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).

A small group of Moravian missionaries arrived in London in 1738. For them, England was merely a staging-post for their intended missions in the British colonies, but while in London they made contact with a religious fellowship, the Fetter Lane Society, and out of this there developed a permanent Moravian Congregation in London.

What I intend doing in this talk is to show you some of the documents I have found—this has been very much a documentary and archive-based project—and explain how these have dramatically altered our understanding of Blake’s family origins and childhood influences. The archival documents that I illustrate originate in eight different archives on three continents, and relate particularly to Blake’s mother, previously a very shadowy figure, even whose maiden name was unknown or misread. Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s Victorian biographer, wrote “She is a shade to us, alas! In all senses: for of her character, or even her person, no tidings survive”. [1]

And so it remained for 140 years, until in 1999 I established that her true maiden name was Catherine Wright. Catherine was first married to Thomas Armitage, and after Thomas’s death, to James Blake. And then on 21 July 2001, Marsha Keith Schuchard discovered Catherine and her first husband in records held at the Moravian Church Library and Archive at Muswell Hill.

I begin with this letter from Catherine Armitage applying for admission to the Moravian Congregation at Fetter Lane in the City of London. The letter is undated, but it would probably have been written on 14 November 1780, like a corresponding letter of Thomas, her first husband. This is a document of considerable importance, that raises all sorts of questions about Blake's childhood, and the milieu in which he grew up. Its effect is to shatter some entrenched preconceptions that have been dominant in Blake scholarhip for a very long time. And this is what she writes

Dear Brethern and Sistors
I have very littell to say of my self for I am a pore creature and full of wants but my Dear Savour will satisfy them all. I should be glad if I could always lay at the Cross full as I do know thanks be to him last Friday at the love feast Our Savour was pleased to make me Suck his wounds and hug the Cross more than Ever and I trust will more and more till my fraile nature can hould no more at your request I have rit but I am not worthy of the blessing it is desird for I do not Love our Dear Savour halfe enough but if it is will to bring me among his happy flock in closer conection I shall be very thankful I would tell you more of my self but itt is nothing that’s good … [2]

The letter is typical of such requests for membership in the Congregation; its stress on the blood and wounds of Christ is fully in accord with contemporary Moravian spirituality. It provides evidence of Catherine’s literacy (even if her spelling is a little shaky). She writes the strong confident hand of a shopkeeper’s wife: used to writing invoices and receipts, but a little unaccustomed to the demands of a formal letter of application. The letter ends, as many of such letters do, with a quotation from a Moravian hymn.

… so now I will rite of my Savour that is all Love

Here let me drink for ever drink

nor never once depart

for what I tast makes me to cry

fix at this Spring My heart

Dear Savour thou hast seen how oft

I’ve turned away from thee

O let thy work renewed today

Remain eternally.

Catherine is quoting the second stanza of a hymn by James Hutton beginning “Stream through the bottom of my heart” which first appeared in a hymnal of 1742. [3] The hymn is quite clearly cited from memory—hence the spelling mistakes—but then it was customary in the Moravian Church to commit a vast repertory of hymns to memory. As G.E. Bentley, Jr. suggests, it would be pleasant to think that Catherine later sang to her children this and the other Moravian hymns she had memorised. [4]

Catherine’s application for full membership in the Moravian Congregation is one of 238 surviving such letters in the archive of the Fetter Lane church. They all take this form—ordinary working men and women of the eighteenth century writing about their spiritual anguish and their devotion to the salvific blood and the wounds of Christ.

There were effectively three categories of worshippers at Fetter Lane. There were those who came regularly to the Preaching Services; these people were known as the “constant hearers”. Then there were the members of the Fetter Lane Society—the fellowship group which predated the formal establishment of the Moravian Church in London. Both John and Charles Wesley had been members of the Fetter Lane Society before they left to establish their separate Methodist movement. Persons accepted into the Society were allotted to bands—groups of 8 to 10 who met regularly under a leader for private spiritual discussion. Members of the Society could also request individual one-to-one spiritual counselling—there’s a note in one of the church diaries of Catherine doing precisely that. It was a pretty intense experience which would often lead to a wish for closer association in the Congregation. This then is a letter in which Catherine, William Blake’s mother, feels drawn to full communicating membership in the Moravian Church, the Congregation of the Lamb. The words she uses are very striking indeed: “hug the Cross”—“Suck his wounds”.

