Important dates and events in William Blake’s Life
B. was the third of 7 children (an older brother died in infancy); only brother James, his father’s namesake, Robert (younger by nearly 10 years), and sister Catherine figure in B.’s later life in any significant way.
It is puzzling that B. says so little and even much less that is positive about his siblings and parents. According to Frederick Tatham, a member of a group of young artists and spiritualists that called themselves the Ancients who devoted themselves to B. late in his life, James Blake, Sr. was a man “of moderate desires, moderate Enjoyments, & of substantial [moral] Worth, his disposition was gentled, & by all accounts his Temper amiable, & was by his Son’s description, a lenient & affectionate Father, always more ready to encourage than to chide” (Blake Records 508). Indeed, B.’s father excused him from the duties of the family business, kept him from school, purchased engravings and plaster casts for his private study, and paid his tuition to drawing school when B. was 10.
Tatham recalls B. representing his mother “as being possessed of all those Endearing Sympathies, so peculiar to maternal tenderness” (Blake Records 508). Another source says that B.’s mother encouraged his artistic proclivities, hanging the early verses and drawings of her son on the walls of her room.
His parents seem, from what little we know, to have indulged their unusual son. Thus, there is little to explain B.’s coolness toward his family. Akroyd says,
All the evidence suggests . . . that [B.’s] parents were more than usually affectionate and considerate. Theirs was a liberal household in every sense, and confirms that a Dissenting tradition could be maintained without the brooding pieties so extravagantly depicted by nineteenth-century novelists. There is no obvious reason for Blake’s later attempts to disown or to dismiss his parents as of no consequence in his own life. Yet he did always remember that they had once ‘threatened’ to beat him, and that they seemed to prefer another child over him; as we move from Broad Street into the greater world we will come to see how he remained deeply nervous and resentful of any authority, even when it took the most benign form. Perhaps that is why the children within his own poetry tend to be spirited, enraged, or simply afraid. He was a born antinomian whose obedience; the family itself, that first home for authority and the lessons of submission, was therefore something to be banished from his life and from his memory. It might be called egotism, solipsism, paranoia but, however it is defined, it remained the true soil of his genius. (Blake: A Biography 22-23)
Catherine Blake (B.’s wife, not his mother) relates these two stories: “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when your were four years old. And he put his head to the window and set you ascreaming.” And again, “even when a child his mother beat him for running in & saying that he saw the Prophet Ezekial under a tree in the fields.” (Akroyd 34)
B. seems to have been given to long, solitary rambles, even as a young child he would sometimes walk six or seven miles in an afternoon. Gilchrist records an early experience during one such walk near Peckham Rye when B. saw a tree filled with angels, their bright wings gleaming along every branch like stars. His father threatened to beat him for telling this “lie” and only his mother’s intervention prevented it. These were the only two times that B. seems to have been punished for claiming to have visions.
Pars’ Drawing school was one of the most influential in London. It was relatively expensive and the willingness of B.’s parents to pay for this specialized education while shielding him from the floggings and tedium of regular school suggests that they understood and supported their uniquely gifted son.
At Pars school, B. became enamored of the bold outlines of engraving—their power and their clarity likely appealed to him. Even at this young age, B. began a collection of engravings and drawings that he expanded and retained until poverty forced him to sell them off in his old age.
Here he learned his craft and, at 16, B. engraved “Joseph of Arimathea,” a work that articulates many of the principles and influences from which B. would draw inspiration for the rest of his life.
Studies under Sir Joshua Reynolds (though he had very little positive to say about him or his aesthetic theories). Meets Thomas Stothard and John Flaxman, forming, in Akroyd’s phrase, “ a little club or community of shared interests. They were all sons of London tradesmen, all in love with the gothic past, all reading Chatterton and Ossian with profound interest” (71).
The art program at the RAS was structured in a way that would allow its neediest students to work as well. B. worked steadily as an engraver during this time. Ironically, as Akroyd notes, B.’s engraving was “a ‘commercial art’ that obliged him to work within strictly defined limits and … carefully formulated rules” (78). While summarizing B.’s artistic interests and budding career, Akroyd writes: “In his later life he was known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He was part of the first great period of commercialism and mass manufacture in English history, and was one of its first casualties” (79).
While visiting her parents, B. related to young Catherine Boucher the story of being ill-treated by a woman he was courting. Catherine expressed sympathy for him, at which point B. asked, “Do you pity me?” to which Catherine replied, “yes, I do.” In response, B. said simply, “then I love you.” A year later they embarked on what must be one of the happiest marriages in literary history.
Both partners were poor; this was a marriage of love rather than convenience. Indeed, in later years when there was talk of appointing him a professor at the Royal Academy Schools, it was held against B. that he’d married a servant.
B. seems to have found in C. a soul mate & a sympathetic, nurturing partner. She came to believe in Blake’s visions and eventually saw visions of her own. She drew & painted alongside her husband, and it is reported that they spent fewer than a couple of weeks apart during their 45-year marriage. Their’s was a life of constant poverty and occasional privation, yet both were reported to be orderly, clean, and quite content simply to be together. When B. would be attacked by the “nervous fear,” paranoia, and occasional despair that his visions sometimes brought on, C. would sit quietly with him until he felt better. Despite their radical political leanings, they hewed to traditional gender roles in their home. C. cooked, cleaned, and made them their clothes; B. lit the fire, made the tea, and worked nearly incessantly on his commissions or his own work. The couple were childless.
