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In June 2001, Dr. M. K. Schuchard discovered records relating to William Blake’s mother, Catherin... more In June 2001, Dr. M. K. Schuchard discovered records relating to William Blake’s mother, Catherine Wright, her first husband, Thomas Armitage, and what may be Catherine’s future brother- and sister-in-law, John and Mary Blake, in the London archive of the Moravian Church. I believe there was a continuing interest in Moravian spirituality within the Blake family long after his mother had formally left the church. The Moravians taught that the division of humankind into two genders was not a sign of fall and corruption; it was a way of enjoying God’s love. The divine purpose of gender division is so that man and woman can play the roles of Christ and His Bride. Human marriage was more than a metaphor for the mystical relationship with Christ; it was a celebration and reenactment of the soul’s relationship with God. For Zinzendorf and his Moravian followers, sexual intercourse was a sacred liturgy. Coitus could be the highest expression of spirituality and worship of God if conducted with the proper reverence. Blake’s mother was taught by the Moravians that sacred sex between a husband and wife is part of the worship of Christ and restoration of the cosmos: a Christian piety that values the sexuality of both men and women without promoting domination or exploitation. This is what we find in the Moravians of the eighteenth century, and it appears to have been what William Blake was searching for in his art and life.

Literature Compass, Nov 1, 2006

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 14, 2019

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012

In Blake’s juvenile Poetical Sketches (‘commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the... more In Blake’s juvenile Poetical Sketches (‘commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year’ (E846)), music is simply the conventional adjunct to poetry. A number of the poems are called ‘Song’ — but this is just ‘the imaginary conjuring of songs which are not songs’ (Hoagwood xiii).1 However, for the mature Blake, music and musicality are basic to his vision of art. His early biographer, Allan Cunningham, describes how Blake’s poetry and art were one with his music: In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all his undertakings. As he drew the figure he meditated the song that was to accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring too of the same moment. (Bentley, Blake Records 633)

The BARS Review, Apr 22, 2017

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Apr 19, 2018

Continuum eBooks, Sep 12, 2014

&quot;Every person who bought Blake’s work in his lifetime is of significance to Blake sc... more &quot;Every person who bought Blake’s work in his lifetime is of significance to Blake scholarship. This chapter is concerned with one such person, Rebekah Bliss (1747-1819). Mrs. Bliss owned books by Blake as early as September 1794. She is the earliest collector known to have owned anything by Blake and is thus of signal importance. By the time of her death she had acquired For Children: The Gates of Paradise, two copies of the Songs, Blair’s The Grave (1808), and two copies of Young’s Night Thoughts with the Blake illustrations (one plain, one coloured). But Mrs Bliss was also a prominent collector of Oriental books, of Arabic, Sanskrit, Turkish manuscripts, of Persian and Mughal miniatures, of Chinese watercolours, even of Japanese colour-printed books. Her library (called Bibliotheca splendidissima in its 1826 sale catalogue) exemplifies a culture of book-collecting in which precious books of East and West, works by Blake and rare Oriental manuscripts, were juxtaposed. But we can go further, in that evidence suggests that Blake and Bliss had some personal acquaintanceship, and that Rebekah Bliss acquired most of her Blakes directly from the artist. The Bliss library is then an important indication of the intellectual and cultural context of Blake’s circles of friendship. Could Blake have known the collection in which his books formed a part? This would open up possibilities for a reconsideration of Oriental influences on Blake’s work. We can now feel more confident in seeing correspondences between Blake’s art and the art of India and the East. Thus the collector (Rebekah Bliss) who adds Blake to her collection of Oriental books creates a new critical context for his work; and Blake’s access to Oriental (and particularly Indian) art and its influence on his work needs reassessment.&quot;

The BARS Review, 2017

Review by Keri Davies (Independent Scholar) of Jennifer Jesse, William Blake’s Religious Vision: ... more Review by Keri Davies (Independent Scholar) of Jennifer Jesse, William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness . Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. 312. Hb. £52.95. ISBN 9780739177907. Pb. £29.95. ISBN 9781498511780.

