frederick C. Owlett (“Blake’s burden”). Thomas Wright notes that altogether some fifty persons attended.
Coach routes to Hampstead
This shows the stagecoach route William Blake would have taken from Fountain Court to Old Wyldes, with a bit of walking either end. Later, in 1826, a privately-hired cabriolet would have taken him door to door.
I have written before about the long continuities of London life. The 1801 coach route to Hampstead survives as the 24 bus route: Pimlico (Grosvenor Road) to Hampstead Heath. It is believed to be the only route that has never been changed since London Transport established the bus route in 1934.
“O Nancy’s hair is yellow like gowd”
Music is important to Blake, yet the only record we have of his taste in music is a note by his Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist. Drawing on conversations with Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, Gilchrist records the poet’s visits to the Linnell family in Hampstead in the 1820s, and tells a story of Blake becoming tearful whilst listening to Mrs Linnell singing a border ballad, “O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd”. (Better authorities than I agree that the tune though claimed to be an “Old Border Melody”, is more likely an 18th-century composed air “in the Scottish manner” than an actual Border folk-tune.)
As far as I can determine, this song, which moved Blake to tears in 1825 (was he thinking of Nancy Flaxman, whose husband died about this time?), makes its first appearance in Vol.5 of The Scotish [sic] Minstrel. Significantly, the title-page vignettes of all six volumes are engraved by W.H. Lizars, an old friend of the Linnells, and a witness at their wedding in Edinburgh in 1817.
Linnell’s Account Book notes that a copy of Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job was sent to Lizars as a gift in June 1831. This is evidence, I think, for the continuing friendship between Linnell and Lizars; perhaps the Scotish Minstrel (an expensive engraved work at 48/- for the six volumes) was itself a gift to which Linnell responded with a set of the Job illustrations.
The Dante wood
During his last years, Blake was at work upon his illustrations to Dante, a commission from Linnell. A clump of trees on the skirts of the heath was long known to old friends as the “Dante wood”. This, I take it, is the very same. And, for comparison, Blake’s illustration to Inferno Canto II: 139-142.
BLAKE
. . . Awake
Highgate’s heights & Hampstead’s, to Poplar, Hackney & BowTo Islington & Paddington & the Brook of Albions RiverWe builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple: from LambethWe began our Foundations: lovely Lambeth! O lovely HillsOf Camberwell, we shall behold you no more in glory & prideFor Jerusalem lies in ruins & the Furnaces of Los are builded thereYou are now shrunk up to a narrow Rock in the midst of the SeaBut here we build Babylon on Euphrates. compell’d to buildAnd to inhabit, our Little-ones to clothe in armour of the goldOf Jerusalems Cherubims & to forge them swords of her AltarsI see London blind & age-bent begging thro the StreetsOf Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard.The voice of Wandering Reuben ecchoes from street to streetIn all the Cities of the Nations Paris Madrid Amsterdam.The Corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street languishesTo Great Queen Street & Lincoln’s Inn. all is distress & woe.
During the years that Blake wrote these lines, Hampstead was prospering as a sedate middle-class resort. The former dwelling of the painter George Romney was converted to assembly rooms in 1807 and the surgeon John Bliss sought to publicize the curative properties of the Hampstead waters. Keats, Hunt, Shelley, Lamb, Coleridge, and Constable were all attracted to Hampstead and its neighbourhood.
Blake, following the disastrous reception of his exhibition in 1809, had spent nearly a decade in deep obscurity. Now, his old friend George Cumberland was to introduce him to the young artist John Linnell, who supported him with commissions in his final years.
Their friendship began in 1818, when Linnell was living in Rathbone Place in Soho. Linnell’s journal records a visit to Hampstead with Blake in May 1821, perhaps to look for a house for his growing family. For in the summer of 1822 Linnell took lodgings for Mrs Linnell and the children at North End, Hampstead, at Hope Cottage. The following year he took lodgings at Wyldes (then called Collins’ Farm), for a couple of months. He did not stay there all the time himself, but visited Hampstead occasionally and made sketches there. Then, in March 1824, Linnell took his family to live permanently at Collins’ Farm, retaining a house at Cirencester Place, Paddington, as a studio, and going to and fro by coach.