Despite what some of B.’s art and poetry might suggest about his views on open marriage and sex as a gate to Eternity, Akroyd remarks that “there is no evidence that B. was ever unfaithful to his wife; there is no reason to suppose that B. ever practiced homosexuality, despite the presence of homo-erotic art in his illustrated books; there is no plausible excuse for conjecture, made by some biographers, that he tried to bring a second “wife” into the home in accordance with Swedenborgian religious precepts. His depictions of sexuality are idealized, almost abstract, and they seem to have remained for him a matter of the mind rather than of the flesh” (82).
Here B. would have brushed elbows with the radical intelligentsia of his time, certainly he did do with Fuseli and Priestly. The salon was a place to hold rational debate on various topics of current import; sometimes this discussions were quite formal. Mrs. Mathews would announce the topic for discussion and her invitees would weigh in. But such debates must have been ill-suited to an autodidact like B., who would have found foreign the gamesmanship of debating for the “sake of argument” his hard-won opinions nor would the such luminaries as Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, Priestly, etc.—who were radically secular as well as radically republican—been much interested in engaging B. in the areas of esoteric knowledge in which he was widely read.
Of B.’s self-education, Akroyd remarks: “[B.’s] was a privately gained and esoteric knowledge, which could never be imparted in the kind of liberal and rational conversation [of conventionally learned and ingenious men] that [Sir Joshua] Reynolds had extolled. In that sense, B. stood apart from the mores of his age, and as a result never became a part of any group or sect or club. He prided himself on self-sufficiency, and his ‘unbending deportment’ was such that he was to spend much of his life in self-imposed isolation” (87).
Further on, Akroyd continues his characterization of B.’s intellectual interests & self-education: “…in fact, we can observe the movements of B.’s mind; he picked up separate ideas, or fragments of knowledge as he needed them. He was a synthesizer and a systematizer, like so many of his generation, but it was his own synthesis designed to establish his own system of belief. He was likely to adopt an item he had read in a periodical or pamphlet with the same frequency that he borrowed notions from Paracelsus or Swedenborg. He was, above everything else, an artist and not an orthodox ‘thinker’; he was attracted to images or phrases as a means of interpretation, and never espoused a complete or coherently organized body of knowledge” (90).
It is during this period, B. is first reported to have sung some of his “poems” at various gatherings. He seems to have sung or chanted his work or that of others publicly throughout his life. In any case, there was a general interest in ballads and popular music at this time; such “folksy” art was constantly performed in teagardens and tavern-grounds & such songs were occasionally collected in published volumes. Perhaps Flaxman considered B.’s Poetical Sketches in this way; he does seem to have condescended to B.—as a letter, that Flaxman attached to a copy of Poetical Sketches suggests. In that letter, Flaxman, himself the son of a London tradesman begs Hayley’s indulgence, saying that his “education will plead sufficient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of his work.” In that same letter, Flaxman remarks that B.’s fortunes as an engraver were “not extraordinary.”
The death of B.’s father came as no surprise as he had been ailing for some time. For this reason, it’s likely his legacy had already been divided per his wishes before his death. His namesake, James, and wife, Catherine, took over the hosiery business, which flourished thereafter. Another of B.’s brothers, John, opened a bakery across the street and B. and his wife Catherine moved next door to the business and apartments of his mother & brother James. This suggests, contrary to B’s strange silence about his family and the ongoing suspicion of the family dynamic expressed in his poetry, that his family ties were fairly close at this period.
Parker had been a fellow apprentice with B. at Basire’s and the two of them and their wives lived above their business at No. 27 Broad Street. It appears that their primary business was selling rather than making engraved prints since few engravings bearing their imprint survive. This was a good time to go into the engraving business as it was a fast-growing trade and England had just concluded wars with America and France. Suddenly, there was a great deal of money for such “extras” as engraved prints of the masters.
Up to this time B. was, from all outward appearances, an artist on the rise. He had exhibited at the RAS, was a relatively successful engraver, and was beginning to publish his poetry. However, going into the engraving business with Parker signals, to an extent, the withering of the artistic career that his RAS chums Stothard and Flaxman were now beginning to enjoy. About this time, one of B.’s early wealthy patrons, attempted to raise a subscription to send B. to Rome as a sort o finishing school for his artistic studies. It would have been a remarkable opportunity for B. Indeed, his friend Flaxman spent 7 years in Italy painting and returned one of the most sought-after artists in England. However, this plan fell through and, while Flaxman and Stothard began to realize their ambitions to become important artists, B. sat in his shop from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. before giving any thought to his own work.
A further indication that B’s artistic career was faltering occurs in 1786, when John and Josiah Boydell created a Gallery of Historical Painting (B.’s specialty) less than a mile from B.’s home. B. was the only London engraver of note NOT to be asked to exhibit his work in this gallery.
These facts, and the demoralizing and provoking effects that such humiliations must have had on someone so sensitive as B. seem to explain why he did not exhibit again for several years at the RAS and why his friendships with Stothard and Flaxman cooled considerably after the mid-1780s.
Robert was the only family member with whom B. professed a deep attachment—and they were quite close. B. taught Robert drawing and encouraged him to keep an artist’s notebook. At his death, B. is reported to have seen Robert’s spirit leaving his body, ascending heavenward while “clapping its hands for joy.” B. kept Robert’s drawing notebook for the rest of his life, writing his most personal thoughts and sketching some of his most important ideas in it up until the year of his death. B’s work in the notebook begins from where Robert left off. In later years, B. flipped the book upside down & wrote on the backs of all the pages; late in life, he sewed in additional leaves as needed.
