Brother Blake & Sister Blake: and the lost Moravian History of William Blake’s family (original) (raw)

Abstract

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.

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