Linnell introduced Blake to some of the best friends of his declining years. It was Linnell, at dinners here at Wyldes and at Cirencester Place, who introduced Blake to John Varley, Frederick Tatham, George Richmond, Edward Calvert, and Samuel Palmer. Blake’s impression on all these young men was profound, but no one else was affected by Blake in the same way, to the same extent, or so permanently as Palmer. Despite the differences between nineteen years and sixty-seven, Palmer and Blake rapidly became firm friends. Palmer’s son remembers
A. H. PALMER
Fortunately for my father, Broad Street lay in Blake’s way to Hampstead, and they often walked up to the village together. The aged composer of The Songs of Innocence was a great favourite with the Linnell children, who revelled in those poems and in his stories of the lovely spiritual things and beings that seemed to him so real and so near. Therefore as the two friends neared the farm, a merry troop hurried out to meet them led by a little fair-haired girl of some six years old To this day she remembers cold winter nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs Linnell, and sent on his homeward way, with the servant, lantern in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road.
The little girl was Hannah Linnell, who was to marry Samuel Palmer in 1837. Her son continues
A. H. PALMER
The Canterbury Pilgrims was the first work of Art I can remember. Tom Dacre, Little Lamb, & other Songs of Innocence & perhaps of Experience were the first poems I ever heard & . . . she who repeated them had heard them as she sat at the author’s knee at Hampstead & I heard them when I was about the same age. . . .
Blake’s visits to the Linnell’s in Hampstead on Sundays were apparently quite regular, even though Blake believed that the air of Hampstead was unhealthy. For even whilst enjoying Hampstead’s quiet in the bosom of his friend’s family, or its beauty from the garden or summer-house, he would sometimes be tempted to inveigh against its unpropitious qualities. And his views on this, as upon other subjects, would be expressed with a brusqueness and force altogether at variance with his usual amiable manner. On one occasion, for instance, when Mrs Linnell ventured to express her humble opinion that Hampstead was a healthy place, Blake startled her by saying
BLAKE
It is a lie! It is no such thing!
Gilchrist, Blake’s biographer, describes the scene at North End in 1825
GILCHRIST
Blake was at this period in the habit, when well, of spending frequent Sundays at his friend’s Hampstead Cottage, where he was received by host and hostess with the most cordial affection. Mr Linnell’s manner was that of a son; Mrs Linnell was hospitable and kind, as ladies well know how to be to a valued friend. The children, whenever he was expected, were on the qui vive to catch the first glimpse of him from afar: One of them, who has now children of her own, but still cherishes the old reverence for Mr Blake’, remember thus watching for him when a little girl of five or six; and how, as he walked over the brow of the hill and came within sight of the young ones, he would make a particular signal; how Dr Thornton, another friend and frequent visitor, would make a different one,—the doctor taking off his hat and raising it on a stick She remembers how Blake would take her on his knee, and recite children’s stories to them all: recollects his kind manner; his putting her in the way of drawing, training her from his own doings . . .
Dr Robert Thornton was Linnell’s friend and family physician. In 1821, Blake had completed a series of seventeen tiny woodcuts for Thornton’s school edition of Virgil. Gilchrist continues
GILCHRIST
Mr Linnell’s part of the house . . . commanded a pleasant southern aspect. Blake, it is still remembered, would often stand at the door, gazing in tranquil reverie across the garden toward the gorse-clad hill: He liked sitting in the arbour, at the bottom of the long garden, or walking up and down the same at dusk, while the cows, munching their evening meal, were audible from the farmyard on the other side of the hedge: He was very fond of hearing Mrs Linnell sing Scottish songs, and would sit by the pianoforte, tears falling from his eyes, while he listened to the Border Melody to which the song is set, commencing—
O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd,And her een as the lift are blue.
To simple national melodies Blake was very impressionable, though not so to music of more complicated structure. He himself still sang, in a voice tremulous with age, sometimes old ballads, sometimes his own songs, to melodies of his own.
These visits continued on a regular basis until Blake fell ill, early in 1826.