This event seems to have catalyzed B.’s interests in spiritual matters, sacred history, and occult lore into a spiritual awakening. B.’s most intense study of Swedenborg occurred about this time; a number of his friends were members of the Swedenborgian Church and/or were Masons and/or practiced some form of spellcraft.
This spiritual awakening, while it defines B.’s art for us, would have isolated him even further from the secular intellectuals attending Joseph Jonson’s famous salons in which Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Priestly, and others were regular invitees. And, as B. seems to have been candid about his own visions and was notorious for possessing “a manly firmness of opinion” about his esoteric spiritual beliefs—even with strangers—this inward turn would likely have further estranged him from the artistic and literary establishment through whom most artists of exceptional talent found a viewing public and could expect to find patrons and thereby establish economically stable careers.
Fuseli was Swiss-born and already a well-connected and well-regarded artist in London by the time B. met him. As a friend of Joseph Jonson and Joseph Priestly, as well as many other Dissenters and Republicans, Fuseli, for a time, was able to introduce B. to important people who frequently sent him commissions for engraving work. Indeed, from the late 1780s to the late 1790s, B. was as close to prosperity as he would ever be. He was known in the “right circles” and he had regular and relatively lucrative commissions.
For about 10 years, Fuseli and B. were close friends and B. once wrote of Fuseli: “The only Man that eer I knew/ Who did not make me almost spew.” Fuseli is said to have remarked, concerning his friend’s art, that “Blake is damned fine to steal from.” They had much in common, including a mutual distaste for “nature” drawing, sharp sarcasm, and being simultaneously artists and writers. But, Fuseli, unlike B., knew how to work within the social system for his own advantage & seemed to move effortlessly in the uppermost cultural circles, eventually being asked to be a professor of painting at the Royal Academy Schools. They borrowed design ideas from one another. Though the two eventually drifted apart, B. did not turn on Fuseli the way he did Flaxman and especially Stothard.
In this early work, we see glimpses of the fallen Urizen who curses his children and wanders in self-exile through a dead world that he has in part created. B. also uses in this poem, the septenarius, the 7-footed line that he employs in his later prophecies. This poem also marks an important moment in B.’s development as well: ten ink and wash drawings accompany the text of his poem. Thus, B.’s idea of the “illuminated book” can be dated to this time.
B, told others that he received a revelation from the spirit of his departed brother, Robert, who lead him to invent a printing process whereby he could combine his gifts as engraver, poet, and painter. In MHH, he references this new technique as the “infernal method” of writing. This method required B. to learn to write backwards and so he practiced this until he mastered a flowing hand. The method itself required that he write directly onto a copper plate using a combination of salad oil and wax as “ink.” He would then pour a corrosive substance on the plate and allow it to “bite into” the plate for several hours. The corrosives ate around the oil and wax writing, leaving them raised above the untreated surface. After washing the plate, B. applied actual ink to the raised lettering and gently pressed the plate onto paper. He would then paint and complete the sketch and embellish the lettering. Each “illuminated book,” then, is an original work of art and, for this reason, each copy differs from the others in coloration and other details. All Religions Are One is probably B.’s first organized creation using this new printing method.
B. likely saw another, more practical advantage to this new printing method. With it he could control the entire publication process from conception to direct distribution of his work. It must have seemed to B. that he could find an audience of his own without having to deal with the arbiters of taste who ran the RAS and publishing houses.
Thel and Songs of Innocence display increased sophistication and complexity. Of Songs Akroyd writes: “he may have hoped to make this fortune out of it, with its pastel shades and its images of children and nurses, it looks as typically Georgian as a Wedgwood teas-set or a Hepplewhite chair” (119).
However, Akroyd goes on to say,
[The Songs] were not quite right for the age—‘wild’ and ‘mystical,’ with an old-fashioned Gothic appearance that was not acceptable to connoisseurs. They seem to us now to express all the energy and confidence of a poet who has at last found his way forward; Songs of Innocence has the obliquity of ‘An Island in the Moon,’ the spirituality of Thel, the dramatic directness of Tiriel, and the melodic control of Poetical Sketches, all working together to form a complete and coherent statement. And yet B.’s contemporaries were partly right: there is something ‘wild’ about these highly compressed and concentrated lyrics. At first glance, they might have seemed aspects of amenable pastoralism (he even deliberately copied Stothard’s soft style in a few images) but there is an intensity in the words and designs that sets them apart from the more agreeable work of his contemporaries. The verse is part of the design, the design part of the verse, in an extraordinarily condensed and almost ritualistic way; the visual completeness, the insistent meters, the impersonal skill of the calligraphy, turn these poems into achieved works of art that seem to resist conventional interpretation. The sense of energy and intensity within such taught bounds leads also to an awareness of possible loss of control and disequilibrium; that is why the tight meters and formal concentration of the poems seem actively to exclude the reader and the world. Blake protects the sources of his inspiration very carefully, and there is always a suggestion of distance and even parody within the most apparently ‘naïve’ lyrics; they resemble the man himself, who could be cryptic or maddeningly oblique when he felt himself to be challenged. (Blake 122)
B. dissolved his partnership with Parker and moved into a new home and began a new phase of his professional life. The 10 years in “Lambeth’s Vale” were the most prosperous and personally productive of B.’s life. The Lambeth place was a terraced house of three storeys and had 8-10 rooms, some including marble fireplaces and paneled walls. This was the first time that B. had an entire house to himself and gardens at his disposal. Here, he worked diligently to realize the promise of his new printing method while also working steadily—if somewhat dilatorily—on a steady stream of engraving commissions, mostly from Joseph Jonson (the publisher of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Paine).