Blake, Gender and Culture, 2015

Blake 2.0

The Reception of Blake in the Orient

"Every person who bought Blake’s work in his lifetime is of significance to Blake scholarshi... more "Every person who bought Blake’s work in his lifetime is of significance to Blake scholarship. This chapter is concerned with one such person, Rebekah Bliss (1747-1819). Mrs. Bliss owned books by Blake as early as September 1794. She is the earliest collector known to have owned anything by Blake and is thus of signal importance. By the time of her death she had acquired For Children: The Gates of Paradise, two copies of the Songs, Blair’s The Grave (1808), and two copies of Young’s Night Thoughts with the Blake illustrations (one plain, one coloured). But Mrs Bliss was also a prominent collector of Oriental books, of Arabic, Sanskrit, Turkish manuscripts, of Persian and Mughal miniatures, of Chinese watercolours, even of Japanese colour-printed books. Her library (called Bibliotheca splendidissima in its 1826 sale catalogue) exemplifies a culture of book-collecting in which precious books of East and West, works by Blake and rare Oriental manuscripts, were juxtaposed. But we can go further, in that evidence suggests that Blake and Bliss had some personal acquaintanceship, and that Rebekah Bliss acquired most of her Blakes directly from the artist. The Bliss library is then an important indication of the intellectual and cultural context of Blake’s circles of friendship. Could Blake have known the collection in which his books formed a part? This would open up possibilities for a reconsideration of Oriental influences on Blake’s work. We can now feel more confident in seeing correspondences between Blake’s art and the art of India and the East. Thus the collector (Rebekah Bliss) who adds Blake to her collection of Oriental books creates a new critical context for his work; and Blake’s access to Oriental (and particularly Indian) art and its influence on his work needs reassessment."

Notes and Queries, 2013

This common four-letter word appears in print as early as 1905.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2009

Literature Compass, Nov 1, 2006

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 14, 2019

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012

The BARS Review, Apr 22, 2017

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Apr 19, 2018

Continuum eBooks, Sep 12, 2014

The BARS Review, 2017

Blake, Gender and Culture, 2015

Blake 2.0

The Reception of Blake in the Orient

Notes and Queries, 2013

This common four-letter word appears in print as early as 1905.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2009

Tells how the evangelist George Whitefield, on his return to England from the American colonies i... more Tells how the evangelist George Whitefield, on his return to England from the American colonies in 1742, brought with him a black boy whom he left with the Moravians to bring up and educate until he was twenty-one. It explores Whitefield’s motives in entrusting “Andrew the Negro Boy” to Moravian care, expands on previous accounts, and shows how this relates to other episodes in Whitefield’s relationship with the Moravian Church before the decisive violent break following the publication of his Expostulatory Letter (1753).
George Whitefield’s friendship with the future Moravian leader James Hutton began when they were both in their early twenties. When Hutton established himself as a bookseller, it was only natural for Whitefield to publish through his friend’s shop, and to visit the Christian fellowship group (the Fetter Lane Society) that Hutton had established at his premises. Even when the Fetter Lane Society had taken a decisively Moravian turn, Whitefield continued to attend meetings, and occasionally preached there before his departure for America.
Whitefield published in 1740 a criticism of slaves’ treatment in the southern American colonies and sometimes preached to slaves. Nevertheless, as early as 1738, Whitefield had called for an end to General Oglethorpe’s and the Georgia trustees’ prohibition of slavery. So it is not entirely surprising that when Whitefield returned from a preaching tour of America, he brought with him a slave child, whom he “gave” to the Moravians. The episode is ignored by Whitefield’s biographers (excepting Tyerman, who relegates it to a footnote), but a brief account is given in Daniel Benham, Memoirs of James Hutton (1856).
After 1750, the Georgia trustees sanctioned slavery, and Whitefield developed a defence of the institution, claiming its full scriptural justification. Over the coming years, he added to his own stock of slaves, and emerged as perhaps the most energetic, and conspicuous, evangelical defender and practitioner of slavery.

