Gopsall, Leicestershire, 1739
Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot. An ancestor had leveled forests and pried up ore, and within two generations the family had spun pig iron into gold. There were servants and a well-laid table, carriages and gentlemanly privileges, profusion upon profusion. One of his detractors would label him “Solyman the Magnificent,” holding court like an Ottoman sultan in a London town house and a country home in the English Midlands. But on the cusp of forty, past midlife for his time and place, he was more like a provincial Saul, the brooding warrior-king, fleeing from the Philistines across a battlefield of ghosts.
Charles Jennens was, by his own reckoning, “puny.” He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends. Most of the people he held in regard would precede him in death, including the man to whom he would make his only discernible statement of love. His smallest agitations could balloon into obsessions. In his will, written and revised as his designated heirs died off one by one, he instructed his executor to return “all the Books in the Cases on that side of the little Room…which fronts towards the Windows, and all the Books in the Narrow Slip between the said Room and the Closet” to the person who had left them there. His Anglican parish priest would sum up his infirmities as “an impetuosity of temper,” “an extreme lowness and depression of spirits,” and “violent perturbations and anxieties of the mind.”
Jennens was born in 1700, at the dawn of a century that would be remembered as an age of rationality and progress. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were still a fresh discovery. The astronomer Edmond Halley was working to chart a particular comet’s fierce reliability. In smoky coffeehouses and on the printed page, philosophers and pamphleteers debated the revolutionary claim that the best government was one founded not on the will of God but on a people’s right to be governed well.
Jennens’s own outlook, however, was a ledger book of worries. By the time he reached adulthood, whatever opinions he held about the future arose from one unshakable conviction: that his life coincided with a wrong turn in national affairs and the initial stages of his country’s inevitable decline. On any street, in any town, the fetid churn of modern living was on ready display: men whittled down by politics and faction, country girls painting themselves into city courtesans, public executions, animals tortured for a laugh, wailing children abandoned to their fate. To anyone really paying attention, Jennens sometimes felt, the sum of public life—political conspiracies and scandals, economic scheming, one foreign war bleeding into the next, and all of it amplified by sensational reports in things that printers had recently named “News-papers”—amounted to an ironclad argument in favor of despair.
“ ’Tis impossible for such a Wretch as I am, surrounded with so many circumstances of inconvenience, which stare me in the face which way soever I take my prospect,” he once wrote, “to determine with any certainty upon any Action of my Life.” But at Gopsall and in London, Jennens built a private sanctuary filled with evidence of what the world could be, rather than reminders of what it usually was. He piled up newly published books with marbled edges and calfskin binding. In his drawing rooms, he hung pictures by European masters, a gallery that would swell to some five hundred items. He filled cabinets with musical manuscripts sent directly from Venice and Rome, and played the pieces competently on a harpsichord or piano. He was guided by taste and passion, with a consuming desire to be carried away by objects of awe and beauty. In his darkest moments, they were a salvation, like lifelines flung from a receding ship.
One troubled season, surrounded by what had become one of Britain’s finest repositories of human creativity, Jennens started pulling down books from his library shelves. He spent days poring over them, scribbling notes, filling up fresh sheets of paper with a sharpened quill. He copied down quotations from the sacred scriptures, some from the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets, some from New Testament epistles. He linked up one passage with another, editing and rearranging them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text—the whole of it not so much a story as an archaeology of ancient promises, dug up and dusted off for the present.
What if the way to capture the uses of suffering and the mysteries of living, Jennens began to wonder, was to reenact them in a performance? Seeing the hidden order of things played out before your eyes could be a source of solace, he thought, but even more a route toward enlightenment, with the same direct effect that painting and music had on him. Page after page, what was emerging from Jennens’s notes was not a learned dissertation or dry essay but something entirely different: a kind of dramatized philosophy—a script even—visceral and affecting, expressed in words but also, he hoped, transcending them. It took discipline to spin sense out of the surrounding chaos, to imagine a better world and start walking toward it. Perhaps the best vehicle for doing so was not so much an argument as a demonstration.
Jennens could not be sure what, if anything, would become of his “Scripture Collection,” as he had started to call it. Even if he ever got around to sharing his vision with anyone, the result could well remain a private folly. He hoped that an aging London composer he called “the Prodigious” might be able to do something with it, he finally told a friend, especially if he could be persuaded to “lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions.” But then again, maybe not. The maestro’s “head is more full of Maggots than ever,” Jennens had complained a few years earlier.
Jennens’s idea would never bring him fame, which in any case he never seems to have sought. It would add nothing to his already substantial wealth. Even when the grand performance he first imagined eventually found an audience, few people would be able to name him as its source. Yet living differently required thinking differently, he was coming to sense, which is what he hoped his script would be able to show.
Committing his ideas to paper would end up being the most enduring act of Charles Jennens’s life, as well as the bravest. “The Subject,” he later wrote with a rare hint of excitement, “excells every other Subject.” At the heart of his work was not so much a statement of faith as a test of will—an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found hard to believe in.
It was the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right.