Joseph Viscomi *
In
“William Blake's ‘The Phoenix’: A Problem in Attribution,” Robert N. Essick
argues that “The Phoenix / to Mrs Butts,” a manuscript poem discovered in 1981
and first attributed to Blake by Geoffrey Keynes (illus. 1), was indeed written
by
Blake for Mrs. Butts and is not a forgery, as Morton Paley and David Bindman
had suspected (“Phoenix” 366). [1] Essick bases his argument on the
bibliographical and technical features of the work, and not on the style of the
poem or the provenance of the artifact, though he uses the provenance to
support his conclusion. And therein lies a potential problem, for the
provenance given to Keynes by the poem's owner is impossible. A mistaken
provenance does not necessarily mean that the artifact is bogus, but it does
raise red flags. In this brief note, I argue that “The Phoenix” is authentic
and the provenance mistaken because two families directly connected to Thomas
Butts have been unknowingly conflated. Only one of these families, however, is
known to Blake scholars, and thus by correcting the provenance of a minor work,
I hope also to shed light on Blake's patron, his patron’s family, and the way
in which works from the Butts collection were distributed. (These are the
subjects of two forthcoming studies.)
Keynes,
the first to record the provenance, identifies the
owner
. . . [as] Mr Owen D. Long, resident in Wales. It came to him through his
grandmother, whose maiden name was Mary Anne North, daughter of Mrs North,
formerly Miss Cooper, who by her second marriage became Mrs Butts. I had not
been aware that she, born Cooper, had made a previous marriage as Mrs North,
and this is all that the owner knows of his descent, but it is quite plain that
the document signed William Blake and addressed 'To Mrs Butts' has been traced
to its authentic origin (1021).
The
idea that Mrs. Butts had been previously married may have been news to Keynes,
but it was first noted by Bentley in “Thomas Butts, White Collar Maecenas”
(1053n7). Bentley infers the second marriage from the fact that Butts, in his
will (p. 8), bequeathed rings and ten pounds to “Mary Ann the wife of my said
son Thomas Butts a Ring of the value of nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and
six pence . . . to Mrs Maria North, the daughter-in-law of my said wife
[Elizabeth], to Mr Charles Long, to Mrs Mary Anne Long his wife and who is a
daughter of my wife, to Mr Henry Baker and to Mrs Caroline Matilda Baker
his wife, who
is also a daughter of my wife.” [2] From this passage,
specifically the mention of a daughter-in-law named North, Bentley reasonably
inferred that Mrs. Butts
was married to a Mr. North before marrying Butts. [3] In the will, Butts does not mention his
wife's maiden or married name, but Burke's
and Ada Briggs identify her as Elizabeth Cooper (93).
The
will implies that Butts married a woman who had previously been married. Bentley
and Essick reasonably assumed that the will's Elizabeth is Elizabeth Cooper and
that she had married a Mr. North before
marrying Butts and thus was the mother of the Butts children as well as the
mother of the North children. But if her children with Mr. North came before
those with Butts, then they were born before or no later than 1783, since
Joseph Edward Butts, Butts' eldest child, was born 4 February 1784 (Burke's). If so, Owen Long's math fails
to add up. It is nearly impossible for a daughter of Mrs. Butts born before
1783 to have a grandchild living in 1981. [4]
At
first glance, only Owen Long's math and not the lineage itself appears
incorrect. Either Mary Ann Long was Owen Long's great grandmother—that is, at least one remove more than he imagined—or
she was born after the Butts children.
But
in fact it is the lineage and not only the chronology that he has confused. According
to the International
Genealogy Index (IGI), Mary Ann Long was Mary Ann Delanney,
baptized 25 January 1802 and married to Charles Long on 24 November 1827 in the
parish of St.
Pancras, Euston Road, London. Her mother was Elizabeth Delanney, who married
Thomas Butts on 15 June 1826 in the parish of St. Pancras, which, according to
Butts's will (p. 6), is his parish. The record in the marriage register of St.
Pancras (illus. 2) provides the proof that the groom is Blake's patron:
Thomas
Butts of this Parish Widower and Elizabeth Delauney of this Parish Widow were
married in this Church by Licence . . . this fifteenth Day of June in the Year
One thousand eight hundred and Twenty Six By me J. Brackenbury Curate. This
Marriage was solemnized between us Thos. Butts [and] Elizth Delauney In the
presence of John G Fearn[,] Mary Ann Delauney [,] Caroline M Delauney. [5]
The
names of the female witnesses prove that the widower is Blake's patron. As
noted, in his will Butts identifies Mary Ann Long and Caroline Matilda Baker
as
“daughters of his wife,” and Mary Ann's maiden name was Delauney (or
Delanney). Further search through the
IGI reveals that Caroline Matilda Delauney (or Delanney) married Henry Baker
in the Parish of St. Pancras, Euston Road on 24 June 1837. [6] Their
mother, the widow
Elizabeth Delauney, had married Peter Delauney in the
church of St. George, Hanover Square, Westminister, on 25 October 1791.
