New Information Concerning Mrs Enoch, William and Catherine Blake's 'Fellow Inhabitant' at 17 South Molton Street

Abstract

ON 14 January 1804, shortly after returning to London from his trial for sedition at the Epiphany Quarter Sessions at Chichester, William Blake wrote a letter to his patron William Hayley. From his two-room apartment on either the first or second floor of 17 South Molton Street, Oxford Street in the parish of St George, Blake wrote: My poor wife has been near the Gate of Death as was supposed by our kind & attentive fellow inhabitant. the young & very amiable Mrs Enoch. who gave my wife all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother but my arrival has dispelld the formidable malady & my dear & good woman again begins to resume her health & strength –1 1 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, new rev. edn, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982) (hereinafter referred to as E), 740. 2 See Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London, 1945), 175; Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (Oxford, 1971), 204; G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise; A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London, 2001), 260; G. E. Bentley, Blake Records: Second Edition (New Haven and London, 2004) (hereinafter referred to as BR 2), n; 750. 3 G. E. Bentley Jr has suggested the possibility of a connection between the presence of Mrs Enoch and Blake's separate lithograph of Enoch, c. 1807 (see BR 2, 750).