Robert Hawes and the Millenium Press: A Political Micro-Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Spitalfields

Abstract

The micro-cultures of late eighteenth-century London are bewilder- ingly complex. The wider master narratives directed by perspectives such as those offered by Linda Colley or James Chandler, stressing patterns of conformities dictated by Protestant integration, or an apparently infinitely extendable “Spirit of the Age,” have promoted a fairly stratospheric and imperial view of history that is not much help at the level of ground- zero local contemporary culture. For example, unlikely though it may seem, London in 1789 accommodated at least two anti-Swedenborgian visionary authors who both worked in the city’s engraving trade. One of them was William Blake, the “mad” make-weight of respectable Romantic canonicity The other was William Bryan, a copper-plate printer, Society of Avignon illumine, receiver of visionary dictation and, with the ex-Swedenborgian carpenter John Wright, in later years a prominent follower of the prophet Richard Brothers. However finely they overlapped in 1789 by virtue of temporal location and common mentality, thereafter Blake’s and Bryan’s lives went in divergent directions. Whether we consider them marginal or central to their moment, both of them have to be regarded not only as symptomatic but also as constitutive of contemporary historical culture. Unfortunately, to adapt E. P. Thompson’s riposte to modern economic historians, they do not appear to have known they were only following the tram-lines of historical inevitability.³