The Letter of Christ, a household charm against lightning and the perils of childbirth, printed in Birmingham by Joseph Russell, the ballad printer convicted in 1819 for selling Hone’s Political Litany

[EPISTOLA JESU AD AGBARUM]. A Copy of a Letter written by our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Birmingham: J. Russell, Printer, 22, Moor-street, [c. 1814–1830]. Broadside, about 350 x 240 mm, printed on one side within a border of cable ornaments. A large woodcut of the Crucifixion stands at the head, flanked by two italic panels telling how the letter was found under a great stone at the foot of the Cross, “eighteen miles from Iconium, fifty three years after” the Crucifixion. Below, in two columns, are the Letter of Jesus Christ, Christ’s Cures and Miracles, King Agbarus’s letter to Christ with Our Saviour’s Answer, and Lentulus’s Epistle to the Senate of Rome, with the imprint at the foot. Laid down on card.

The printer is Joseph Russell, at Moor Street from 1814, and the 22 Moor-street address is the one recorded for him in that year. We have located no other copy of this Birmingham edition in the catalogues of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the University of Birmingham or Harvard. Those libraries hold London editions by Evans, Howard and Evans, Catnach, Pitts and Batchelar, and Midlands printings of other dates and formats from Birmingham, Coventry and Dudley.

Notes

The text is the English popular form of the Letter from Heaven, the Sunday-observance letter attributed to Christ. It blesses those who keep and spread it and curses those who do not, and has been called “likely the oldest known form of a chain letter” (C. A. Miceli, e-Clavis, NASSCAL). In this version the letter lies under a stone at the foot of the Cross, inscribed with a blessing on whoever turns it over, until a child of six or seven turns it, and it is carried to Iconium. Owners are told to “keep it in their houses,” and the sheet promises that such a house will suffer no harm from lightning, pestilence or thunder and that a woman in labour who carries a copy will be safely delivered. Printed with it are the letters exchanged between Christ and King Abgar of Edessa, first reported by Eusebius, and the spurious description of Christ ascribed to Publius Lentulus. Of the Abgar letter William Hone wrote in 1820, following Jeremiah Jones, that the common people of England “have this Epistle in their houses, in many places, fixed in a frame, with the picture of Christ before it” (The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 62).

Joseph Russell (d. 1840) was a Birmingham bookbinder and printer of ballads and chapbooks whose business passed to his nephew Samuel Russell and then to Jackson and Son. In August 1819 he was convicted for selling Hone’s parody the Political Litany and sentenced to eight months, although a London jury had acquitted Hone himself. The Victoria County History records that “the pattern of such prosecutions was set by the conviction of Joseph Russell for selling Hone’s Political Litany.” The following year Hone published the Abgar letters in his Apocryphal New Testament. Russell’s text follows the London street sheets of Evans and Catnach, and he sets it under a large woodcut of the Crucifixion, with Christ haloed on the cross before hills and a domed building.

Very good. The sheet is browned and soiled and laid down on card. Splits along the central vertical fold and a horizontal fold, with small losses showing the card beneath, run through the heading, the lower part of the woodcut and the lower text, and surface wear dims a few lines of the right-hand column. The edges are frayed and chipped all round, with a strip lost from the right margin along most of its length, small losses at the other margins and a short tear at the upper left, all stopping short of the printed border. There is a stain in the upper margin. The ornamental border and the imprint are intact and the text remains readable.

References

British Book Trade Index, Russell, Joseph (Birmingham, 1811–1839); “Political History to 1832,” in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. VII, The City of Birmingham (London, 1964), pp. 270–97; Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica I.13; W. Hone, The Apocryphal New Testament (London, 1820), p. 62; R. Priebsch, Letter from Heaven on the Observance of the Lord’s Day (Oxford, 1936); W. R. Jones, “The Heavenly Letter in Medieval England,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 6 (1975), pp. 163–78; D. C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park, 2006); C. A. Miceli, “Epistle of Christ from Heaven,” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha (NASSCAL). Not in ESTC, which ends in 1800.

A protective Letter of Christ from Joseph Russell’s Moor Street shop, in a Birmingham edition we have not traced elsewhere.

Offered by Atelier Zweig LLC. Shipped insured, with signature on delivery.