This is the location where Thomas Butts, a sober and respectable government employee—and one of B.’s staunchest friends and most significant patrons—reports that “calling one day [I] found Mr. And Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer house, freed from ‘those troublesome disguises’ which have prevailed since the fall. ‘Come in!’ cried B.; ‘It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!” When Butts arrived, the Bs had been reciting passages from Paradise Lost in character, and the garden of Hercules Building had to represent the Garden of Eden; a little to the scandal of wondering neighbors on more than one occasion.” (Akroyd 154)
Apparently, Jonson agreed to publish this poem. The time was certainly ripe for it and the records indicate that 7 volumes were planned. But, whether Jonson didn’t “get” B.’s poetry and withdrew his support, or whether B., felt vulnerable to arrest for sedition and decided not to finish it, all that remains of it is an unfinished copy of the first volume.
Of this failed venture Akroyd remarks: “The failure to publish The French Revolution had permanent results of a kind that B. could not have anticipated. It marked the last opportunity he ever received of publishing his work in conventional form, and therefore the last occasion when he might have acquired a substantial audience. He liberated himself from commercial consideration by printing and promoting all of his subsequent work, but at the cost of forfeiting a public. His independence meant that he could preserve his vision beyond all taint—and that integrity is an essential aspect of his genius—but it also encouraged him to withdraw from the world of common discourse” (162).
Joseph Jonson probably stocked a small quantity of these emblems-with-inscriptions in his publishing office, but apparently few were printed or sold. Nevertheless, they survive because B. saved the copies and copper plates of all his works.
The first “prophetic” book B. completed while living in Lambeth, even though it is not like later books the poet explicitly titled a prophecy.
Akroyd describes Marriage this way: “…even within the canon of B.’s work [MHH] remains something of a puzzle. It opens and closes with poetry, but the rest of the text is composed of proverbs, short descriptive narratives, observations, arguments, and parodies; it also contains some of B.’s most intensely conceived and richly colored illustrations. . . . [it has] a didactic purpose and ‘sublime’ prophetic style—a form of the urban and popular literature that B. so frequently copied. And it is significant that he did not add his name to the title page—it might have been a pamphlet, or a primer, or a catchbook, or a collection of proverbs. In fact it is all four at once and only the extraordinary intensity of its artistry might prevent it from being sold in the streets like any other political or religious broadside” (151). . . . “It is the work of an angry, exalted young man who feels the truth of his own sexual and creative energies. It also displays confidence and ambition, because here for the first time he establishes himself in the role of the artist-prophet…” (153).
About the time of his mother’s death, B. began writing drafts of various lyric poems in Robert’s notebook. Akroyd says, “By the end of the year [1792] he had filled fourteen pages with 58 complete or incomplete poems. Out of these carefully transcribed verses came Songs of Experience. . . . These are not pure lyrics emanating from one voice but dramatizations of various mental states and attitudes—or, perhaps, dramatizations of the various selves that inhabited B” (Blake 141).
B. apparently originally conceived of Songs of Experience as direct satires of Songs of Innocence, poem for poem, but in the process he found more general possibilities of expression. At first he printed both of the Songs as separate series, but then linked them together with a new title page, “Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
The combined Songs complicates the seemingly simple original Innocence poems. There are contraries and oppositions at every turn—not only is Experience etched on the back of Innocence, but B. used a different calligraphy and a different method of printing color.
The “visionary” images of Europe may, in fact, be literally visionary. The most famous of these images, that of an ancient man kneeling down from a red orb, measuring the abyss below him with a compass and called the “Ancient of Days,” was inspired by a vision that hovered before B. at the top of his staircase in Lambeth.
B. and Catherine printed several copies of Europe, over a few days, before using color printing in an even more elaborate way upon The Song of Los.
The title page of The Song of Los seems to have been color painted without any previous etching or engraving, so for the first time B. creates words by simply painting them in reverse on unmarked copper. The book itself is vividly, almost luridly, colored with some of his most heavily decorated images.
In words echoing Hegel’s transcendental notions of the ongoing evolution of art and history, Boehme believed that “god wishes to be aware of himself, and thus the cosmos is created in an act of eternally renewed will and desire. In the same way, the sevenfold spiritual properties of the world are engaged in dialectical activity, and the strivings of these qualities enters the very nature of creation itself.”
Paracelsus said that “Man is compacted of all bodies and created things.” So, “it is a great truth, which you should seriously consider, that there is nothing in heaven or upon the earth which does not also exist in man, and God who is in heaven exists also in man, and the two are but One…Man is a sun and a moon and a heaven filled with stars; the world is a man and the light of the sun and the stars is his body… The human body is vapor materialized by sunshine mixed with the life of the stars. Four elements are in the world, and man consists out of four, and that which exists visibly in man exists invisibly in the ether pervading the world.”
B. internalized these mystical ideas and translated them into his own terms. For B., “spiritual warfare” is the essential mission of every individual and the dynamic opposition between contraries animates the cosmos. B. also came to see that the poetic imagination can discern the spiritual outline of all created things because it contains them; with the spirit reborn, the poet may see with the eyes of eternity into himself and thus into the universe.