BLAKE
I am again laid up by a cold in my stomach the Hampstead air as it always did. so I fear it will do <this> Except it be the Morning Air & That; in my Cousins time I found I could bear with safety & perhaps benefit. I believe my Constitution to be a good one but it has many peculiarities that no one but myself can know. When I was young Hampstead Highgate Hornsea Muswell Hill & even Islington & all places North of London always laid me up the day after & sometimes two or three days with precisely the same Complaint & the same torment of the Stomach. Easily removed but excruciating while it lasts & enfeebling for sometime after Sr Francis Bacon would say it is want of Discipline in Mountainous Places. Sr Francis Bacon is a Liar. No discipline will turn one Man into another even in the least particle. & such Discipline I call Presumption & Folly I have tried it too much not to know this & am very sorry for all those who may be led to such ostentatious Exertions against their External Existence itself because it is a Mental Rebellion against the Holy Spirit & fit only for a Soldier of Satan to perform
Linnell was becoming more and more concerned about Blake’s health. He received this letter in May 1826.
BLAKE
I have had another desparate Shivring Fit. it came on yesterday afternoon after as good a morning as I ever experienced. It began by a gnawing Pain in the Stomach, & soon spread. a deadly feel all over the limbs which brings on the shivring fit when I am forced to go to bed where I contrive to get into a little Perspiration which takes it quite away. It was night when it left me so I did not get up but just as I was going to rise this morning the shivring fit attacked me again & the pain with the accompanying deathly feel I got again into a perspiration & was well but so much weakend that I am still in bed. This intirely prevents me from the pleasure of seeing you on Sunday at Hampstead as I fear the attack again when I am away from home
Throughout July 1826 Blake had been severely ill, and unable to accept Linnell’s pressing invitations to come out to Hampstead on a visit. Linnell proposed to take lodgings for him at Mrs Hurd’s (Hope Cottage), where the Linnells had lodged before they went to Collin’s Farm.
BLAKE
This sudden cold weather has cut up all my hopes by the roots. Everyone who knows of our intended flight into your delightful Country concur in saying: ‘Do not Venture till summer appears again’. I also feel Myself weaker than I was aware, being not able as yet to sit up longer than six hours at a time. & also feel the Cold too much to dare venture beyond my present precincts. My heartiest Thanks for your care in my accommodation & the trouble you will yet have with me. But I get better & stronger every day, tho weaker in muscle & bone than I supposed. As to pleasantness of Prospect it is All pleasant Prospect at North End. Mrs Hurd’s I should like as well as any—But think of the Expense & how it may be spared & never mind appearancesI intend to bring with me besides our necessary change of apparel Only My Book of Drawings from Dante & one Plate shut up in the Book. All will go very well in the Coach. which at present would be a rumble I fear I could not go thro. So that I conclude another Week must pass before I dare venture upon what I ardently desire—the seeing you with your happy Family once again, & that for a longer Period than I had ever hoped in my health full hours
Finally on Tuesday, August 1st he wrote to say that he was well enough to travel
BLAKE
If this Notice should be too short for your Convenience, please to let me know. But finding myself Well enough to come I propose to set out from here as soon after ten as we can on Thursday morningOur Carriage will be a Cabriolet. for, tho getting better & stronger, I am still incapable of riding in the Stage, & shall be I fear for some time being only bones & sinews All strings & bobbins like a Weavers Loom. Walking to & from the Stage would be to me impossible tho I seem well being entirely free from both pain & from that Sickness to which there is no name. Thank God I feel no more of it & have great hopes that the Disease is Gone.
During this time he was at work upon his illustrations to Dante. A clump of trees on the skirts of the heath was long known to old friends as the “Dante wood”. Blake did not receive much benefit from his stay. He was, indeed, gradually getting weaker and weaker.
The last of his letters to Linnell was written in July 1827
BLAKE
My journey to Hampstead on Sunday brought on a relapse which is lasted till now. I find I am not so well as I thought I must not go on in a youthful Style—however I am upon the mending hand to day, and hope soon to look as I did for I have been yellow accompanied by the old Symptoms
Six weeks later, on August 12 1827, Blake died.
Let us end as we began, with Blake’s pastoral vision—recollected now in late middle age. Blake’s vision of paradise is no lost traveller’s dream but the sunny side of eighteenth-century London life experienced by a boy given to roaming the adjacent fields and living in an indulgent family in a Broad Street on a square named Golden.