Explores the links, some speculative, between William Blake’s extended family and the Moravian Ch... more Explores the links, some speculative, between William Blake’s extended family and the Moravian Church congregation in London.
In June 2001, Dr. M. K. Schuchard found, in the Church Book of the Congregation of the Lamb (the Moravian Church in London), the records of the membership of Thomas Armitage, hosier, born in Royston, Yorkshire, and of his wife Catherine, born in Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire. The couple were William Blake’s mother and her first husband. In addition to the Armitages, there are a number of references in Moravian archives to members of a Blake family. Indeed, John and Mary Blake are among the earliest members of the Fetter Lane Society (the fellowship group that preceded the formal establishment of the Moravian Church in London). Congregation diaries record in surprising detail the lives of the Blakes, and their family tragedies, such as the death of their youngest child.
Are Brother and Sister Blake related to James, second husband of Catherine and father of William? The coincidence, not just of surname, 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 of James Blake. After Thomas’s death, Catherine Armitage “became a widow and left the Congregation”. On 15 October 1752 she married James Blake in the same chapel, St. George’s Mayfair, where she had wed Thomas Armitage, and her new husband took over the hosiery business. Did Brother John Blake, a friend of the Armitages through his church membership, take the opportunity after Thomas’s death to introduce his kinsman James, a journeyman hosier, to a young widow, Catherine Armitage, with a haberdasher’s shop?
The Blake link remains unverified. Nevertheless, the Moravian archives provide us with an uniquely detailed picture of the lives of ordinary Londoners, the women and men from whom derive William Blake’s cultural and spiritual inheritance.

John Scott, a lawyer who had been a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, though ... more John Scott, a lawyer who had been a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, though even then William Godwin noted that he was "a believer in spiritual intercourses", later became a prominent Southcottian. But by 1817, Thomas Foley, rector of Old Swinford, who been one of Joanna's most loyal friends, was writing to another Southcott supporter, Samuel Eyre that: "Scott our Solicitor at the Neckinger trial has ... joined himself to the new Prophet Blake who is filled with witchcraft and goes on very abominably". At the time of Foley's letter, William Blake is known to have been interested in magic and mesmerism, and certainly portrayed himself as a prophet in Jerusalem. This paper suggests that he was indeed Foley's "new Prophet", and the Visionary Heads examples of what Joanna and her followers would have termed "witchcraft". Our understanding of Blake's life and art in the years at South Molton Street is thus changed. The Visionary Heads are no longer just a game played with John Varley, but have to be fitted into a practice of spiritualism which some at least of Blake's contemporaries thought genuine and not at all the product of madness

The upsurge of interest in William Blake following the publication of Gilchrist's Life (1863) led... more The upsurge of interest in William Blake following the publication of Gilchrist's Life (1863) led to a significant nineteenth-century outpouring of facsimile editions. The fullest and best of these reproductions were the hand-coloured facsimiles of Blake's Prophetic Books issued by William Muir (1845-1938) and his collaborators at "The Blake Press at Edmonton". Muir's facsimiles are esteemed nowadays not for their accuracy of reproduction-but for preserving the hand-crafted feel of the originals. They maintain a truth to Blake's processes, if not always to his images, by continuing the basic combination of a printed monochrome image with hand colouring. It's now nearly 15 years since my account of Muir and the Blake Press facsimiles appeared in Blake Quarterly. This paper looks at some problems that are still unresolved.

The direct and simple-seeming couplets of Auguries of Innocence include two lines that still lack... more The direct and simple-seeming couplets of Auguries of Innocence include two lines that still lack adequate critical comment:

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.

Most writers follow Foster Damon in reading "pass the Polar Bar" as meaning to escape to the spiritual world. They draw attention to a similar expression in The Book of Thel:

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:
Thel entered in and saw the secrets of the land unknown,

and suggest that this passage draws on The Odyssey, Book xiii, where Homer describes the two entries to the Cave of Phorcys, one for the gods, the other (the northern entry) for human beings. The Homeric myth was given a symbolic reading by the Neoplatonist Porphyry, interpreting it as referring to the descent of the soul into the body. Even if we accept Neo-Platonism as relevant to discussion of Thel, its application to this distich from Auguries involves a kind of critical sleight-of-hand.