Admission to the Congregation of the Lamb did not automatically follow the letter of application. Applicants who did not seem frivolous or otherwise inappropriate were considered monthly, and the names were put to the Lot. The Lot offered three choices: the three cylindrical boxes each contained a rolled-up piece of paper with the word Yes or No written on it or otherwise left blank. Any applicant could be accepted, refused, or encouraged to try again on the basis of the divine will as expressed through the Lot. There was a one in three chance (as the un-Godly might say) of an affirmative response. It was hoped that whichever way the Lot fell, the result would be positive. Unsuitable candidates would be rejected whilst others would strive harder to make themselves acceptable to the Church. Catherine and Thomas were accepted into the Congregation at their first attempt.

This engraving in the Moravian Zeremonienbüchlein shows the Holy Communion service at the Fetter Lane Chapel in 1754. The Labourers stand on either side of the Liturgist, facing the congregation. Candidates, like Catherine, for communicant status are allowed to look on from the galleries. Note the separation of the sexes, and that there is no altar rail and no shuffling queue. The bread and the wine were distributed to the communicants in their places. This, as so often in the Moravian liturgy, serves to enhance the dignity and stillness, which was much commented on. In early documents, the Moravians are sometimes referred to as “the still brethren”. For them, stillness, as with the Catholic Quietists around Madame Guyon, consisted in waiting quietly for God’s grace. They regarded excessive prayer, bible-reading, and even church attendance, as supererogatory. (You will recall that Blake himself is recorded as not having entered any place of worship in the last forty years of his life.) Only when you had experienced God’s grace should you put yourself forward for full membership in the Congregation of the Lamb, and partake of Holy Communion. It was in part his quarrel with the idea of stillness that led John Wesley to withdraw from the Fetter Lane community.

Contrast that image with this engraving by Hogarth, “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism”, satirising Methodist worship; the preacher (who may be intended for George Whitefield) ranting, wig awry; the amorous encounter under the pulpit; and the woman in the foreground giving birth to rabbits.

The sense of stillness pervades even those Moravian ceremonies that were unlike anything seen in other English churches at the time, such as the prostration after communion.

Or the kiss of peace. Again with the separation of the sexes: brethren embrace brethren, sisters embrace sisters.

And the pedilavium or foot-washing. Here, as at Fetter Lane, the sisters perform the rite in the chapel, the brethren exiled to the hall.

In her letter, Catherine refers to “last Friday at the love feast”. The lovefeast, a symbolic fellowship meal with hymns and music, gave an opportunity for godly conversation. The illustration shows a children’s lovefeast in the hall at Fetter Lane. The Moravians were pioneers in offering special religious services for children. The year before Blake’s birth, the Congregation Diary records

Being Christmas Eve, a lovely Number of little Children had towards Evening a Lovefeast with tender Rejoicings over the New-born Child Jesus, of whom they sweetly spoke & sung & play’d; and at last with the tenderest Heart’s Emotion & Devotion adored Him on their Knees. It was a Children’s meeting the like we have not had many in London for Feeling & pure Children’s Joy. [5]

Our awareness of this aspect of Moravian worship should, I think, profoundly affect how we approach the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, perhaps particularly the two “Holy Thursday” songs.

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Before looking at other images from Moravian sources, I thought I would quickly show some of the public records relating to Blake’s mother, simply to show how we came to recognise that the Catherine Armitage in the Moravian Archive, was the future Catherine Blake.

The register of the parish of St Mary Magdalen, Walkeringham, records the baptism of Catherine Wright, the daughter of Gervas Wright and his wife Mary, in 1725. Gervas Wright was a yeoman farmer and maltster at Walkeringham on the edge of the Isle of Axholm, where Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire meet. Gervas and Mary Wirght had eight children:

Richard (1715);
Robert (1717).

A first Katharin (1718), who died young;

John (1720).

A first Elizabeth, christened 30 January, died October 1722.

Another Elizabeth (1724);

Catherine, christened 21 November 1725; and

Benjamin, christened 23 September 1729.