This event symbolizes the heavy repression of radical political thought in England at this time. Jonson’s arrest is emblematic of a series of repressive measures that silenced all but the most ardent of radicals. Like many of his contemporaries, B,’s support of republicanism in the early 1790s becomes a matter of private belief rather than public statement:
It is sometimes believed that [B.] moved from the public prophesies of America and The French Revolution to the biblical allusiveness of The Book of Urizen as a way of dissociating himself from the fervid political climate of the period. He would have had every right to do so, even despite his tendency to nervous anxiety, because the atmosphere of the 1790s was not at all conducive to the prophetic or polemical examination of political affairs. To have lived in London, at the time of the war with France and the approach to that ‘Great Terror’ of 1795, which marked the climacteric of the Revolution, was to live in an atmosphere of continual suspicion, espionage, and intrigue; many of B.’s acquaintance, such as Thomas Holcroft and William Sharp, were arrested or questioned. There were treason trials and transportations, while the threat of execution was stayed only by juries who refused to condemn their countrymen for their opinions. . . . Habeas Corpus had been suspended in the spring of 1794 but now two acts were passed against ‘treasonable and seditious Practices’ as well as ‘Seditious Meetings and Assemblies.’ These laws, flawed and uncertain though they were in execution, effectively marked the end of organized radicalism in London. (Blake 181)
Hayley was a second-rate poet, but a generous, if patronizing sponsor who saw it as his mission in life to “help his friends.” He is said to have called B., behind his back any way, “his secretary” and seems to have had no conception of B.’s great gifts as either poet or painter. Like Flaxman, Hayley seemed to regard B. as a journeyman engraver who could be useful in that capacity. The commissions he procured for B. were largely of well-worn subjects or for miniatures of famous historical figures and the art that B. produced for others at this time is competent but not inspired.
At first, this was a happy arrangement for B. He & C., while not well-off, enjoyed the peaceful surroundings and never needed worry about the next commission. And the Blakes seemed to thrive as a couple. Hayley provides us with the most detailed eye-witness report of their happy marriage:
[Catherine is] the only female on Earth, who could have suited Him exactly. They have been married more than 17 years & are as fond of each other as if their Honey Moon were still shining—They live in a neat little cottage, which they both regard as the most delightful residence every inhabited by a mortal; they have no servant:—the good woman not only does all the work of the House, but she even makes the greatest part of her Husbands dress, & assists him in his art—she draws, she engraves, & sings delighfully & is so truly the Half of her good man, that they seem animated by one Soul, & that a soul of indefatigable Industry & benevolence—it sometimes hurries them both to labour rather too much... (Ackroyed 232)
However, B. came to see Hayley as a spiritual enemy—someone who tempted him to neglect his visionary work for mere money. In fact, B.’s output of poetry and personal art slowed to a trickle during the Felpham years, particularly when compared to the amazingly productive decade he’d just experienced. Yet, he continued to work on “The Four Zoas” throughout this time and, by the end of 1803, he collected all the bits and scraps of paper upon which he’d write in bursts of inspiration and created a single fair copy. While B. was working for Hayley in Felpham, his patron published a book on the English epic’s importance to the world of letters. Milton was Hayley’s case in point and B. had, in any case, drawn a portrait of Milton. It is likely, then, that B. benefited from his association with Hayley insofar as he came to see himself as Milton’s heir and called to write the next great English epic. B. also benefitted by having unlimited access to Hayley’s library and, during this time, taught himself Italian, Greek, and Hebrew. He found learning languages easy &, even in late life, was reported to be able to read Dante in the original and even corrected translation errors in his copy of the Divine Comedy.
About “The Four Zoas,” B. wrote: “But none can know the spiritual Acts of my three years slumber on the banks of Ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or he should read my long poem descriptive of those Acts; for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme, similar to Homer’s Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Persons and Machinery entirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted)…I have written this poem from immediate Dictation… without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d Non existent, and an immense Poem exists which seems to be the Labour of a long life, all produc’d without Labour or Study. I mention this to shew you what I think is the Grand Reason of my being brought down here.”
By the summer of 1802, B. and C. were constantly ill and in low spirits. By 1803, B. was writing to his brother, James, that he’d learned how easy self-publication might be from Hayley—by cutting out publishers and selling directly to readers, promising to return to London soon & put this lesson to profitable use.
In the summer of 1803, B. was involved in some kind of altercation with John Scofield, a soldier who appeared in B.’s yard & with whom B. exchanged angry words. B. pinned Scofield’s arms behind him and forcibly marched him the 60 yards down to the town tavern where the villagers had gathered. Scofield accused both B. & Catherine of making numerous seditious remarks. This was a time of renewed war with France & the coasts were being patrolled by soldiers for fear that Napolean would invade by sea in a surprise attack.
In the event, and after nearly two years, Hayley hired B. a good lawyer, paid his court costs, and the poet was acquitted—in part because Scofield had been demoted to private for some unspecified earlier offense against a superior officer. The villagers at Felpham vouched for B. as a quiet and industrious man. Hayley’s generosity caused B. to moderate his views about his former patron.
Upon reestablishing residence in London, B. found that he had been forgotten or that he was largely out of favor. He did not receive a large professional commission again for the next 11 years. Butts, attempting to keep him from the workhouse, gave him a stipend to teach his son art. B. gratefully agreed to add to the Biblical illustrations that Butts had commissioned several year previously. This seems to have been Butts’ way of creating a face-saving way for B. to continue to work and write. After having been accused of the capital crime of treason, worrying about the verdict for two years, and discovering that he would be unable to reestablish himself as a self-sustaining artist—that he was now doomed to rely on wealthy patrons—Blake became withdrawn, paranoid, and angry. Akroyd writes: “There is no doubt that he also felt himself under threat, and by the end of 1805 all the resentments, rebuffs, and misfortunes seemed to gather around him” (267).
