Abstract
Several of Blake’s early biographers averred that his family were Dissenters. In 1863 Gilchrist described his father as an ‘honest shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man — a dissenter’1 and Henry Crabb Robinson, in his article for the Vaterländisches Museum in 1811 wrote that ‘Blake does not belong by birth to the established church but to a dissenting community; although we do not believe that he goes regularly to any Christian church.’2 None of these early accounts, however, specifies which particular ‘dissenting community’ this meant.
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Notes
Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (London, 1998), 56.
David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York, 1977), 142. See also his ‘Blake’s Early Swedenborgianism: A Twentieth-Century Legend’, Comparative Literature, 5 (1953), 247–57.
Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (London, 1937), 16.
Davies, The Theology of William Blake (Oxford, 1948), 32.
Bentley, The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale, 2003), 189n.
Bentley, Blake Records: First Edition (Oxford, 1969), 7–8.
See Edward Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1994), passim.
Keri Davies has outlined how Thompson’s discovery of a Muggletonian named Thomas Hermitage, born in London, led him to erroneously suppose that this was the first husband of Blake’s mother. As Davies points out, Catherine married Thomas Armitage who was born in Yorkshire. See Keri Davies, ‘The Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family: Snapshots from the Archive’, Literature Compass, 3: 6 (2006), 1297–319 (1299).
See Thomas Wright, The Life of William Blake, Vol. 1 (Olney, 1929), 2.
See Margaret Ruth Lowery, Windows of the Morning: A Critical Study of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, 1783 (Yale University Press, 1970), 14–8.
During the Eighteenth Century Moravians in England did not refer to themselves as ‘Moravians’, but rather as members of the ‘United Brethren’ meaning that they were in unity with the Moravian Church of the Continental Province. For convenience I use the terms ‘Moravian’ and ‘Brethren’ interchangeably throughout this chapter, though it is important to note that the term ‘Moravian’ carries certain connotations pertaining to the origins of a religious movement which had at its centre Moravia, and not the movement as it existed under Count Zinzendorf. See Geoffrey Stead and Margaret Stead, The Exotic Plant: A History of the Moravian Church in Great Britain 1742–2000 (Werrington, 2003), 4.
See Daniel Benham, Memoirs of James Hutton: Comprising the Annals of His Life and Connection With the United Brethren (London, 1856).
The extent to which the Wesley brothers influenced the formation of the Moravian society is questionable. Podmore has argued that Charles Wesley played no part in the founding of the first Moravian society in England, and John Wesley did so only by chance: at the conference in which Böhler expressed his intention to form such a society, Wesley was in attendance coincidentally, given that he had journeyed to London primarily to visit his brother who had been taken ill. See Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England: 1728–1760 (Oxford, 1998), 38–9.
Colin Podmore, ed., The Fetter Lane Moravian Congregation: London 1742–1992 (London, 1992), 3.
On the controversy over the doctrine of stillness see C. W. Towlson, Moravian and Methodist (London, 1957), Chapters 5 and 6, though since the publication of Podmore’s The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760.
Cited in Davies, Keri, ‘The Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family: Snapshots from the Archive’, Literature Compass, 3: 6 (November 2006), 1297–319.
Davies cites Craig Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (Pennsylvania, 2004), 79. The original source is not provided.
On the Moravians and religious enthusiasm see Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion With Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1950), Chapter 17.
There is indeed a possible connection between the sexualised devotion of the Moravian’s Christ-centred spirituality and Blake’s use of erotic imagery in his poetry and illustrations. See Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination (London, 2007).
See Robert Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789–1824 (Cambridge, 1997), 43–80.
John Walsh, ‘The Cambridge Methodists’ in Peter Brooks, ed., Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London, 1975), 264.
See Lowery, Margaret Ruth, Windows of the Morning: A Critical Study of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, 1783 (Yale, 1970).
Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard suggest that it may in fact be Blake’s grandparents, James Blake’s parents, listed in the register. See Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard, ‘Recovering the lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family’, BIQ, 38: 1 (Summer, 2004), 36–43.
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© 2014 Michael Farrell
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Farrell, M. (2014). The Moravians. In: Blake and the Methodists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455505_3
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