William Blake now has for the first time identifiable grandparents, uncles, and an aunt. Most of their names recur n the Blake family, but it’s curious that none of the Blake children are named after their maternal grandfather, Gervas. Had Catherine quarrelled with her father? Catherine’s brother Benjamin, who married Elizabeth Whitehead in 1754, has children Richard (born 1759), Elizabeth (163), Catherine (1766), Thomas (1769), and Mary (1772). Again, none of the sons are given their paternal grandfather’s name.

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This document records the marriage of Catherine Wright to Thoms Armitage at the Mayfair Chapel, otherwise known as St George’s Chapel, in Westminster in 1746. I still do not know what the cross next to the names might signify. The marriage was irregular, that is it took place without the reading of banns or bishop’s licence but, and I have to stress this, was according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England and performed by an ordained Anglican clergyman—though one who had been unable to find a benefice and quite possibly had spent time in a debtor’s prison. The Mayfair Chapel was relatively respectable—by no means as sleazy as getting married in the Fleet—after all, Shelley’s grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, was to marry Mary Catherine Michell there in 1752. Weddings at the Mayfair Chapel and similar places ceased following Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754.

Eleven months after Thomas’s death in 1751, Catherine marries again, and again at the Mayfair chapel. To James Blake. Presumably through nervousness, she gives her name as “Harmitage”. When William Blake expostulated, “Public Records as If Public Records were true” (E 6170) in the margin of Richard Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1796), he gave a warning that his biographers would have done well to heed. This entry was discovered by H.M. Margoliouth in 1947, and caused fifty years of confusion.

The rate book for Broad Street, Goden Square ward, makes it perfectly clear. The name Armitage is crossed out and the name James Blake written in.

And then the Church Book for Fetter Lane, the list of members in the Congregation of the Lamb, brings it all together:

Catherine Armitage M[arried] S[iste]r | Walkingham Nottinghamshire Nov: 21st 1725 |1750 Nov. 26| — | — | became a Widow &left the Congregation.

Catherine “became a Widow & left the Congregation”. This does not imply she cut off all connection with the church, merely that she ceased to be a member of that inner communicating group.

The Fetter Lane Society also included a Blake couple; Brother and Sister Blake are listed here in Abraham Reincke’s list of Moravians in 1743. This list of early Moravians exemplifies how scattered Moravian documentation can be. For a long time it was known only in a printed transcript published in the late nineteenth century, and which encouraged earlier speculation that the Blake’s attended Moravian services. It was only in March 2006 that the original came to light again in the Moravian Archive in Bethlehem, PA. Are Brother and Sister Blake related to James, husband of Catherine and father of William? I can’t as yet make a positive link to James Blake but the coincidence is striking. John and Mary Blake would be of the right age (probably in their late twenties). And social class (John Blake is a butcher) to be plausible relatives, maybe brother and sister-in-law, of James Blake. Did Brother John Blake, a friend of the Armitages through his church membership, take the opportunity after Thomas Armitage’s death to introduce his kinsman James, a journeyman hosier, to a young widow, Catherine Armitage, with a haberdasher’s shop? On 15 October 1752, Catherine married James Blake. Marriage without the approval of the church elders would have warranted immediate expulsion from the Congregation

When, in her letter, Catherine wrote “I cling to the cross all night”, she was using imagery typical of German Pietism. Here we see it represented in the frontispiece to Gottlieb Creuzberg’s popular Wahre Seelen-Ruhe in den Wunden Jesu (1723). In 1743, a Fetter-Lane conference agreed that “There shd be always somebody among us to learn German. Br Gottshalk will give the Brn every Day an Hour at7 in ye Morning after ye Bible-Hour” and also noted “In general an Encouragement was giv’n to ye Brn and Srs to learn German”. Is there a link between his mother’s early contacts with the German community in London and Blake’s own later involvement with German-speaking artists and intellectuals such as George Michael Moser, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools. Even matters as apparently straightforward as Blake’s reading of the seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme, his life-long friendship with the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), and his interest in the work of the German physiognomist J.C. Lavater, will need to be reconsidered now that we know that Blake’s mother (and perhaps James Blake, too) would have been acquainted with German-speaking Moravians during their founding evangelism in London.

