Jose Maria (White) Blanco White (1775 - 1841)

Born 11 Jul 1775 in Seville, Spain

Died 20 May 1841 at age 65 in Liverpool, Lancashire, England

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Genealogy

Dissident Anglo-Spanish priest, essayist and poet

Birth name: José María Blanco y Crespo. Better known as Joseph Blanco White. (he, his father and grandfather freely switched between signing their names in English form and Spanish form).

His father was Guillermo Blanco Morrogh or William White y Morrogh. Guillermo was the son of an Irish immigrant to Spain, William White and a Spanish native of Irish ancestry, Ana Andrea Morrogh.

His mother was María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve.

He had a relationship, and a son with Magdalena Esquaya while still in Spain (she died 1816). He arranged for the child to be brought to England where he raised him and schooled him.

• Fernando Blanco Esquaya 1810-1856, known in England as Maj Ferdinand White CB, became a British army officer, married Henrietta Burnett, died in Dieppe.

See his Wikipedia page: Wikidata: Item Q3047406, en:Wikipedia but note the Spanish-language page has more detail.
Another general biography here: https://www.uudb.org/white-jose-maria-blanco/
Familysearch sources: Joseph's death was registered in the Apr-May-Jun quarter of 1841 in the West Derby district.^[1] José died on 20 May 1841 and was buried in Liverpool, Metropolitan Borough of Liverpool, Merseyside, England.

Find A Grave: Memorial #10580995

Joseph's son Ferdinnad White married Hennitta Patricia Douglas on 3 June 1844 in Bengal, India^[2]and died on 9 August 1856 in Dieppe, Seine-Inférieure, France.^[3]

Biography

— the following biography and sources for Joseph Blanco White focus primarily on his relationship to William Gifford and John Murray, editor and publisher, respectively, of the influential conservative periodical the Quarterly Review. The biography and sources are by Jonathan Cutmore, author of John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807-1843 (Liverpool University Press, 2019), from his Writing and Reading the Quarterly Review (manuscript, 2015), used by permission. Jonathan Cutmore (c) 2021

The irrepressible ex-priest Joseph Blanco White (born José María Blanco y Crespo), exiled from Spain for his dissident views, arrived in London in 1810. Within two years he had become a contributor to the influential London journal the Quarterly Review with the publication on 13 Aug. 1812, in Number 14, of a review of Walton’s Present State of the Spanish Colonies. The Quarterly's editor, William Gifford, who corrected White’s English and added material to bring White’s contribution ‘down to the present day’, paid White a great complement by putting the article at the head of the issue.

In factually detailed, crisp prose, White expressed the desire that agitation for the political independence of the Spanish colonies should cease; while hostilities with the French continued stability was needed in Spanish affairs. Earlier in the year Southey, who was enamoured of White’s anti-clericalism and had become one of his literary sponsors, made use of White’s influential periodical El Español (1810-1815) in his article on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, in Number 12 (article #169). (White himself referred to El Español in his review of Walton.) More than ten years passed before White’s second article appeared, a review, published on 27 Sept. 1823 in Number 57, of Quin’s A Visit to Spain. This time Gifford placed it in the privileged final position in the number, which he generally reserved for authoritative statements on domestic and foreign policy.

As a Canningite journal, the Quarterly should not have been an appealing venue for White during his strenuously anti-Catholic phase. Southey’s participation in the journal, though, confused the Quarterly’s position on Roman Catholic Emancipation. Though Gifford would not let Southey or White write directly against Emancipation, he was willing to permit them to criticize continental varieties of the Catholic faith as superstitious and authoritarian. After all, one of the purposes of the Quarterly was to defend the Christian constitution and the nation’s orthodox Protestant character in part by combating religious enthusiasm. So it was that Gifford let White conjure up the horrors of the Inquisition and propagandize in favour of Protestantism in his 1823 review of Quin: ‘It is a trite observation that where Catholic and Protestant states are contiguous, the superior condition of the latter appears with irresistible evidence’ (p. 260), White wrote. White epitomizes his survey of Spanish Catholic intolerance of Jews, Muslims, and Protestants in sentences that could be introductory to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’: An Auto de Fe has always been considered in Spain as a triumph of true Christianity, where, if the view of the sufferers may now and then start a tear, the heart, rejoicing in the complete victory of the church, forgets the ties which bind it to the victims. Hence the custom of performing these exhibitions on the greatest festivals, and welcoming the sovereign … with a solemn burning of God’s enemies. (p. 252)