Thus, the return to London marked the beginning of a long period of disappointments, pinching poverty, and few prospects. Akroyd believes that B.’s vulnerability to the world—his basic ineptitude at business—seemed to unravel his personality:
There are occasions when it seems he has almost lost control over his personality or, rather, that its various aspects jostle for attention—the visionary and tradesman, the poet and the fantasist, the prophet and hypocrite, the passive servant and the self-righteous autodidact. All these various selves seem to strive for mastery, and it is possible to see even here in the chaos of B.’s despair one of the sources for the drama of his prophetic books, where various faculties and aptitudes are engaged in a constant struggle for supremacy. (256).
Yet, B. continued to develop as an artist and visionary poet. He attended the Truchsess Exhibition of Northern European art, where he saw, for the first time, original works by the masters he’d studied the copies of in his youth—Michaelangelo, Dürer, Giulio Romano, Schongauer, etc.—“whose spiritual intensity were so much a part of the ‘Gothic’ sensibility that he had imbibed while young” (257). B. began painting again with a view to mounting an exhibition of his own and even turned down paying commissions because he was so “full of work.” B.’s art changes at this time in ways that reflect the inspirations of the Truchsess exhibit.
Flaxman introduced B. to Henry Cromek, a publisher of means, and was commissioned to do a series of sketches and engravings for a major and profitable project titled “The Grave.” But, in the end, Cromek found B.’s art to “wild” and too “extravagant” for the volume. Ultimately, Cromek gave B.’s drawings to a more fashionable engraver, Louis Schiavonetti, who reworked B.’s ideas. Cromek and Schiavonetti made a good deal of money on this venture; B. received comparatively little.
B. says that during their association, Cromek asked him what he was working on & B. told him: a painting of “Chaucer’s Pilgrim’s Leaving the Tabard Inn.” Shortly thereafter, when B.’s former school chum, Stothard, exhibited a painting on the same theme, B. became furious with Cromek, accusing him of giving Stothard the idea. This was not true: Stothard had painted much the same scene in 1794. But this new version of the scene made Stothard both wealthy and famous while B. struggled for bread. During their argument, Cromek said, in effect, “if you’re so great, why don’t you do a better painting and show us all we were wrong?” That is what B. did; and for the next 2.5 years worked on his solo exhibition that he believed would ultimately result in his being recognized as a great artist, not merely a good engraver.
The specific reasons for the estrangement between Flaxman and B. have been lost. But it may be that B. felt that his school chum did not sufficiently support him in his dispute with Cromek or that he might have agreed with the publisher that B.’s work was too idiosyncratic and “wild” to be marketable. Such a criticism from his long-time friend would have wounded B. deeply. Or, it may simply be that professional jealousy and disappointment were the root cause of his estrangement from his friend. Flaxman, for his part, does not seem to have held a grudge against B. But he does seem to have avoided direct contact with him. On at least two occasions, Flaxman attempted to get B. a commission; so, it would seem that he cared for B., despite the rift between them. Ten years later, Flaxman would again work with B. —further evidence that the reasons for the falling out may well have been more in B.’s mind than in Flaxman’s.
This was a rare commission, and given B.’s stated intention to devote himself solely to his own art, suggests that need prompted him to accept the work. Thomas was a rare B. enthusiast and collected his work and this commission demonstrates the results of B.’s reinvigorated sense of what art can be. As Akroyd writes: “He seems to be bringing to Milton the heroic resonance of Michaelangelo, while at the same time he is creating a hieratic and symmetrical art reminiscent of medieval religious motifs. It is an extraordinarily powerful combination, and he is here able to create a wholly original religious landscape in which all constituents of his art are displayed” (271).
B. seems to have thought that by taking his art directly to the people and convincing them that the aesthetic standards of the time were corrupted by money and place-seeking that he could make his own mark on the artistic world. He in fact only sold one painting, which had already been commissioned prior to the show. While Flaxman and Stothard were exhibiting in well-appointed halls, B. was showing his work on the walls of his brother’s small shop on Broad Street. He must have appeared to others as a small-time crank whose artistic vision was completely out of synch with the times. One of the few newspaper notices that B.’s exhibition received called him mad—a view of him that resonated with many of his acquaintances. People on the street near his home whispered “there goes the man who talks to spirits and angels.”
The “Descriptive Catalogue” very forcefully attacked his erstwhile friends Stothard and Flaxman—as well as the Arts establishment of his time. In the text, he declares himself the equal of Michaelangelo. The “Catalogue” shows B. at his most bombastic and paranoid and served only to further alienate him from the fashionable art circle of his day and from connoisseurs who might have commissioned his work. B.’s attacks on Stothard—someone who was characteristically gentle—suggest how difficult it could be to be B.’s friend. He seems to have been prone to professional jealousy, sensitive to even the hint of a slight, and quick to resentment. To some degree, however, his frustration and the rages that it provoked were due to his unshakable belief in the profound spiritual importance of his art and artistic vision—and an unshakable faith in his own genius. He genuinely believed that his art and poetry were his mission—a mission that would capture ancient spiritual truths that had been lost and to lead England back to its Gothic inheritance. That is, art would once again be the acts of anonymous, devoted lover’s of God and Truth creating work that would lift people into a higher perception of the Divine. As he wrote in Robert’s notebook, “The Nature of my work is Visionary and Imaginative[. I]t is an Endeavour to Restore the Golden Age.”