This very much damaged, well-thumbed copy of Creuzberg was owned by the Moravian painter John Valentine Haidt. He appears to have used it both as a devotional text but also, thanks to its 18 engravings of the Passion, as a source of graphic ideas. And it’s Haidt that I want to turn to next.

This is a painting by Haidt of the Crucifixion. It’s one of a group of six paintings executed around 1760 for the Moravian Church in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Haidt’s paintings were not intended as simple decoration for Moravian churches, nor as objects of devotion or religious meditation, nor as icons or religious images. Their role was to be educational and instructive. The Moravians revered the memory of Jan Amos Comenius, the last bishop of the Unitas Fratrum, whose Orbis Pictus brought visual aids into education. And that in a sense is the role that Haidt’s biblical and history paintings serve.

Haidt’s painting shows at bottom left the soldiers gambling for Christ’s garment. This episode is very uncommon in representations of the Crucifixion. Of course, the use of paintings in their churches led the Moravians to be suspected of being secret Papists. We sometimes fail to recognise how visually austere Protestant places of worship, of whatever denomination, were throughout the eighteenth century.

But Blake too portrayed the gambling soldiers in a water colour now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The resemblance between the painting by Haidt and that by Blake are striking and were noted in the catalogue of a Haidt Exhibition in 1966, long before we knew about the Moravian connection. The Blake is one of a sequence of Bible paintings executed for his patron Thomas Butts. Butts and his wife ran a girls’ school and perhaps it makes sense to see Blake’s paintings of Bible scenes a contribution to the school curriculum, as visual aids like Haidt’s.

Though there survive a substantial number of paintings: portraits, biblical scenes, history paintings, conversation pieces, by Haidt, there survive, as far as I aware, no sketchbooks, and no preliminary drawings except this one ink drawing on the flyleaf of a hymnal. Haidt, born in Danzig in 1700, had been a gold-chaser in London in partnership with the same George Michael Moser whom Blake knew at the Royal Academy. Haidt and Moser organised what is believed to be the first life class for London artists at the informal drawing school they ran in the 1740s. Haidt left London in 1754 for Pennsylvania, never to return. But his drawing school was taken over by Henry Pars. Blake’s friend the miniaturist Richard Cosway was both pupil and later teacher at Pars’s school, and Blake himself went as a pupil there when he was ten in 1767. Did Haidt leave behind sketchbooks to be copied by students in Henry Pars’s classes? Maybe the striking reminiscence of Haidt’s Crucifixion in Blake’s watercolour derives from sources left behind in Pars’s drawing school—or perhaps Blake saw Haidt’s paintings at Lindsey House in Chelea, the Moravian headquarters until it was sold in 1774. Behind Lindsey House is the Moravian burying-ground where James Gillray Sr., father of the caricaturist, was sexton. Every Easter, the Fetter Lane congregation walked in solemn procession to the Chelsea burying-ground for their Easter Morning service and spent the day there in worship and godly conversation.

Haidt’s drawing is on the flyleaf of the notorious Appendices XI and XII to the Moravians’ German hymnal, a product of a period in Moravian history known as the “Sifting Time”.

This where we find the hymns dealing with the marriage religion, or addressing the divine phallus, and the mystery of the first wound of the circumcision, and so on. I quote three stanzas from hymn #2114:

2. Deine heil’ge erste wunde salbe mich zum ehe=bunde, auf dem gliede meines leibes, das zum nutzen meines weibes;

3. Und das purpur rothe öle fliess auf meine priesterhöhle, und sie recht geschiklichmache | zu der procurator=sache:

4. Dass ich meine theure riehe mög umfassen mit der liebe, damit du dein weib umfangen, als er dir zur seit aufgangen,

I quote the German to show that I’m not making this stuff up. It translates as

May thy, (viz. Saviour’s) first holy Wound anoint me for the conjugal Business upon that Member of my Body, which is for the Benefit of my Wife, and the Purple red Oil flow upon my Priest’s Hole, and make it rightly fitted for the Procurator-Business, that I may embrace my precious Rib with the same Tenderness, thou didst embrace thy Wife, when it went out of thy Side, &c.