In 1825 Robert Southey and John Coleridge convinced White to publish some works against Roman Catholic Emancipation and to contribute his third and last article for the Quarterly, a review of a novel, Don Esteban, or Memoirs of a Spaniard. The article appeared in Dec. 1825, at the end of Coleridge’s brief tenure as editor. In his review, White claims to believe that the book was written by ‘some one of our English third-rate Novel writers’, although he must have known that its author was his fellow Spanish émigré Valentin Llanos-Gutierrez. Among other colourful criticisms, White accuses the author of braggadocio and a ‘want of accurate vision’. The author (Llanos-Gutierrez) shares, White claims, ‘the unconquerable propensity of all his countrymen to see things, not as they are, but as they most flatter their vanity’ (p.213). This ‘spirit of rhodomontade’—White calls it a ‘national defect’—has become even more pronounced ‘in these their days of national wretchedness … a morbid symptom peculiar, we believe, to all retrograde nations, but most remarkably exhibited in the Spaniards’ (pp.208-209). White attacks the author as a fraud: Unpleasant as our observations must be to him, they have not been written with half the severity with which literary deceptions of this kind should be visited. Disguise and fiction are certainly allowable. … But such assurances of reality as are prefixed to this book, make the deception practiced not only an offence in literature, but in morals. (p. 217)

There are reasons to think that the Quarterly's publisher, John Murray, and its second editor, John Taylor Coleridge, had ulterior motives in letting White loose on this particular novel. Henry Colburn, who published all of Llanos-Gutierrez’s books, was in some respects a rival to John Murray. Like Murray, Colburn catered to the upper crust; he also had a number of sometime Quarterly Review writers in his stable, including Maturin and Barrett; and Gifford in the Quarterly was engaged in a running feud with one of Colburn’s important authors, Lady Morgan. Probably Coleridge was aware, too, that Llanos-Gutierrez had married John Keats’s sister. With that knowledge Coleridge would have identified the Spaniard with the Shelley-Hunt circle, a set of writers he could not abide. Coleridge’s visceral disdain for the Satanic and Cockney schools may explain his allowing White to emulate the ‘semisavage conduct of the Edinburgh Review’ rather than the ‘candour, moderation, and liberality’ that he claimed to prefer (QR Letter 264). In any case, thus provoked, Llanos-Gutierrez replied in a pamphlet, published by Colburn of course, a Letter from a Spaniard (the author of Don Esteban) to the editor of the Quarterly Review (1826).

White’s tortuous struggle with the Christian faith in a round-about way eventually caused him to put down roots in Oxford, at Oriel College, the heart of the liberal or Broad Church wing of the English church. There he associated with the Noetics, Copleston, Whately, and Senior, Quarterly reviewers all. Copleston arranged that White should receive the MA degree and be supplied with a residence and an honorary position in the college. He lived at Oxford for six years, from 1826 to 1832. While he was there White edited the short-lived London Review (1828), the Noetics’ set up when John Gibson Lockhart locked them out of the Quarterly Review.

Sources

1. ↑ Death Registration: "England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007"
   citing Death, West Derby, Lancashire, England, General Register Office, Southport, England
   FamilySearch Record: 2NX8-ZT1 (accessed 23 November 2023)
   Joseph Blanco White death registered Apr-May-Jun 1841 in West Derby.
2. ↑ Marriage of son Ferdinnad White: "India Marriages, 1792-1948"
   citing Digital film/folder number: 005137016; FHL microfilm: 498982; Record number: 203; Packet letter: A
   FamilySearch Record: FGNQ-MVM (accessed 23 November 2023)
   Joseph Blance White's son Ferdinnad White marriage to Hennitta Patricia Douglas on 3 Jun 1844 in Bengal, India.
3. ↑ Death of son Ferdinand White: "France, Seine-Maritime, Civil Registration, 1793-1879"
   citing Digital film/folder number: DI0001082
   FamilySearch Record: 62H9-H7D5 (accessed 23 November 2023)
   Blanco White in death record for son Ferdinand White 9 Aug 1856 in Dieppe, Seine-Inférieure, France.

• Oxford Historical Society (The Oxford Historical Society, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892) Vol. 22: "Reminiscences of Oxford by Oxford Men. 1559-1850", Page 202-11

• J. White. Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White (1845)

• National Library of Scotland, John Murray Archive.

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

• J. H. Thom, ed., The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White (3 vols, 1845).

• J. B. White, Autobiografía de Blanco White, ed. and trans. A. Garnica (1988).

• M. Murphy, Blanco White: Self-banished Spaniard (1989).

• E. R. Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence (2003).