A recent critic has seen the term "polar bar" as referring to the contemporary search for a North-West Passage, linking exploration with militarisation. If Damon and his followers have given us an excessively metaphorical and decontextualised reading, this writer’s interpretation, to my mind, seems over-literal.

The lines cited are not the only expression of anti-war sentiment in the poem. My interpretation seeks to link Auguries to Blake’s maternal inheritance of Moravianism, particularly to Moravian pacifism—their refusal to take oaths or bear arms, which had led to recurring charges of Jacobitism against them. Blake’s acquaintance, the Moravian poet James Montgomery, was another writer of anti-war poems. I also seek to relate Blake’s lines to earlier poetry and to Moravian hymnody with the same movement, moral as well as metrical. The Moravian heritage was multi-faceted.

William Blake, in a letter of 1 September 1800 to his friend George Cumberland, writes of himself... more William Blake, in a letter of 1 September 1800 to his friend George Cumberland, writes of himself as “Poet Painter & Musician”. J. T. Smith praised his musical abilities, yet the only indication we have of his musical taste is a note by his Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist. Drawing on conversations with Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, Gilchrist records that the poet’s favourite song was “O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd”, which he heard Hannah Linnell sing on his visits to the Linnell’s at Hampstead. What Mrs Linnell’s sang (and its definition as a “Border Melody” is in that debatable land between a traditional song and the pastiche that has become absorbed into the tradition) was first published in The Scottish Minstrel (1824), with a titlepage vignette engraved by W. H. Lizars.

Lizars’s development of a relief etching process had been communicated to Blake by George Cumberland in 1819, as Blake’s own invention rediscovered or reinvented. But Blake scholars have largely dismissed Lizars’s reinvention of relief etching as coincidental or as irrelevant, producing results very different from Blake’s; and Lizars’s long-standing friendship with Linnell unaccountably ignored. Lizars was witness at Linnell’s Scottish civil wedding in 1808, and was in London in 1816, when he attended Flaxman’s lectures on sculpture and drew Flaxman’s portrait. There is plentiful evidence that Lizars could have seen examples of Blake’s relief-etched books in Illuminated Printing.

When, in 1822, Blake noted at the end of The Ghost of Abel: “W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788”, he was making a serious claim for priority of invention. Where then do Blake and Lizars stand in the debatable land of invention, of priority, and of originality?

PhD thesis, 2003

Biographical discussion of William Blake (1757-1827) has long been dominated by unexamined assump... more Biographical discussion of William Blake (1757-1827) has long been dominated by unexamined assumptions regarding his family background, his early religious allegiance, and his supposed rejection of the publishing world of his time. This dissertation presents biographical and other discoveries relating to Blake and his milieu that challenge some longestablished commonplaces. The dissertation is shaped by a concentration on the individuals indicated in the chapter titles (Rebekah Bliss, William Muir, Alexander Tilloch, Richard Twiss, Samuel Varley, Catherine Wright). I claim priority of discovery for the date of Blake’s mother’s first marriage, the identity of her first husband (Thomas Armitage, 1722-1751), and her true maiden name (Wright). I suggest an unexpected political allegiance for Blake’s father, indicated by his vote in the 1749 Westminster by-election. I present the identity of Blake’s first known collector (Rebekah Bliss, 1747-1819), and uncover evidence of the commercial availability of Blake’s illuminated books in the 1790s. I link Blake to contemporary book-collecting circles and in particular to those in which Richard Twiss (1747-1818) participated. I bring to light Blake’s friendship with Alexander Tilloch (1759-1825), and show how access to Tilloch’s library would have compelling consequences for the interpretation of Blake’s work. I identify Tilloch with a character in An Island in the Moon, and make further suggestions for the real-life counterparts of other persons caricatured in that work. I demonstrate how Blake’s posthumous reputation was fostered by the facsimiles produced by Tilloch’s great-great-nephew William Muir (1845-1938), and show how this contributed to Blake’s influence on art and design in the later nineteenth century. Further discoveries relating to Blake’s mother disclosing her provincial birth, the names of her parents and siblings, and her association with the Moravian sect, conclude the study.