Elizabeth's maiden name was Davis. Her daughter Caroline's birth and
christening dates are not recorded in IGI (which means that it most likely
occurred in one of the many parishes that have yet to enter the IGI).
The
“Elizabeth Butts” mentioned in Butts's will was his second wife and not
Elizabeth Cooper, the mother of his children and the woman, according to
Briggs, known as “Betsy.” [7] This second marriage solves a minor mystery
in Blake studies: Mrs. Butts's age at the time of her death and the place of
her death. Her obituary in the Gentleman's
Magazine for February 1852 records her as having died as 24 December 1851
at 81 years, implying a birth year of 1770. This is much too late for Elizabeth
Cooper—unless she married Butts when she was still a child, or lied about her
age when she died. The birth year, however, is consistent with Elizabeth
Delauney. The obituary also records her dying outside her own home, “In Upper
Gower St,” despite being the “relict of Thomas Butts, esq. of Grafton-st.” She
apparently died at the home of her daughter Caroline Baker, who lived with her
husband Henry, an architect, at 11 Upper Gower Street. In the 1840s, the Bakers
lived at 25 Grafton Street, a few doors down from the Butts’s at 17 Grafton.
Upon
Butts's death in 1845, Tommy Butts inherited the Grafton residence and,
according to the will, Mrs. Butts was required to vacate the premises three
months after her husband's death (p. 2). She apparently moved in with her
daughter Caroline.
Mrs.
Delauney, if 81 when she died, was around 56 when she married Butts. Butts has
been mistakenly believed to have been born in 1757 (Bentley “Butts” 1052) and
thus Blake's exact contemporary. But he was the third son named Thomas born to
Thomas Butts and Hannah Witham. The first was baptized on 13 March 1746, the
second on 12 July 1756, and the third, born 15 December 1759, was baptized on
9
January 1760. [8] Apparently, the first two children died in
infancy. [9] Hence, he was two years younger than Blake
and
was 66 years old at the time of his second marriage, with all of his children
gone, but possibly with a new
stepdaughter, Caroline Matilda Delauney, still at home. [10]
The
second marriage of Butts supports—though only barely—Owen Long's claim that he
inherited “The Phoenix” from his grandmother, Mary Ann Long, since she was born
to Butts's second rather than first wife, in 1802 rather than before 1783. [11] The second marriage, however, also refutes
Long's lineage, because Elizabeth Delauney's maiden name was Davis and not
North, and there is no record of her ever marrying a North between Peter
Delauney (1791) and Thomas Butts (1826). She was remarried as Mrs. Delauney,
and her daughter Mary Ann was also married as a Delauney.
Where,
then, does Owen Long come up with the name Mary Ann North? Did Mr. Long know
Bentley's article, which mentions that Mrs. Butts was born Elizabeth Cooper and
was previously married to a Mr. North (1053n7)? Did he, in other words, deliberately construct a false
provenance? Like Essick (“Phoenix” 376), I think this is unlikely, since
Bentley recorded the long “L” of “Long” as an “S,” which it very closely
resembles, and thus identified the daughter-in-law as Mary Ann Song. If Owen
Long read Bentley, then he would have not found the name Long. For that he
would have had to examine the original will and correct what the trained eye of
one of Blake studies most astute scholars missed. No, we are not dealing with a
very sophisticated forgery. Admittedly, my suspicion of the provenance made me
suspect forgery and forced me to examine the will and the poem. I can verify that the surname is “Long” (as
Bentley also now acknowledges) and, after a close inspection of the poem, that
I believe it was written—both invented and executed on paper—by Blake. The only
conclusion, then, is that Owen Long's memory played tricks on him, that he
conflated various people in Butts's first and second families into one direct
descendent. According to Keynes, the poem's provenance was “all that the owner
knows of his descent.” Apparently, Mr. Long knew even less than that.
Did
his grandmother Mary Ann Long marry a Mr. North after 1845, the year Butts's
will was proved? While possible, it seems too much of a coincidence that Mrs.
Delauney Butts's “daughter-in-law” was also named Maria North. One possible explanation for Long's mixing
up Long and North is suggested by the marriage of Cornelius Delaney and Mary
Ann Mickeburg in the Parish of St. Pancras, Euston Road, in 1829. This is the
parish of Butts and the Delauneys, which suggests that Cornelius may have been
a son of Elizabeth and Peter Delauney (the name was not common in any of its
spellings). If so, then Mary Mickeburg would be Mrs. Delauney Butts's
daughter-in-law, Mary (or Maria). She may have remarried a Mr. North before
1844, when Butts wrote his will, and have been referred to by her new married
name. Owen Long may have confused his great aunt Mary Delaney-North with his
grandmother, Mary Ann Delauney Long. If Long knew his grandmother, born in
1802, he would have been very young and she very old. It seems more likely that
they had never met. Family lore may have conflated the two Marys, who were
sister-in-laws. A similar kind of conflation has happened in Blake studies with
the two Elizabeth Butts’s, Ms. Cooper and Ms. Delauney.
