The Chamber on the Wall

2 KINGS 4: 8-11 (King James Version)

8 And it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a great woman; and she constrained him to eat bread. And so it was, that as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread.
9 And she said unto her husband, Behold now, I perceive that this is an holy man of God, which passeth by us continually.
10 Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.
11 And it fell on a day, that he came thither, and he turned into the chamber, and lay there.

2 KÖNIGE 4: 8-11 (Luther Bibel 1545)

8 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß Elisa ging gen Sunem. Daselbst war eine reiche Frau; die hielt ihn, daß er bei ihr aß. Und so oft er daselbst durchzog, kehrte er zu ihr ein und aß bei ihr.
9 Und sie sprach zu ihrem Mann: Siehe, ich merke, daß dieser Mann Gottes heilig ist, der immerdar hier durchgeht.
10 Laß uns ihm eine kleine bretterne Kammer oben machen und ein Bett, Tisch, Stuhl und Leuchter hineinsetzen, auf daß er, wenn er zu uns kommt, dahin sich tue.
11 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß er hineinkam und legte sich oben in die Kammer und schlief darin

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Bill Goldman, 1950—2020

My friend Bill Goldman died aged 70 in May this year. I have taken far longer to write these notes than I intended thanks to my continuing post-Covid 19 fatigue. I apologise now for any errors, omissions, infelicitous expressions or, indeed, lapses of tone in what follows.

William David “Bill” Goldman, Blake scholar, was born in 1950 in St Pancras, London, the first child and only son (there are two younger sisters) of Joan and William Goldman. Bill’s father, Willy, born 1910 in Mile End Old Town, was a significant memorialist of the Jewish East End. Willy Goldman married as his third wife, Mavis Joan Allsop, in St Pancras, London, in 1950.

Bill entered Sir William Borlase Grammar School in 1960, a good grammar school in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He left aged 16 with 7 GCEs and one O/A level (Use of English, A-grade) to work for BBC Publications, sorting and delivering office mail. By 1970 he had acquired the qualifications for university entrance and went to the University of Essex to study English Literature. Bill dropped out after two years. I don’t recall him ever speaking about the period following except that it led to his religious conversion around about 1977, of which he wrote “I met Jesus my Saviour and acknowledged Him as such … I love the Bible and regard it as God’s Word as it claims to be”. (To me, this kind of talk is close to meaningless. If the Bible is God’s word, then God is a really crap mathematician. See 1 KINGS 7:23.) I can see that conversion gave Bill’s life a stability it might otherwise have lacked but I think it also made him vulnerable to the Christian flat-earthists, worshippers of Blake’s “old Nobodaddy aloft”, who were/are a feature of the Richmond church he joined.

The bourgeois Blake

On 29 November 2019, and coinciding with the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, I attended “William Blake and the Idea of the Artist”, a conference at the Paul Mellon Centre in Bedford Square. The conference sought to “consider the work of William Blake with the context of Romanticism and the artistic currents of his times, the creative legacies of his work and the contemporary resonances of Blake’s vision”.

The first speaker, Silvia Riccardi (University of Freiburg), drawing attention to the interlinear squiggles and elaborations of the lettering in, for example, America, made one want to go back to the works in illuminated printing again, and this time take a magnifying glass. The speakers that followed all made similarly thoughtful contributions. But the final speaker, Dave Beech (University of the Arts, London) left me puzzled.

If I understood his argument, Beech claimed there was an eighteenth-century class distinction between “artisans”, like Blake, who had undergone an apprenticeship, and “artists”, who attended academies. Perhaps it would be anachronistic to point out that Raphael, for example, was apprenticed to Perugino; but surely not anachronistic to note that Sir Joshua Reynolds served an apprenticeship with the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson. At the age of 10 Blake was drawing from casts of antiquities in the school of Henry Pars, before his apprenticeship to James Basire in 1772. After 1779 Blake was a student at the Royal Academy, where he diligently drew from classical sculpture under the instruction of George Moser.

Bunhill Fields—25 May 1708

Post Boy, January 10, 1708 - January 13, 1708; Issue 1975.

In early 1708, the religious group known as the French Prophets (a millenarian movement active in London from 1706), sensationally announced in the London newspapers that Thomas Emes, one of their number, who had died at the end of December 1707, would rise from his grave at Bunhill Fields on 25 May.

Blakespotting: Private Eye

The Private Eye letters pages regularly include “Lookalikes” where sometimes surprising visual resemblances are brought to our attention. The issue of 4-17 October 2019 features, on pages 21-22, no fewer than three Lookalikes and a Moggalike (Jacob Rees-Mogg appropriately paired with a relaxing kangaroo).

Here’s page 22 (click to enlarge)

Bunhill Fields—3 September 1688

John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, died in August 1688, at the age of sixty. Drenched in a rainstorm on a rare visit to London for a preaching engagement, Bunyan fell ill while staying at the home in Snow Hill, Farringdon Without, of the grocer John Strudwick. His cold developed into a fever, though he still preached on 19 August to a London congregation, until illness claimed his life on 31 August 1688. He was buried at Bunhill Fields on 3 September.

Strudwick had already purchased a plot for a family vault in Bunhill Fields and it was his intention that Bunyan’s remains would be placed there too, though Bunyan was initially buried in the “Baptist Corner” at the back of the burial ground. John Strudwick survived another nine years, himself dying in 1697. There is no record of when Bunyan’s coffin was placed in the Strudwick vault although one might guess it was soon after Strudwick’s burial; the surviving burial ground registers only begin in 1713.

Bunhill Fields—the long continuities of London life and death

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.—BLAKE. 

The Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and the adjacent Artillery Ground are the last large open spaces remaining of the three great fields (Bunhill Fields, Smithfield, and Moorfields) that constituted the Manor of Finsbury. The name Bunhill is a corruption of “Bone Hill”, perhaps implying the presence somewhere on the land of a Saxon burial mound. Another suggestion is that the marshy field was used as a refuse tip—a dumping ground for rags and bones, including animal bones from the Smithfield shambles, but I think the name predates the establishment of the livestock market. The manor was originally the prebend of Halliwell and Finsbury, established in 1104 to provide support for a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.

In 1315, in the reign of Edward II, the prebendary manor was granted by Robert Baldock, the king’s secretary, to the Mayor and commonalty of London. This act enabled more general public access to a large area of fen or moor stretching from the City of London’s boundary (London Wall), to the village of Hoxton. Though ownership of Bunhill Fields reverted to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1514 to 1867, it continued to be leased and managed by the Corporation of London. The Corporation in turn sublet the field. This pattern of lease and sub-lease (and often sub-sub lease) was customary with Corporation land and persists to this day.