The hymn, if I understand it correctly, is telling the Moravian boys (Knäbelein) that the blood of Christ’s circumcision is an anointing oil that sanctifies every man’s penis.

The more outrageous German hymns were not translated in the Moravian English hymnals which culminated in John Gambold’s hymnal of 1754, though translations may have circulated in manuscript form. (Moravian historians confirm that the archives were weeded after 1760 and probably again in the 1780s, removing much that later generations perceived as scandalous.) Some of the hymns that were included still managed to shock John Sparrow when he wrote about the 1754 hymnal in Hymns Unbidden ( New York, 1966). The Moravian hymns also managed to upset E.P. Thompson who refers in Making of the English Woking Class (London, 1963) to their “perverted eroticism”. I find it rather amusing that Sparrow and Thompson, polar opposites in so many ways, particularly politically, both got very hot under the collar at Moravian hymnody.

I am convinced that Blake knew this hymnal. Its two volumes comprise a sort of “Hymns Ancient & Modern”—the first volume contains hymns from the Bible, from the early Fathers, from the Greek and Coptic churches, even from the Ethiopic church—but, more importantly for Blake, what are listed as “old hymns of the English church”. It reprints such poets s Richard Crashaw, John Donne, George Herbert, amongst others more obscure. For many of these writers, including John Donne, the 1754 hymnal represents the only occasion where their work was reprinted in the eighteenth century. Earlier critics including Morton Paley have noted the possible influence on Blake of Crashaw or Herbert. The problem has been how to explain this influence—how could Blake have accessed these neglected poets. The Moravian hymnal provides a ready answer.

It may be of interest to a Welsh audience to note that Gambold includes in his selection of seventeenth-century hymns seven translated from Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery, known as “Yr hên Ficer”. These translations long precede those by William Evans published in 1771 as The Welshman’s Candle. But I digress.

Part 2 of the hymnal is a substantial collection of Moravian hymns—some translated from the German—some newly written in English. The hymnal is a source of Moravian doctrine and religious concepts. They sang of the Shekhinah, the female emanation of the Godhead

Thank God! that th’Holy Ghost

Out of thy breast was lost,

And that thy princely Look

The Shekinah forsook,

First Man! who on us all

Didst op’rate by thy Fall.

The implication of these lines is to identify the Kabbalist Shekhinah with the third person of the Trinity, to integrate the female and the maternal within the triune Christian God.

The Moravians preached that the sexual act itself is the highest expression of spirituality. The union of man and woman embodies God’s love for his people. There is no inherent sin in sex; on the contrary., sexual intercourse is a sacramental activity, a physical means of grace. Of course, when the Moravians began to take seriously the view of an erotic union of believers with Christ, even if in a metaphorical sense (and with the Moravians it’s not particularly metaphorical), then they had a problem: believers are both male and female. Their solution, evident in their hymnology and poetry, was to make all souls female:

KNow’st thou, that the Saviour

Shew’d thee grace and favour

When a Criminal?

’Twas his Blood did ransom

Thy soul from the dungeon

But as Yesterday

And To-Day, to thy great joy

Thou art next unto him placed,

As his Bride caressed

We are all, men and women, brides of Christ.

Moravian ideas about female souls and about Jesus as the universal husband, the one true male, could well have stirred Blake’s imagination. [6] Perhaps a Moravian spirituality lies behind Blake’s ideas concerning the sexual union of man and woman as a means to restore the androgynous state of the human being in the fallen world. [7]

On a simpler, more obvious level, it’s my contention, that with regard to Blake’s poetic practice, the Moravian hymnal showed him new possibilities for poetry, giving Blake “permission” if you like—poetic permission by example—to incorporate in his poetry strange names (in the case of the Moravian hymns the names of early African and Native American converts).

From such as Kibbodo,

Frans, Mammuch, Tachtanoh,

Nannachtaush, and Sara,

As John, and Busimeck

Hewn from the Savage Quarry.

Or again, the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words used unselfconsciously and without explanation in their English hymns, as here in the Te Logon litany:

No Angel is so bold and rash,

But quakes at thy Shem’hamphorash:

The Morning-stars, when they did gaze

At Thee, were forc’d to veil their face.

In God’s supreme essential throne

The Name thou bear’st, is God the Son.

