January 23rd John Thomas Blight (Death)
 

 

 

 

 

The Redruth-born John Thomas Blight FSA (1835 – 1911) was brought up in Penzance where his father, a teacher, had moved the family. 
He became a renowned antiquarian and artist having, by the age of 20, already published a survey of the antiquities of Penwith, ‘Ancient Crosses and Other Antiquities of West Cornwall’ (1856) and a collection of drawings. 

Blight expanded his initial book into two volumes and illustrated J.O. Halliwell’s 1851 edition of  Shakespeare's Works and also wrote a much-loved travel guide A Week at the Land’s End, (1861).

Tragically, Blight suffered a breakdown in 1871 and spent the remainder of his life, forty years, in Bodmin Lunatic Asylum where he died on this day in 1911.

                                   

Blight's sketch of St. Michael's Mount from the cover of his 'Ancient Crosses and Other Antiquities of West Cornwall'

 
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