Abstract
This chapter explores the revived interest in Perks as part of the upsurge in interest in the supernatural post-1760 both in London and Bristol, linked to newspaper coverage of the Cock Lane Ghost in London and the Lamb Inn witchcraft in Bristol. It explores the links of Behmenists, including Quakers and Methodists, who collected and published stories involving spirits (and manuscripts from William Law and Dionysius Freher), and how the familiar spirit in Perks and a magical tree became central to the story. Links to Hutchinsonianism, antiquarianism and the Rowley controversy are explored through George Catcott.
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Notes
Douglas Grant, The Cock Lane Ghost (1965)
E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 13–32
Paul Chambers, The Cock Lane Ghost (Stroud, 2006).
Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World (2007) (pp. 80–107 discusses Veal)
Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (New York, 2007).
BCL 20095. For Dyer see Jonathan Barry, ‘Piety and the Patient’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 145–75
Barry (ed.), The Diary of William Dyer (Bristol Record Society, 64, 2012).
Baxter, Certainty, pp. 155–6, retold by Thomas Frost, The Lives of the Conjurors (1870) p. 99.
Raphael [Robert Cross Smith], The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century (“seventh edition” 1825), pp. 528–30.
This is repeated in Lauron William De Laurence, Old Book of Magic (1918), p. 307 and from that in ‘Little Men with Axes: Fairies or Clever Conjuring?’ available at https://www.facebook.com/BroomsticksCrossing/posts/1306 050042866875.
His sister Mary (d. 1742) had married Charles Harford (1704–46) in 1738. Their only son was named Joseph (1741–1802) and his only son, Charles Joseph Harford of Stapleton Grove (1764–1830), no longer a Quaker, who was educated at Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn, a J.P. and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, preserved the Beck family papers. Alice Harford, Annals of the Harford Family (1909).
Barry, Diary, p. 169; BRO 39041/1–7; C.H.B. Elliott, Winterbourne, Gloucestershire (Bath, 1970), pp. 119–20
Madge Dresser (ed.), The Diary of Sarah Fox (Bristol Record Society, 55, 2003), pp. 8–9, 119, 136, 201.
Barry, Diary, pp. 73, 86–7, 98–9, 208–9; Johann Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (New York, 1847), pp. 83–4
Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of the Celebrated Divine and Theosopher William Law (1861 edition), p. 507
A.D. Selleck, Cookworthy (Plymouth, 1978), p. 96.
Paul Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts (New Haven and London, 2013), p. 207.
Charles Wesley wrote to his brother John on 28 November 1779, regarding a dispute about authority within methodism, that ‘Old Brother Dyer’ told him that he ‘heard the spirit say “Obey those who have the rule over you”’, but this probably referred to the Holy Spirit rather than an individual spirit. M.A. Smith, Raithby Hall (1859), p. 8.
Walton, Notes, pp. 158, 593, 602, 604, 608, 620–2, 687; Desiree Hirst, Hidden Riches (1964), pp. 237, 246, 254–5.
On this tradition see C.D.A. Leighton, ‘William Law, Behmenism and Counter-Enlightenment’, Harvard Theological Review, 91:3 (1998), 301–20
B.J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought (Cambridge, 1996); id., Spirituality and the Occult (2001).
Jonathan Barry, Methodism and the Press in Bristol 1737–1775 (Wesley Historical Society, Bristol Branch, bulletin 64, 1992), p. 9; Walton, Notes, pp. 141–2, 175–6, 595–7, 622, 685–7.
Michael Neve and Roy Porter, ‘Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology’; British Journal for the History of Science, 9 (1977), 37–60
C.B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ History of Science, 18 (1980), 1–24
B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1998)
C.D.A. Leighton, ‘Hutchinsonianism’ Journal of Religious History, 23:2 (1999), 168–84
D.S. Katz, ‘The Occult Bible’, in James Force and Richard Popkin (eds), The Millenarian Turn (Dortrecht, 2001), pp. 119–33
Derya Gurses, ‘The Hutchinsonian Defence of the Old Testament Trinitarian Christianity’ History of European Ideas 29 (2003), 393–409.
E.H.W. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton (1930), pp. 135–9, 150, 450–4, 477–9, 488
Jonathan Barry, ‘Chatterton in Bristol’ Angelaki 1:2 (winter 1993/4), 55–81
Nick Groom, ‘Fragments, Reliques and MSS’, in id. (ed.) Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 188–209.
BCL 4756; Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop (Oxford, 2007), pp. 252–3.
WB. Davis, ‘Music Therapy in Victorian England’, Music Therapy Perspectives 7 (1989), 17–22
H.P. Tyler, ‘Frederick Kill Harford’ Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 11:1 (2002), 39–42. Parts of his library, including manuscripts, were sold by Sotheby’s in 1899.
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© 2013 Jonathan Barry
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Barry, J. (2013). The Second Phase: Bristol and London 1760–79. In: Raising Spirits: How a Conjuror’s Tale Was Transmitted across the Enlightenment. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378941_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378941_4
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