John Thomas Blight
- Rob Vickery
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Why I Feel He Came Into My Life for a Reason
I have often thought that the books we find, especially the ones that arrive unexpectedly, cheaply, and almost carelessly discarded, come to us for a reason. That is how I feel about John Thomas Blight. A few days ago, I stumbled across his travelogue, A Week at the Land’s End, which I had purchased for a bargain basement price that felt almost criminal, given the man’s contribution to Cornish history.
When I held it in my hands, I felt the thrill of discovery, not just of the book itself but of the person behind it. Here was a man who, in the space of only a few years, recorded more of Cornwall’s archaeology, churches, and crosses than most people could hope to in a lifetime. A man who walked the cliffs and moors with a sketchbook in hand, leaving behind a body of work that remains invaluable today. And yet his name is rarely spoken. His life ended in obscurity, confined for decades in Bodmin’s asylum, his reputation fading until even publishers assumed he had long been dead.
The more I read Blight, the more I realised he may have come into my life now for a reason.
A Youth of Promise
John Thomas Blight was born in Redruth in 1835, the son of Robert and Thomasine Blight. Robert was a schoolmaster, a Methodist with a passion for nature, antiquities, and folklore. He moved the family to Penzance, where John and his younger brother Joseph grew up in an atmosphere of learning and curiosity.
Both brothers inherited their father’s talents. Joseph became an accomplished engraver. John became something rarer: a draughtsman with a near-obsessive love for the stones, crosses, castles, and churches of Cornwall. By the age of twenty, he had already published a book on the antiquities of Penwith, complete with his own drawings.
That book was only the beginning. Encouraged by figures such as the eccentric Reverend R. S. Hawker, Blight expanded his work into a two-volume series on Cornwall’s crosses and antiquities, one volume for the west in 1857, the other for the east in 1858. He quickly established himself as one of the county’s most promising young antiquarians.
What stands out is the urgency of his work. In the 1850s, Cornwall was changing. Mining boomed and declined, villages expanded, churches were “restored” in ways that stripped out medieval features. Many of the monuments Blight sketched were already crumbling, and others would vanish within decades. His instinct to capture them was nothing short of visionary.
A Week at the Land’s End
In 1861, Blight published the book that I happened to buy: A Week at the Land’s End. At first glance, it’s a travelogue, a guidebook for Victorian tourists eager to explore the romantic west. But it is also something deeper, a record of landscapes, rock formations, and castles, of folklore and faith.
When I turn its pages, I can almost feel Blight walking some of the paths I know well. He pauses over cliff castles such as Maen and Gurnard’s Head, barrows near Sancreed, ancient crosses at waysides and in churchyards. He pays close attention not only to stones but to stories, weaving in folklore, local legends, and antiquarian references.
His descriptions remind me that what I see today, the battered remains of fogous, the ivy-clad crosses, the churches with their Victorian pews, is only part of the story. He shows me what was once there, what has been lost, and what still lingers if you know how to look.
A Life of Struggle
Blight’s talent brought him patrons, but not security. He worked for James Orchard Halliwell, illustrating a life of Shakespeare, only to be left largely unpaid. He was admired by Hawker, yet their relationship soured. He published book after book, but the financial rewards were meagre.
In 1866, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a recognition of his skill and dedication. But by then, the cracks were already showing. He suffered a breakdown in the late 1860s, cared for at home until his family could no longer cope. In 1871, he was admitted to Bodmin’s asylum, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
It is heartbreaking to think of such a promising figure confined for four decades, remembered only in passing, his books slowly going out of print. By the 1880s, publishers even referred to him as “the late Mr Blight,” assuming he had died.
And yet, even within the asylum, Blight endured. Records show he was treated kindly, allowed to sketch, to go outside, even to visit excavations such as the Iron Age cemetery at Harlyn Bay in 1900. He may have been confined, but he never stopped observing, never fully abandoned the world he loved.
Blight Dies in Bodmin
John Thomas Blight FSA has breathed his last. The elder son of a Penzance schoolmaster, he had been raised to love antiquities and nature, to observe them with a close eye. He was a talented writer and artist whose quick wits earned him the respect of his elders while still in his teens. He inspired trust, was given responsibility for notes concerning discoveries at Chysauster, and even granted the rare honour of posing in clerical dress by the Reverend Hawker of Morwenstowe.
Blight was both author and artist. His Ancient Crosses and Other Antiquities of West Cornwall (1856) and A Week at the Land’s End (1861) still stand as his lasting contribution. His painting of the Beating of the Bounds ceremony preserved forever the collective memory of Penzance’s borough limits. He drew and wrote compulsively, almost as though driven by something beyond himself. He never made much money, but surely he had done enough to warrant recognition? Surely after such a life there would be fulsome obituaries, orations, and a ceremony?
And yet, Blight’s death on 23 January 1911 went almost entirely unremarked. Why? Because, as far as the world knew, he had already been dead for decades.