Yet we sing of Thee ne’ertheless,

Non erat, ubi non eras.

The use of Hebrew words like Shekhinah and Shem’hamphorash (the 72-fold name of God) in Moravian hymns may reflect an element of their Judenmission, the highly secretive mission to the Jews, which appears to have sought links with Jewish unorthodoxy, with Kabbalists, Sabbataeans, and Frankists.

Most striking of all these strange words is the inclusion in the Te Matrem litany (addressed to God our Mother), of the Greek word “zoa”.

Thou didst inspire the Martyrs tongues,
In the last Gasp to raise their songs.
Thou dost impel the four Zoa,
Who singing rest not night nor day.

Blake was to make the word “zoa” his own in the first of his great visionary epics, Vala or, The Four Zoas, and my searches disclose no earlier use of the word “zoa”. The earliest OED citation is 1864—where it features as a quasi-scientific coinage by Herbert Spencer.

The discoveries in Moravian archives mean a valuable new context for understanding Blake has been uncovered. Blake’s mother felt herself drawn to the Moravian Church, where she may have met James Blake. But their children were all baptised into the Church of England, as often were other children from the Moravian community. William himself asked for an Anglican funeral. James Blake voted for the Tory candidate in the 1749 Westminster By-election—and this may reflect the Jacobite sympathies Moravians were often accused of. Not only is E.P. Thompson’s Muggletonian hypothesis now seen to be entirely mistaken, but the Moravian discoveries go much deeper, challenging the accepted understanding of Blake’s relation to religious dissent. The Moravians consistently denied that they were dissenters. For legal reasons they were obliged to register their places of worship under the Toleration Acts but that was as far as it went. In 1749 the Moravian Church received recognition by Act of Parliament (22 Geo. II. C. 30) as “an antient Protestant Episcopal Church” and thus a sister church to the Church of England. The 1754 hymnal even includes attempts at versification of the doctrinal articles out of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England. [8] The common view of Blake the dissenter, born into a dissenting family, and inheriting their radical politics, needs finally to be abandoned as the lazy and untrue cliché it is. One can only label Blake a “dissenter” if, like Thompson, one uses a definition of dissent so broad as to be meaningless. [9]

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I’d like to end by turning to Blake’s father James, with a rather different sort of document. This is a James Blake bill, invoiced on the 9th and receipted on the 10th of June 1772. It was discovered by David Jenkins-Handy among Sir Joseph Banks’ papers in the State Library of New South Wales—the entire archive is available online, so David didn’t have to leave Birmingham to find it.

Previously all we knew of James Blake’s business was Stanley Gardner’s discovery that he had a contract to supply hosiery to the workhouse of St Jame’s Parish. But here we see him with an elegant, engraved billhead recording the supply of ribbons and silk handkerchiefs to Sir Joseph Banks. Four or five sales like this and James Blake has paid for William’s apprenticeship. Blake’s father thus seems to have been a relatively successful businessman with customers among the gentry and a stock of rather fancier range than the simple worsted stockings that he sold to the parish overseers. The haberdashery and hosiery business run by Thomas Armitage in the 1740s and taken over by James Blake on his marriage to Armitage’s widow, Catherine, in 1752, in was still in existence in the late 1850s when visited by Blake’s Victorian biographer Alexander Gilchrist. There was a haberdasher’s shop at 28 Broad Street for over 100 years. Ownership may have changed but it was clearly always sold on as a going concern. We should not allow the real poverty of Blake’s final years to distort our understanding of his childhood in a prosperous shop-keeping family.

It’s perhaps only coincidental that ribbons form a feature of Moravian women’s dress. Ribbons were acceptable gifts between women in the Moravian community and were also used as church decorations. As in these portraits by J.V. Haidt, married women wore blue ribbons, the unmarried sisters pink. The Pilgrim-House Diary records for example, in November 1746,

In the afternoon our good A. Johanna gave a lovefeast to the single sisters in the cong., 22 in number, on account of her Mamma’s birthday, & gave them all ribbons. [10]