BLAKE
The fields from Islington to Marybone,To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood:Were builded over with pillars of gold,And there Jerusalems pillars stood.Her Little-ones ran on the fieldsThe Lamb of God among them seenAnd fair Jerusalem his Bride:Among the little meadows green.Pancrass & Kentish-town reposeAmong her golden pillars high:Among her golden arches whichShine upon the starry sky.The Jews-harp-house & the Green Man,The ponds where Boys to bathe delight:The fields of Cows by Willans farm:Shine in Jerusalems pleasant sight.
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Illustrations
Old Wyldes
Old Wyldes in 1909. From a watercolour by Helen Allingham.
Wyldes Farm is a Grade II* listed former farmhouse in the hamlet of North End, Hampstead, NW11, in the London Borough of Barnet (right on the boundary with Camden): coordinates: 51.5691°N 0.1817°W
The farmhouse is a rare survival of a timber framed building in London. It was weather-boarded externally, probably in the 18th century when a large barn was added to the east. Major alterations were made in the late 19th and 20th centuries, including the full conversion of the barn. In the late 1960s the farmhouse and barn were divided, and today are two separate properties known as Old Wyldes and Wyldes respectively.
Built in about 1600, it was the farmhouse for an estate granted to Eton College by Henry VI in 1449, soon after its foundation. The land was held in trust to provide funds for St James’s Hospital, which Henry VII demolished for St James’s Palace. Eton retained the Wyldes estate until 1907, when it was sold to the Hampstead Garden Suburb trust, which had acquired some property from the college in 1906, and to the trustees of the Hampstead Heath Extension.
From 1824 to 1828 it was rented by the painter John Linnell to house his growing family, though he continued to maintain a studio at his former residence at Cirencester Place. William Blake was a regular visitor to the house until his death in 1827. Other artists also used to visit, including John Constable, John Varley, and Samuel Palmer, who later married Linnell’s daughter Hannah whom he first met at Old Wyldes.
In 1837 Charles Dickens moved in with his wife following the sudden death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Overcome with grief, he dreamed of Mary every night in the upstairs bedroom at what was still called Collins Farm. He stopped writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and his friends were worried he had given up writing for good. Among those who came to see him at Wyldes were Harrison Ainsworth, Hablot Browne (also known as Phiz), Daniel Maclise, and his future biographer and friend John Forster. But he soon got back to writing and returned to his home in Doughty Street after about five weeks. In Oliver Twist, Bill Sikes sleeps in a field near Wyldes while fleeing from London. And in The Old Curiosity Shop, Dick Swiveller moves to a cottage in Hampstead which is probably based on Wyldes.
In 1884 Charlotte Wilson and her husband Arthur moved in. An early member of the Fabian Society, she also ran the Hampstead Historic Club, which mostly met at Wyldes. This socialist study group attracted a range of radical thinkers including Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Edith Nesbit, who described the kitchen as an idealised farm kitchen, where, of course, no cooking is done. In her history of Wyldes, Mrs. Wilson lists some of the other visitors including Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner, Ford Madox Brown, and Havelock Ellis. In 1886 Mrs. Wilson parted company with the Fabians and, with Prince Peter Kropotkin, founded The Freedom Group of anarchists. In 1895 she quit the movement, and started a programme of repairs and alterations to the house and barn, incorporating it fully into a single property.
Mrs Wilson moved out in about 1905 when the Wyldes estate and farmhouse were purchased by Dame Henrietta Barnett and her associates, with part becoming an extension to Hampstead Heath with the further area being developed as Hampstead Garden Suburb. The designer of the garden suburb was the architect and town planner Raymond Unwin, who lived in Wyldes until his death in 1940, using the barn as his office.
A Greater London Council blue plaque, placed in 1975, commemorates Linnell and Blake at the house. Another plaque also commemorates Unwin.
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First meeting of the Blake Society
Names of others present include Adeline Butterworth (author of William Blake, mystic, Liverpool, 1911), Dr Wilfrid Hooper (lawyer and local historian), J. Foster Howe (who chaired the meeting), Walter K. Jealous (who spoke on “Blake and Hampstead”), George H. Leonard (spoke on “The art of William Blake”), Greville MacDonald (who addressed the meeting on “William Blake, the practical idealist”), William Muir (facsimilist), Dr Hubert Norman (psychiatrist), and Frederick C. Owlett (“Blake’s burden”). Thomas Wright notes that altogether some fifty persons attended.