Knowing
that the Elizabeth of Butts's will is his second wife forces us to re-examine
not only the poem's provenance but also its date. Was “The Phoenix / to Mrs
Butts” written for the first Mrs. Butts, c. 1800-03, when he wrote the Butts’s
regularly and even composed another poem to Mrs. Butts (E 714)? Or was it addressed to the second Mrs. Butts, c. 1826-27—a
comment on the second and resurrected marriage bed?
The
poem's visual style does not rule out a late date. The text was written in blue
ink and gone over in four colors, giving it a multi-colored appearance not
unlike that of The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell copy H, which was first printed in c. 1790 but finished in Blake's
late coloring style with the text rewritten in colored inks, presumably in c.
1821 for John Linnell. No other work produced in the 1790s has this much
rewriting in colored inks, but nearly all early copies of The Book of Thel and many plates in the early copies of Songs of Innocence have texts that were
rewritten in matching and sometimes nonmatching colored inks to salvage a
poorly printed line (see Viscomi, Book
ch. 15). The lettering in the motto of early copies of Thel (e.g., B, E, and G, among others) was touched up in colored
inks for purely decorative purposes. So the rewriting of text per se is not out
of place c. 1800-03. Indeed, the poem, placed under a flying figure and bird
and between a thin willowy tree and cascading tendrils, looks like a page from Innocence or Thel (illus. 3); the writing, drawing, and 
rewriting seem of a
piece. The difference between this private poem and Blake's public works is
that it was executed on paper and is truly a unique manuscript, and not on
copper, where such poems exist as “printed manuscript” (Essick, Language 170).
Essick
dates the poem c. 1794 not only because of its resemblance to early illuminated
pages (“Phoenix” 377), but also because Gilchrist states that Butts probably
met Blake as early as 1793 (1: 115). But Gilchrist offers no evidence for his
claim, and a meeting this early seems very unlikely. The facts that four of
Butts's 10 illuminated books were acquired from Cumberland's auction of 1835
(Bentley, Blake Books 657), that
three of them were produced after 1810 (Milton,
Ghost of Abel, and a posthumous copy
of Jerusalem), that one, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
copy E, was purchased in 1806, and that two early works, Thel copy L and Marriage of
Heaven and Hell copy F, were acquired at unknown dates and are without
receipts—and possibly not acquired by Butts (see Viscomi “Marketplace
1852”)—strongly suggest that patron and artist had met after Blake's great
period of illuminated printing, 1789-95. Blake's first reference to Butts is
in
a letter to Cumberland in 1799, where he is presumably the patron paying Blake
one guinea apiece for the biblical temperas (Keynes, Letters 11). [12] Blake began writing the Butts’s only when he
left London for Felpham, between 1800 and 1803. The poem was probably written
during this period, when he wrote poems to Butts, Mrs. Butts, Flaxman, and Mrs.
Flaxman (see Erdman 707-23, 733). Mr. Butts also wrote Blake a poem, included
in a September 1800 letter, explicitly acknowledging his affection for
Catherine Blake and Blake's affection for Mrs. Butts—acknowledgements not
without double entendres (see Keynes, Letters
25-27). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the couplets of Blake's other
verses have three or five beats to the line, whereas those of “The Phoenix”
have four, the same number of accents as in the couplets of Thomas Butts's poem
to Blake (Keynes, Letters 26-7). [13]
“The
Phoenix” was probably written c. 1800-03 to Mrs. Cooper Butts. After she died,
the poem appears to have come into the possession of Butts’s second wife. In
his will, he bequeaths “all articles of plate jewelry trinkets and furniture
whether useful or ornamental whatsoever which belonged to her at the time of
our marriage or which I may have since presented her with” (p. 1). Or perhaps
the poem was simply “inherited” by or left over for the new Mrs. Butts, who gave
it to her married daughter, Mary Ann Long, whom Owen Long misidentified as Mary
Anne North, possibly confusing her with a great aunt. This minor poem's
provenance reveals that Butts’s family was more extended than previously
realized and demonstrates how works of Blake's—especially those of little
monetary value in the mid-nineteenth century, including watercolors selling at
auction for less than or only slightly more than the original purchase price of
one pound—could exit the Butts collection through members of Butts’s second
family and not solely through Thomas Butts, Jr. Knowing now that Mr. Long's claim may be a bit confused but at
least plausible strengthens the argument that other works exited in like manner,
including ( as I discuss in the forthcoming articles, “Blake in the Marketplace
1852” and “A ‘Green House’ for Butts”) a collection of Blake's illuminated
books, illustrated books, and watercolors that was sold anonymously at
Sotheby's in March 1852, and a collection of biblical watercolors and half the
1808 series of Paradise Lost that
sold at Sotheby's in June 1852 as part of Charles Ford's collection.
1. William Blake, “The Phoenix / To Mrs Butts,” c. 1800-03. Courtesy of the
British Library.
2. Marriage Register for Thomas Butts and Elizabeth Delauney, St. Pancras Parish,
1826.
3. William Blake, “The Phoenix / To Mrs Butts,” detail, c. 1800-03. Courtesy
of the British Library.
Bentley,
G. E. Jr. “Thomas Butts, White Collar
Maecenas.” PMLA 71 (1956): 1052-66.