J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

WESLEY’S LAST YEARS
During this part of his career Samuel Wesley seems to have been able to
sustain the momentum of his many activities—as composer, performer, organiser,
lecturer, and teacher—for several years. But in August 1816 he was kept from an
appointment with Novello by the serious illness of one of his children: ‘Our little Boy
is in so precarious a State that I much fear I must sacrifice the Pleasure I anticipated of
meeting you at Surrey Chapel To-morrow at one o’Clock.—However, should any
favourable Change take Place, I will be with you.—I must attend two Pupils in the
Neighbourhood of Cheapside, whatever may occur at Home; but still I should feel ill
disposed, or more properly totally disqualified for any musical Exertion of Energy, if
Death should happen.’ 119
Death did happen (nothing else, not even his name, is known of this son). It is
easy to assume that the high level of infant mortality must have inured parents against
such a common source of grief. Perhaps it did, much of the time. In this case,
however, the death precipitated the most prolonged and catastrophic mental
breakdown of Wesley’s life. It has recently been discovered that he was actually
committed to a private asylum for nearly a year in 1817-18. 120 Only after his recovery
in June 1818 was he able to begin picking up the scattered threads of his career once
again. Partly because the times were starting to pass him by, partly because his
network of professional connections had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, he was
never to rise again to the eminence he had reached around 1815. Nevertheless, he was
able to make a fair living picking up what work he could teaching, lecturing,
composing, and performing. An unexpectedly profitable windfall during these years
was his discovery in the Fitzwilliam Library of three tunes Handel had written for
119 Olleson, Letters, p.281.
120 M. Kassler and P. Olleson, Samuel Wesley (1766-1837): a sourcebook (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001),
pp.52-53, 77; Olleson, Wesley, pp.149-57; M. Kassler, ‘Samuel Wesley’s “madness” of 1817-18’,
History of psychiatry 14/4:56 (December 2003), 459-474.
194