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Coach routes to Hampstead
Survey of the High Roads from London (London: John Cary, 1801).
This shows the stagecoach route William Blake would have taken from Fountain Court to Old Wyldes, with a bit of walking either end. Later, in 1826, a privately-hired cabriolet would have taken him door to door.
I have written before about the long continuities of London life. The 1801 coach route to Hampstead survives as the 24 bus route: Pimlico (Grosvenor Road) to Hampstead Heath. It is believed to be the only route that has never been changed since London Transport established the bus route in 1934.
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Robert Archibald Smith, The Scotish Minstrel: A Selection from the Vocal Melodies of Scotland
Ancient & Modern Arranged for the Piano Forte by R. A. Smith. Vol. 5
(Edinburgh: Robt Purdie, [1820-24])
As far as I can determine, this song, which moved Blake to tears in 1825 (was he thinking of Nancy Flaxman, whose husband died about this time?), makes its first appearance in Vol.5 of The Scotish [sic] Minstrel. Significantly, the title-page vignettes of all six volumes are engraved by W.H. Lizars, an old friend of the Linnells, and a witness at their wedding in Edinburgh in 1817.
Linnell’s Account Book notes that a copy of Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job was sent to Lizars as a gift in June 1831. This is evidence, I think, for the continuing friendship between Linnell and Lizars; perhaps the Scotish Minstrel (an expensive engraved work at 48/- for the six volumes) was itself a gift to which Linnell responded with a set of the Job illustrations.
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The Dante wood
Joseph Wrightson MacIntyre (1842–1897). The Firs, Hampstead Heath
(Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre)
William Blake. Dante and Virgil penetrating the Forest. Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy; graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, 371 × 527 mm. Tate N03351
“Go now, for the two of us are of but one will, with you as guide, as lord, as master.” Thus I spoke, and following him, I entered on the steep, sylvan way.
Or in William Hayley’s parallel text of 1782
O va, ch’un sol volere è d’amendue:Tu duca, tu signore, e tu maestro:Così li dissi: e poichè mosso fue,Entrai per lo camino alto e silvestro.Now lead!—thy pleasure I dispute no more.My lord, my master thou! and thou my guard!—I ended here; and, while he march’d before,The gloomy road I enter’d, deep and hard.
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Kenwood
“View of Cane Wood [Kenwood], the superb villa of the Earl of Mansfield near Highgate in Middlesex”. Engraving (Roberts, sculpt.) c. 1770. Exterior view of the south or garden front.
William Blake. “For him Our Yearly Wakes and Feasts We Hold”;
wood engraving on paper, 35 × 75 mm.
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Sources and Further Reading
Helen Allingham.—The Cottage Homes of England. Drawn by Helen Allingham and described by Stewart Dick.—London : Edward Arnold, 1909.
T.F.T. Baker, editor.—A History of the County of Middlesex.—Volume IX: Hampstead and Paddington Parishes.—The Victoria History of the Counties of England.—London: Oxford University Press, 1989.
G.E. Bentley, Jr.—Blake Records.—2nd ed.—New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Blake Society.—The First Meeting of the Blake Society: Papers read before the Blake Society at the first Annual Meeting, 12th August 1912.—Olney: T. Wright, [1913?].
Richard Garnett.—“John Linnell and William Blake at Hampstead”.—The Hampstead Annual (1902), 9-21.
Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus.—2v.—London: Macmillan, 1863.
Alfred Herbert Palmer.—The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, painter and etcher. Written and edited by A. H. Palmer.—London: Seeley & Co, 1892.
A.J. Story.—The Life of John Linnell.—2v.—London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1892.
David Sullivan.—“Old Wyldes and Wyldes”.—Camden History Review (2013).
Philip Venning.—Wyldes: a New History.—Privately Published, 1977.
Charlotte Mary Wilson.—“Wyldes and Its Story. By Mrs. Arthur Wilson”.—The Hampstead Annual (1903), 110-134.
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