In 1871, aged only thirty-five, Blight was diagnosed with “softening of the brain” and committed to Bodmin Asylum. There he remained, out of sight, for the greater part of his life. At first, there were appeals. His contemporaries responded with sympathy, raising money to support him as a private patient. But when the funds dwindled, a “pauper lunatic ward” loomed. In 1883, the Royal Institution of Cornwall heard him described as a broken shell of a man: “though the hand still lives, the over-wrought brain is powerless to guide it.”
William Bolitho of Penzance launched an appeal to grant Blight a £40 annuity, a modest sum to lend him comfort. It was enough to keep him from the pauper wards, but only just. By then, references began to appear to “the late Mr J. T. Blight,” and short obituary notices were published. The world believed he had died.
But he had not.
He lived on at Bodmin for another twenty-seven years, unacknowledged, his survival known only to the asylum chaplain, perhaps the Bolitho family, and his brother Joseph. For the rest of the world, John Thomas Blight was already a ghost.
When he truly died on 23 January 1911, his death was subtly recorded by the chaplain of Bodmin Asylum. There was just a simple note in the records of a place most would rather forget.
The truth of Blight’s prolonged life after his “death” would not come to light until 1977, when the historian P. A. S. Pool of Penzance carefully pieced together the facts (see Morrab Library’s intern, Lisa Di Tommaso’s excellent paper on Blight: BLIGHT.pdf). Only then did the world realise the poignancy of his story: that a man who had done so much for Cornwall’s history had been written off as dead while still very much alive.
The Silence
What strikes me most about this story is the silence. For nearly three decades, Blight lived on in Bodmin, his existence unacknowledged. His contemporaries had once championed him, but as years passed they moved on, their memories of him fading into assumptions of his death.
How must it have felt for him to see references to himself as “the late J. T. Blight,” to know the world had buried him long before he was gone? Did he know? Or was he shielded from such knowledge within the walls of the asylum?
This silence is what makes me feel his presence so keenly. Because when I picked up his book, bought for a few pounds, I was not just buying a text. I was breaking that silence.
Rediscovery
It was not until the twentieth century that Blight’s life was reassessed. The historian Charles Thomas valued his contributions, reintroducing his work to a new audience. Selina Bates and Keith Spurgin’s biography The Dust of Heroes further restored his dignity, showing that his asylum years were not as bleak as once assumed—that he was treated kindly, allowed to sketch, even to attend excavations.
But it was P. A. S. Pool’s careful scholarship that revealed the most haunting truth: that Blight had lived on long after his supposed death, a forgotten man whose story challenges how we remember and value those who devote themselves to the past.
And perhaps this is why he has come into my life now. To remind me that silence is dangerous, that forgetting is easy, that even the most dedicated voices can be erased.
A Ghost in the Landscape
Blight’s story is ghostly in every sense. He recorded monuments that no longer stand. He himself was written off as dead decades before his actual death. He lived in the shadows of an institution, unseen and unheard, until the world caught up long after it was too late.
And yet, through his drawings and his words, he remains. I can now see him in the crosses at Sancreed, the cliff castles at Sennen, the churches of West Penwith. His hand still guides us, even if his life went uncelebrated.
I am going to be walking Kernow with his book in my bag.
Why I Think He Came Into My Life
When I think about why Blight came into my life now, I cannot help but feel the resonance.
I, too, have found myself obsessed with Cornwall’s past, the fogous, the cliff castles, the folklore. Like Blight, I am compelled to preserve stories before they vanish, to record details before they are lost. I recognise something of my own impulses in him: the mixture of creativity, antiquarian curiosity, and stubborn dedication to things that others dismiss as outdated.
His story also speaks to the fragility of creativity. Here was a man of immense talent, yet he struggled to make a living, was mistreated by patrons, and ended his life in an asylum. That injustice resonates, not as a cautionary tale but as a reminder to honour those who came before us, who laid the groundwork without reward.
I also see in Blight a reminder of how easily the past is forgotten. That he could be declared “late” while still alive, written off by his peers, reminds me how important it is to keep these voices alive, to speak their names, to share their work.
Sources:
Long-Vanished People: J.T. Blight Re-imagined in the Context of 19th Century Psychology by Lisa Di Tommaso (https://morrablibrary.org.uk/author/lisa/) | Feb 9, 2022. https://morrablibrary.org.uk/2022/02/long-vanished-people-j-t-blight-re-imagined-in-the-context-of-19th-century-psychology/
Kowethas Ertach Kernow: Cornish antiquarian, John Thomas Blight. https://www.cornwallheritage.com/ertach-kernow-blogs-2022-2023/ertach-kernow-cornish-antiquarian-john-thomas-blight/
Penwith Local History Group - Blight Does Bodmin: https://www.penwithlocalhistorygroup.co.uk/on-this-day/?m=January&d=23&id=23
A week at the Land's End by John Thomas Blight (Publication date 1861)
Ancient crosses and other antiquites in the west of Cornwall by John Thomas Blight
Ancient crosses and other antiquites in the east of Cornwall by John Thomas Blight
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