Library member Patricia Wilson Smith writes for us about J.T. Blight – part four

This is my final blog before I take a break to start work on my experimental film, and I thought it would be interesting to explore Blight’s story from the perspectives of two men who had such a formative influence over his life and work.

The Revd. Robert Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, was in his mid-fifties when he took John Blight under his wing.  Best known in Cornwall today, for writing Trelawney, or The Song of the Western Men (the well-loved Cornish anthem), his reputation then was as poet and eccentric, as was his obsession with retrieving drowned mariners from the foot of the cliffs to give them a Christian burial. John Blight counted him a ‘great man’ and hoped for his help in producing and promoting a second volume of Ancient Crosses and Antiquities that he was planning, recording the antiquities of East Cornwall. Hawker was indeed very helpful to Blight, encouraging the development of his work, but he was not a disinterested mentor, and soon began to insist on inserting poems of his own, and other irrelevancies that Blight attempted to resist. Hawker was a man of strong passions, but not of lasting vindictiveness, and despite a serious ‘falling-out’ later, it seems the two men remained friends for many years. Hawker was instrumental in obtaining a royal declaration for this second volume of work, and for recruiting the subscribers that were needed to publish it. 

James Orchard Halliwell was a man of very different enthusiasms; coming from a privileged background as the son of a wealthy draper, he was educated at Cambridge and before the age of twenty had published many learned articles in the arts, science and literature journal, The Parthenon. He secured the friendship of a noted bibliophile, Sir Thomas Phillipps, and befriended his daughter Henrietta, later proposing marriage to her. He was then involved in a scandal in which he was suspected of having stolen valuable manuscripts from Trinity College. No prosecution could be made, but Halliwell was banned from the British Library, and Phillipps refused to give his consent to their marriage. The pair eloped in 1842. 

James Halliwell was in his early forties when he visited Penzance on a holiday with his wife and children. It was 1861, and Blight’s ‘A Week at the Lands End’ had just been published. Henrietta Halliwell referred to it constantly during their travels around West Penwith, and it’s likely that they also referred to his volumes on Ancient Crosses and Antiquities. Halliwell wrote and published his own ‘Rambles in Western Cornwall’ shortly after. It is interesting to compare the two ‘travelogues’, and easy to imagine Blight’s straightforward and informational little book being mined for information by the older, more worldly, Halliwell.  In comparison ‘Rambles’ seems decidedly quaint in appearance, but would have received a far wider, wealthier and influential audience at the time.

Preface page to Halliwell’s Rambles in Western Cornwall

Hearing of Halliwell’s visit, and desperate for the opportunity to better himself through his talents, Blight contacted him to offer his services as an illustrator. 

The following year brought John Blight the opportunity to work for this illustrious and successful client. He was neither an experienced negotiator nor a man of the world like his future employer, and entered into what, to our eyes today, appears to have been a one-sided arrangement in which Blight worked obsessively to record Shakespeare’s birthplace (Halliwell’s perennial project) in return for being an occasional guest on holiday trips and at the Halliwell’s home, and expenses incurred when working in Stratford.  Being a quiet and sensitive man, he was initially stimulated by the attention and genuine affection he received, and felt unable to demand what he was rightly due. The Shakespeare volumes materialised slowly, never repaying the amount of work Blight had put into over 600 drawings and etchings that he had, in his enthusiasm, given over directly to Halliwell. 

In successive years Blight’s reputation as an archaeologist grew, but it was not an occupation that attracted a regular income. Overwork and desperation about money contributed to John Blight’s breakdown which began in 1868, and his attachment to a local woman, Evelina Pidwell seems also to have contributed to his downfall. James Halliwell became aware of his friend’s struggles when he began to write desperate letters asking for commissions, but choosing to ignore the signs, Halliwell eventually threatened to ‘cut’ him. Only when Blight’s father wrote to him explaining the difficulties they were experiencing as a family, did Halliwell show any concern for the artist. It is significant that James Halliwell was among those responsible for setting up a fund to pay for Blight’s confinement at Bodmin asylum, and was undoubtedly one of those alluded to in this letter from the St Lawrence

Hospital Management Committee, dated 1968, to a Blight researcher:

 “…when he was admitted…the Form of Guarantee signed by Robert Blight and Thomas Cornish was for one month only…However, from the correspondence it would appear that interested people or relatives were making arrangements for a further Guarantee of a longer duration”. (Extract from letter to Miss M Ingleden, 12 February 1968)

Writer John Mitchell (A Short Life at Lands End, 1977), deeply sympathetic to John Blight’s story, concluded:

 “Blight’s ‘death to the world’, as Halliwell put it, took place with his committal to the Asylum when he was thirty-five, his active life was indeed a short one. Halliwell’s carefully ambiguous phrase, which occurs in the introduction to his Calendar*, printed in 1887, gives a clue to how matters stood at the time. He was surely aware that Blight lingered on at Bodmin, yet he said nothing. Evidently he, Parker, Boase and others were parties to an agreement, tacit or formal, that …Blight should be considered as not only dead to the world but dead and buried.“ 

*A Calender of the Shakespearean Rarities, Drawings and Engravings formerly preserved at Hollingbury Copse, near Brighton, 1887, refers to the work of Halliwell and Blight in recording architecture contemporary with Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon and elsewhere, with a long list of Blight’s drawings in Halliwell’s possession.

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