Given his sense of mission, it is little wonder that the worldly Art establishment misunderstood or rejected his motives and under-rated his talents. In Hayley’s case—and possibly Cromek’s—B. was used as a tool for this technical skills as an etcher and patiently indulged for his seemingly eccentric personal artistic vision.
Class pretensions also seem to have played a role in B.’s marginalization. We seen in Stothard’s early portrait of B. a tough-looking, slightly shabby son of a tradesman. While both Stothard and Flaxman derived from the same stock, they seemed determined to rise above their birth and take their places among the highest ranks of society. Stothard’s view of his visionary classmate seems to have been the general view and so B. was forced to endure the condescension of artists whose work he considered “blots and daubs” while his own original vision found no audience.
After his failed exhibition, B. began work on a more elaborate and extensive attack on the artistic sensibilities (and pretensions) of his time, though he never published it. He perceptively noted the inimical effect that consumerism and mass-production were having on art. He accurately diagnosed the reasons for the success of his former RAS friends and his own obscurity: they were willing to execute standardized visions that suited the popular and simple-minded tastes of the time. He, however, believed that only an original vision that transformed the givens of a particular time and place into the timeless terms of Truth could truly be called art. As Akroyd puts it,
In an age that was becoming increasingly uniform and standardized, he tried to affirm the originality of the artistic genius. . . . It is yet another example of his clairvoyant understanding of his age that he is able to draw the connection between art, industrial economics, and what we would become the ‘consumer societies’ of modern civilization in an analysis that was not formulated until the [20th] century. It is as if his own sense of helplessness and despair had broken him open, and he could speak clearly about the world that had come close to destroying him; it was not madness at all, but a peculiar kind of lucidity which springs from those who have nothing left to lose. (Blake 293-94)
While B. dated the poem Milton to 1804 on the frontispiece to this illuminated book, he did very little work on it between 1805 and 1810 because he was primarily engaged in “Drawing and Painting” in response to the inspiration he had received at the Truchsess exhibition. He even declined to print out a set of his illuminated books for George Cumberland at this time because he was too busy reclaiming the spiritual in art.
The beginning of B.’s most concentrated work on his last epic poems could not have been less auspicious. As Akroyd writes: “This was the shape his life had now taken: his humiliation at the hand of Cromek, his unmerited assaults upon Stothard, his estrangement from Fuseli and Flaxman, the termination of Hayley’s patronage, the failure of his public exhibition, the newspaper attacks on his sanity, now culminated in the alienation of his greatest patron and supporter [Butts]” (301). It is tempting, then, to see B.’s life as tragic. Yet that is not at all how he saw himself. His notebook entries suggest that he believed that only “Mental Things are Real” and he seems to have set himself the task of Imaginatively transforming the difficult circumstances of his material life into a joyful spiritual journey.
Robert Southey, who seriously under-rated both B.’s poetry and art, attests to having seen Jerusalem as a work in progress in 1811, describing it as “a perfectly mad poem.” By 1820, B. had completed 80 of Jerusalem’s 100 plates. He seems to have composed these poems only sporadically—in what he called “the heat of my spirits”—straight onto the copper. If there were paper drafts of either poem, they have not survived.
Like B., Linnell disparaged the aesthetic principles of of the artistic establishment and, also like B., was fond of Michaelangelo and Dürer. He became B.’s steadfast companion and staunch supporter for the rest of the elder man’s life. Linnell and B. frequently went to museums, attended art exhibitions and the theater. A staunch Baptist, Linnell found B.’s spiritual beliefs and bold assertions about spiritual truths sometimes scandalizing. Yet their relationship demonstrates that when not belittled or dismissed, B. would explain his views patiently and rationally.
Linnell was a good businessman and seems to have determined to assist his other-worldly friend to a better standard of living. He paid him to finish and produce Jerusalem and introduced him to a number of wealthy people from whom B. received commissions. B. also seems to have been encouraged by having been taken up by a group of young admirers who seemed to have formed a reasonable idea of his genius and, perhaps in as a result, printed up 10 copies of all of his illuminated books. Akroyd speculates that B. may have seen in his young admirers hope that future generations would better appreciate his art and poetry.
According to Akroyd, the Ancients were a small group of friends whose “catchphrase was ‘poetry & sentiment’; they wore long cloaks and went for excursions in the woods where they recited Virgil; they sat up on camp-stools to watch the sunrise; they improvised tragedies; they wandered through thunderstorms singing. Once they entered the Bromley churchyard to meditate and were suspected of the then lucrative practice of grave-robbing. They were all young. . . at most in their early twenties; but they discovered W.B., and almost at once he became their sage and mentor. . . . It is not at all clear that they properly understood him. . .” (338-39).
Indeed, the Ancients’ spirituality seems to have ultimately been more escapist than B.’s and most of them wound up as relatively doctrinaire believers in “fundamentalist” Christianity. Robert Tatham, for example, is reputed to have inherited most of B.’s mss. and papers and to have destroyed work that was too erotic or heretical for his tastes.
Varley was Linnell’s first art teacher and an accomplished watercolorist. In contrast to B., his dictum was “go to nature for everything.” B. no doubt told Varley that he viewed nature as nothing more than the vegetative universe and therefore nothing more than Satan’s clothing. But, Varley’s accomplishments in “judicial astrology” and “zodiacal physiognomy” did interest B. & they became close friends.
Varley was a remarkable astrologer by all contemporary accounts having accurately predicted a variety of births, deaths, marriages, etc. in the lives of his acquaintances. On one occasion, he sealed his predictions in an envelope that accurately predicted that an acquaintance would marry at age 50 and eventually live in Italy. When the man died, the envelope was opened and each of his predictions proved true. Varley also warned his own son against playing with balls. A few years later, the boy was killed when a cricket ball struck him in the head.
