William Hayley and Smallpox

William Hayley (1745-1820) is remembered today chiefly as the much-derided Felpham Billy, the Bard of Sussex, the friend or enemy of William Blake. But he was a generous and effective patron and friend to Cowper, Romney, Flaxman, and Blake, as well as many others; and it is perhaps unjust that his name should chiefly live in the spiky epigrams which Blake jotted down in his notebook

Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake
Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.

In his lifetime, Hayley was an acclaimed poet, a scholar who achieved both commercial and critical success before, towards the end of his life, his work fell out of fashion. He was the first person to publish a substantial extract of Dante’s Divine Comedy in English translation, declined the offer of the poet laureateship (partly for political reasons), and, in his biographical writings, often explored issues of mental health. His literary efforts extended to drama, biographies of Milton and Cowper, an essay on sculpture, and endless epitaphs (many of them accompanying monuments in Chichester cathedral). He was also an amateur physician, treating himself, his household, and the villagers of Felpham with the then-fashionable electrical cure.

Despite having written a bestselling and highly influential book advising young women on how to attract and keep a husband (The Triumphs of Temper, 1781, and innumerable subsequent editions), Hayley’s own romantic life was a failure, with two disastrous marriages.

Blake's Cottage at Felpham

The Blake Society’s Zoom meeting on Wednesday 20 October was devoted to MILTON AND THE COTTAGE. This is my belated response.

The climactic moment of Blake’s Milton is precipitated when the female figure Ololon appears as “a Virgin of twelve years.”

For Ololon step'd into the Polypus within the Mundane Shell
They could not step into Vegetable Worlds without becoming
The enemies of Humanity except in a Female Form
And as One Female, Ololon and all its mighty Hosts
Appear'd: a Virgin of twelve years

Ololon is the spiritual form of Milton’s Sixfold Emanation; she is the truth underlying his errors about woman. And there’s that striking designation of Ololon as “a Virgin of twelve years,” with its Biblical resonance and its evocation of the Virgin Mary. Ololon, like Mary, is a bearer of deliverance.

William Blake’s Cat

Mary Ann Linnell, wife to John Linnell and mother-in-law to Samuel Palmer, recalled in a letter of 1839 that “Mr Blake … used to say how much he preferred a cat to a dog as a companion because she was so much more quiet in her expression of attachment”.

It was perhaps in vague recollection of Mrs Linnell’s words that Tim Heath, two weeks ago, just before the Blake Society Zoom meeting, asked me if the Blakes, Catherine and William, ever had a cat. The answer is yes.

The Blakes moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex in September 1800 where Blake could work under the often burdensome patronage of the wealthy writer William Hayley. There he made the acquaintance of Hayley’s friend John Marsh (1752-1828) of Chichester, attorney, musician, prolific gentleman composer (thirty-nine symphonies), and diarist. Marsh recorded most of his long life in minute detail, in a journal that survives in thirty-seven volumes at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

In his Journal for 5 April 1802, Marsh wrote: “On Monday the 5th our white Cat produced 4 white Kittens, one of which we saved for Mr Blake of Felpham (Mr Hayley’s friend) but had great difficulty in rearing it, the Cat seeming to have very little Milk—”, and then repeated in his marginal summary: “Bred a White Kitten for Mr Blake”. It is pleasant to picture the white kitten playing with Catherine’s embroidery wool, or William, sitting quietly for once, dozing with a white kitten on his lap. (My understanding is that the gene that causes cats to have completely white fur is also linked to congenital hearing impairment. White cats with blue eyes are commonly deaf. One hopes that the Blakes’ white kitten escaped that disability.) Marsh’s journal also reports visits to Blake on 9th May and 26th June 1801, and gifts of white kittens to others in December 1801. Three years later, on 22th May 1805, he wrote again: “We drove to Felpham & carried our little white kitten to Mr Hayley”.