I’ve just touched upon Moravian commitment to the fine arts—to incorporating painting, music and poetry into their church life. I particularly regret that time doesn’t allow me to play you some Moravian music because it formed an important part of their appeal. If we examine the likely contexts that would have been in a position to exert an influence on the young, maturing, Blake, they are likely to have originated in Moravian practices typified by what could be found in Fetter Lane. Blake can now be linked (if tangentially) to at least two (Moravian and Swedenborgian) definable religious movements which made up part of London’s spiritual life. Moravianism and Swedenborgianism, I would argue, marked Blake; they have left their recoverable traces on his work. The proper scholarly project is to narrate the history of Blake’s religious contacts and context within a contemporary religious culture that is much richer than we had hitherto imagined. The cumulative picture that emerges is of the Blake family’s involvement, before 1780, with groups who can be readily identified as emerging from a continental European, Germanic and Scandinavian culture, which emphasised high artistic practice in painting, engraving, and music, together with quite distinctive (although not specifically dissenting) spiritualities. It seems to me that Blake should be thoroughly repositioned, not as someone whose formative years were amidst the polarised and factional political and religious turbulences of England in the 1790s, but whose allegiances were heavily influenced, often at formative stages in his life, by this European, spiritually-diverse movement. For Blake scholars, the discovery of Armitage and Blake documents in the Moravian Archives at Muswell Hill opens up a new frontier in Blake studies.

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Endnotes

1 Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake, “pictor ignotus”.—2 vols.—London : Macmillan, 1863. Vol. I, p. 96.

2 Moravian Church Archive.—C/36/2/169 (Letter from Catherine Armitage to apply to Congregation of the Lamb, no date).

3 A Collection of hymns, with Several Translations from the Hymn-Book of the Moravian Brethren.—London : printed for James Hutton, 1742.—No 185.

4 G.E. Bentley, Jr..—“Annual Checklist of Blake Scholarship”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 39, no 1 (Summer 2005), 6.

5 Moravian Church Archive.—C/36/7/9 (Congregation Diary. Vol. IX: 1 January 1756—14 July 1757), p. 102 [24 December 1756].

6 Jack Lindsay.—William Blake: his Life and Work.—London : Constable, 1978. Passim.

7 J.G. Davies.—The Theology of William Blake.—Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1948.—pp. 146-50.

8 A Collection of Hymns of the Children of God in All Ages, from the Beginning till Now. In Two Parts. Designed Chiefly for the Use of the Congregations in Union with the Brethren’s Church.—London : Printed; and to be had at all the Brethren’s Chapels, 1754.—Vol. I, p. 198: “Old Hymns of the English Church. [No] 337: Doctrinal Articles out of the Thirty-Nine".

9 Donald Davie.—Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy: Essays in Dissent.—Manchester : Carcanet Press, 1995.

Challenges E.P. Thompson’s merging of religious and political dissent.

10 Moravian Church Archive.—Pilgrim-House Diary [1040, 1746] Th. Nov. 24th.

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Further Reading

Keri Davies.—“William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol.33 no.2 (Fall 1999), 36-50.

Puts paid to Thompson’s Muggletonian hypothesis.

Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard.—“Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake's Family”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 1 (Summer 2004), 36-43.

Amends and extends the 1999 essay, and establishes the Moravian allegiance of Blake’s mother.

Keri Davies.—“The Lost Moravian History of William Blake's Family: Snapshots from the Archive” .—Literature Compass, vol. 3, issue 6 (Nov. 1, 2006), 1297–1319.

A summary of archival discoveries.

Keri Davies.—“Jonathan Spilsbury and the Lost Moravian History of William Blake's Family” .—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2006-07), 100-09.

New light on Blake’s possible involvement in the later London Moravian community

Keri Davies.—“Bridal Mysticism and 'Sifting Time': the lost Moravian history of William Blake's family” .—Blake, Gender and Culture; edited by Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne J. Connolly.—London : Pickering & Chatto, 2012.—Pp. 57-70.—The body, gender and culture; 10.

Keri Davies.—“‘The Swedishman at Brother Brockmer’s’: Moravians and Swedenborgians in eighteenth-century London”.—Philosophy, Literature, Mysticism: an anthology of essays on the thought and influence of Emanuel Swedenborg; edited by Stephen McNeilly.—London: The Swedenborg Society, 2013.—Pp. 385-412.

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