At Varley’s suggestion, B. began to sketch his visions of dead persons—Herod, Socrates, the Empress Maud, Mohamet, etc. B. would stare intently at a space in the room, sometimes whispering “There he is.” Sometimes Varley would fall asleep during these late-night sessions, but B. would remain wide awake, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning sketching and occasionally conversing with and writing down what his subjects had to say.
At Varley’s direction, B. copied some of these images into a larger notebook organized according to Varley’s physiognomic principles, which he titled “List of Portraits Drawn by William Blake From Visions wich Appeared to Him and Remained while he Completed Them.” “The Ghost of a Flea” is the most finished and well-known of these images of invisible subjects.
B.’s landlord at South Molton Street sold their house and the couple was obliged to move. They moved to lodgings owned by Catherine’s sister and her husband in Fountain Court. The young Charles Dickens worked a few blocks away and it’s possible that they saw one another on the street, though it is doubtful that they ever exchanged words.
Crabb Robinson seems to have considered B. a “special case” and for a while interviewed him. They met at the home of a German-born banker, Charles Aders, who owned what was probably the most extensive collection of Northern European Art in England at the time. This impressive display also served to inspire B. much as the Truchsess Exhibition had done & some of B.’s most masterly compositions and engravings emerge after 1819.
At that first meeting, Robinson was struck with B.’s speaking so matter-of-factly about his visions and “the spirit” speaking to him. He quotes B. as saying, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy” (in Akroyd 342). Robinson seems to have been more fascinated than personally moved by B.’s visions and views about art; and, after 5 or 6 visits seems to have grown tired of B.’s one-track conversation. He did write to Dorothy Wordsworth about B., however, speaking of “poor B.” while nevertheless recognizing his “genuine dignity and independence.” In that same letter, Robinson remarks that B.’s “hallucinations” had doomed him to obscurity.
Despite a weakening of his overall health—characterized by frequent fevers and diarrhea—B. continued to work every day. Sometimes, when unable to sit at his engraving table, B. would sketch the designs for these important new commissions while propped up in bed.
Of these late works Akroyd writes: “They are like the work of a young artist who is discovering the possibilities of his medium for the first time, and they evince all those qualities that he taught to the Ancients: Unbroken Masses; Unbroken lines; Unbroken Colors.’ Here is emotion given a shape, and spirituality lent form” (355).
Linnell seems to have drawn the outlines of the new Job series from the originals that Butts had commissioned years before. B. colored them in a way that demonstrates his new sense of the luminous surface. The new work featured bright pastels and hieratic compression of form and are considered among his finest illuminated engravings.
Linnell was appalled to discover that his friend and mentor had been forced by poverty to sell his substantial collection of prints, some of which his father had given him when he was a boy. He thereafter tactfully “hired” B. to assist him in a publishing venture, paying B. 100 pounds to illustrate the Job story, using some of the work that he’d done for Butts. Typically for B., this enterprise barely made back production costs. Linnell, however, saved the copies and the copper plates against better days. In gratitude for his effort, B. gave Linnell his only ms. copy of The Four Zoas—upon which he’d been working for 20 years.
From the time that Linnell and his family moved to the rural suburb of Hampstead, B. made it a custom to walk from Fountain Court to visit the Linnells on Sundays, sometimes sketching, sometimes playing with Linnell’s young children, sometimes gazing in reverie at Hampstead heath. He found taking a carriage provoked a relapse of diarrhea and so preferred to walk.
Flaxman died in December of this year, shortly after giving unusually high praise to B.’s Job engravings. When B. heard of his old schoolmate’s death, he smiled and says, “I thought I should have gone first. I cannot consider death as anything but removing from one room to another” (in Akroyd 365).
Linnell describes him spending one of his last shillings in August on new pencils so he could finish the Dante work.
According to Linnell, “on the day of his death, he stopped work and turned to Catherine, who was in tears: ‘Stay Kate!’ he said, ‘Keep just as you are—I will draw your portrait—for you have ever been an angel to me.’ When he had completed it, he put it down, and then began to sing verses and hymns’” (in Akroyd 367). To the devoted circle of young artists who surrounded Blake in his final years, even his death seemed beautiful. He died “in a most glorious manner,” Richmond wrote Palmer soon afterwards: “He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ—Just before he died His Countenance became fair—His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven” (Bentley, Blake Records 346-47).
Obituaries tended to emphasize his personal quirks at the expense of his literary and artistic achievements. The Literary Chronicle, for example, described him as “one of those ingenious persons [. . .] whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities” (1 September 1827, in Bentley, Blake Records 351), a view that persisted until Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus appeared in 1863, finally securing his reputation as a major poet and artist.
In her old age, or perhaps in response to the death of her husband, C. developed a suspicious and difficult temperament. After a few months during which she quarreled with Linnell, C. moved in with Tatham. They also quarreled, once so terribly that C. was set to move out the following morning, but when morning came she reconciled with Tatham, saying that she’d been up all night talking to B. who had desired her to repair the rift between the two of them. C. managed to eke out a living by selling some of B.’s paintings and illuminated books; but, in each case, not until she had “opportunity of consulting Mr. Blake.” Indeed, C. told Tatham that B.’s spirit spent 2-3 hours in conversation with her every day.
C. met her own death as calmly and cheerfully as her husband, crying out to William as though he were in the next room that she was coming to join him directly.
