Abstract
Methodism is a movement within Protestant Christianity that has its origins in the eighteenth-century evangelical revival in England. Though technically a branch of the Anglican Church until 1795, Methodism was in practice the largest dissenting religious group in the country during William Blake’s lifetime. This book considers the relationship between Blake’s work and this important body of contemporary religious thought.
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Notes
See John Tyson, ‘Lady Huntingdon’s Reformation’, Church History, 64: 4 (December 1995), 580–93.
See Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (London, 2000).
See John Kent, Jabez Bunting: The Last Wesleyan (London, 1955).
See Archibald W. Harrison, The Separation of Methodism from the Church of England (London, 1945);
John Kent, ‘The Wesleyan Methodists to 1849’ in Davies, Rupp, George, et al. eds., A History of the Methodist Church in Britain Volume 2 (London, 1978), 213–75.
See Lesley Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton, 1982);
Edward Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1994); and
Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Aldershot, 2007).
Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789–1824 (Cambridge, 1997), 46. See Chapter 2 on Blake’s orthodoxy.
Davies, The Theology of William Blake (Oxford, 1948), 28.
Bottral, The Divine Image: A Study of Blake’s Interpretation of Christianity (Rome, 1950), 70, 98.
Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (New York, 1954), 388n.
Fisher, The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary (Toronto, 1961), 121. He goes on to suggest that ‘the ultimate achievement of the (religious) societies was to provide a programme for moral rearmament. It was left for the Methodists to develop on a larger scale the enthusiasm latent in those beliefs. Blake hopefully associated this new movement with the regeneration and awakening of man … he found the zeal and energy of Wesley and Whitefield congenial.’ (125). Fisher suggests, however, that the Mr Huffcap, referred to in chapter 4 of Blake’s An Island on the Moon, might be a satirical picture of a histrionic Methodist preacher (127). Fisher died in a boating accident at the age of 40, leaving his unfinished book to been seen through the press by his former supervisor, Northrop Frye. This may explain why his treatment of Blake and Methodism remains so brief.
Gill, The Romantic Movement and Methodism: A Study of English Romanticism and the Evangelical Revival (London, 1954), 148.
Thomas B. Shepherd, Methodism and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1940), 246. See also
F. Brompton Harvey, ‘Methodism and the Romantic Movement’, The London Quarterly and Holborn Review, Series 6: 3 (July 1934), 289–302.
See Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (Gainesville, 1983), 131.
See Jacob Bronowski, William Blake: A Man Without a Mask (Middlesex, 1944), chapter 4;
Martha Winburn England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers (New York, 1966) and
Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Hell’s Hymnbook: Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Their Models’ in R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty, eds., Literature of the Romantic Period 1750–1850 (Liverpool, 1976), 19–36.
Worden, ‘The Emotional Evangelical: Blake and Wesley’, Wesley Centre Online (http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/16-20/18-18.htm), 1–10 accessed 04/10/2007.
Jesse, William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness (New York, 2013), 8.
See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Middlesex, 1976).
Kathleen Raine’s comprehensive Blake and Tradition (London, 1968), for example, makes no mention of Wesley or Methodism. Moreover, Steve Clark has suggested that, prior to Thompson’s attack on Methodism, the link between Blake and the Methodists was ‘something of a commonplace’. See his ‘Jerusalem as Imperial Prophecy’ in
Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds., Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke, 2006), 167–85 (176). Clark, however, cites only two books to substantiate his claim: Charles Gardner’s William Blake the Man and Osbert Burdett’s William Blake; neither of which offers a satisfactory account of Blake’s theology in the context of Methodism. Gardner writes: ‘It is evident that he (Blake) observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs’. See William Blake the Man (London, 1919), 23. Burdett’s association of Blake’s art with enthusiasm led him to claim that Blake was ‘the Wesley of the arts. To him religion was an artistic activity, so that he was always offering one in terms of the other, and instead of pleasing either party he offended almost all.’ See William Blake (London, 1926), 103.
Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, 2006), 20.
See Halevy, The Birth of Methodism in England, Bernard Semmel, trans., (Chicago, 1971), passim;
see also Stuart Andrews, Methodism and Society (London, 1970), chapter 7.
On Whitefield’s preaching see James Downy, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit (Oxford, 1969), chapter 6.
Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2005), 274. On Wesley and enthusiasm see Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1950), chapter 18.
Di Salvo, Rosso, and Hobson, eds., Blake, Politics, and History, (London, 1998), 97–114.
See Paola Bertucci, ‘Revealing Sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electrical healing’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39: 3 (September 2006), 341–62
and W. J. Turrell, ‘Three electrotherapists of the eighteenth century: John Wesley, Jean Paul Marat and James Graham’, Annals of Medical History, 3 (1921); see also idem, John Wesley: Physician and Electrotherapist (Oxford, 1938); S. J. Rogal, ‘John Wesley’s “curious and important subject”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 13 (1989), 79–90; and
H. Newton Malony, ‘John Wesley and the eighteenth century therapeutic uses of electricity’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 45 (December 1995), 244–59.
See Adlard, ‘Blake and “Electrical Magic”’, Neophilologus, 53: 4 (October 1969), 422–23. Adlard argues furthermore that the image of Birch’s electrical magic features in Milton, in particular Milton’s descent from Heaven as a ‘falling star’ or ‘electric flame’. I am grateful to David Fallon for providing me with this reference. See also
G. Schott, ‘William Blake’s Milton, John Birch’s “Electrical Magic”, and the “falling star”’, The Lancet, 362 (December 2003), 2114–16; and
Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse & Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 2003), 81–83.
See Gerald E. Bentley, ‘Thomas Butts, White Collar Maecenas’, PMLA, 71: 5 (December 1956), 1052–66 (1055) and Stranger from Paradise, 189n. Bentley’s evidence for his later view is the reference to the Archbishop of Canterbury in Butts’s letter to Blake of 22 September 1800, though the tone of this is uncertain.
See Jacob Bronowski, William Blake 1757–1827: A Man without a Mask (London, 1943), 62 and Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 268, 356.
Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (London, 1937), 16.
Butts owned Copy I of Jerusalem and either Copy A or Copy B of Milton. See Gerald E. Bentley, Blake Books (Oxford, 1977), 261 and 319. David Bindman identifies 129 paintings made by Blake for Butts between 1799 and 1818. See Blake as an Artist (Oxford, 1977).
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© 2014 Michael Farrell
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Farrell, M. (2014). Introduction. In: Blake and the Methodists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455505_1
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