William Blake

• 1. Introduction

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  William Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil so he could keep sketching. He was near death, working feverishly on illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, and he could not stop. On the 12th of August 1827, he finally set down his tools, turned to his wife Catherine, and drew her portrait. Then he sang hymns until he died. A witness in the house said she had been present not at the death of a man, but of a blessed angel.

  Blake was born on the 28th of November 1757 in Soho, London, and he spent nearly his entire life within a few miles of that address. He never attended a university. He never held a prestigious post. At the time of his death, he had sold fewer than 30 copies of his most famous work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. His contemporaries thought him mad.

  How did a man so ignored in his lifetime become, as one scholar later put it, the Romantic writer who exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century? What drove him to invent an entirely new method of printing, build a private mythology spanning dozens of books, and claim daily conversations with angels and dead relatives? And what does it mean that his poem beginning "And did those feet in ancient time" became the words of a national anthem while he was still alive, largely unknown?

• 2. The Boy Who Saw Angels

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  At the age of four, Blake claimed to see God pressing his face against the window of his family home at 28 Broad Street in Soho. At eight or ten years old, walking in Peckham Rye, he saw a tree filled with angels, their wings bespangling every bough like stars. He went home and told his father. According to his Victorian biographer Alexander Gilchrist, only his mother's intervention saved the boy from a thrashing for telling lies.

  His parents were Moravians and English Dissenters, yet they baptised him at St James's Church, Piccadilly. His father James was a hosier, and the family appears to have enjoyed at least some prosperity: the number of prints and bound books James and Catherine purchased for young William suggests comfortable means. When he reached the age of ten, they decided not to send him to school at all, recognising his headstrong temperament. Instead they enrolled him in drawing classes at Henry Pars's drawing school in the Strand. He had already left formal education after learning only reading and writing.

  Through those classes Blake encountered the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Albrecht Durer by way of engravings of Greek antiquities his father bought for him. The Bible was another early and enduring influence. In his own account of his childhood he spoke of beholding God's face pressed against his window, seeing angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. These were not metaphors he applied retrospectively. He meant them literally, and that literalness would define him.

• 3. Learning the Trade

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  On the 4th of August 1772, Blake was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street for a fee of 52 pounds and 10 shillings, with a term of seven years. The arrangement seems to have been outwardly smooth; no record survives of any serious disagreement between them. Yet Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake later added Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries, and then crossed it out.

  Basire's style of line-engraving was considered old-fashioned at the time, eclipsed by the fashionable stipple and mezzotint techniques. It has been speculated this instruction in an outmoded form may have hampered Blake's ability to find work later. Two years into the apprenticeship Basire sent Blake to copy images from Gothic churches across London, possibly to settle a quarrel between Blake and a fellow apprentice named James Parker. Those long afternoons in Westminster Abbey proved decisive.

  The Abbey Blake worked in was draped with painted funeral effigies, suits of armour, and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd records the most immediate impression would have been of faded brightness and colour. Blake later claimed he experienced visions there: he saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard them chant. His study of Gothic form, which he regarded as the living form as opposed to the sterile classical ideal, left clear marks on everything he made afterward. His time sketching there was occasionally interrupted by boys from Westminster School who were allowed into the Abbey and who teased him. One tormented him so persistently that Blake knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, upon which he fell with terrific Violence. Blake complained to the Dean, and the schoolboys' privilege was withdrawn.

• 4. Inventing Illuminated Printing

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  In 1788, aged 31, Blake invented a method he called relief etching, which he would use to produce most of his subsequent books, paintings, pamphlets, and poems. The process reversed the usual logic of engraving entirely. Where conventional intaglio engraving cut lines into a copper plate and flooded them with ink, Blake wrote and drew backwards onto his plate using an acid-resistant varnish, then submerged the plate in nitric acid. The acid ate away the unprotected copper, leaving his words and images standing in raised relief.

  He would then mold wax around the edges of the small plate, creating a miniature tub for the acid to sit in. After etching, he applied ink with a dauber to the raised surfaces, then printed from those raised areas directly onto paper. He mixed his own pigments using linseed oil as a base and eight different powders to create his range of hues. He described what the process revealed as melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

  Blake described it as "stereotype" in The Ghost of Abel, referencing a process invented in 1725 that cast metal from wood engravings. His method was fundamentally different. It allowed text and image to appear together on the same page in the manner of medieval illuminated manuscripts, collapsing the division of labour between scribe and illustrator that had governed book-making for centuries. The pages were then hand-coloured in watercolours and stitched into a volume. Scholars Joseph Viscomi and Michael Phillips still disagree on whether Blake inked his text and image in a single pass or in two separate pressings; a surviving printing error in a copy of Europe a Prophecy from 1794, held in the Glasgow University Archives, shows text on plate 13 obscured by the image, suggesting at least occasional two-step work. Blake used this method for Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.

• 5. Marriage and Partnership

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  Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1781 while recovering from a refused marriage proposal. He told her and her parents the story of his heartbreak, then asked Catherine directly: "Do you pity me?" When she said yes, he replied: "Then I love you." They married on the 18th of August 1782 at St Mary's Church, Battersea. Catherine, who was five years his junior, was illiterate at the time and signed her wedding contract with an X. The original certificate can still be viewed at the church, which installed a commemorative stained-glass window between 1976 and 1982.

  Over the following decades Blake taught her to write, and she became his closest working collaborator. According to the Tate Gallery, Catherine mixed and applied his paint colours. The literary scholar Angus Whitehead wrote that for almost forty-five years she was the person who lived and worked most closely with Blake, enabling him to realize numerous projects that would have been impossible without her assistance, and that Catherine was an artist and printer in her own right. One of her most noted works is the colouring of the cover of the book Europe: A Prophecy. Blake's biographer Alexander Gilchrist wrote that the couple did everything in making their books together, from writing and designing to printing and engraving, everything except manufacturing the paper.

  The marriage was not without tension. Gilchrist refers to stormy times in the early years, and Morton Paley records conflict between Catherine and Blake's brother Robert that grew so intense Catherine was forced to kneel and apologize to Robert after Blake sided against her. Samuel Foster Damon has speculated that Catherine may have had a stillborn daughter, and that The Book of Thel serves as an elegy for that child, though Damon notes he is speculating. In 2019 Tate Britain's major Blake exhibition gave particular focus to Catherine's role in his work.

• 6. Radical Politics and Dangerous Company

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  In June 1780 Blake was walking toward Basire's shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison. The crowd attacked the gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze, and freed the prisoners. Blake was reportedly in the front rank during the attack. The Gordon Riots, as they became known, were a response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism. They provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III and led to the creation of the first police force.

  Around 1783, Blake performed his juvenile verse at a dinner party, which led to patronage and the publication of his first poetry collection, Poetical Sketches. The following year, after his father's death, he and his former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a print shop and began working with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson's house was a meeting-place for some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the day: the theologian Joseph Priestley, the philosopher Richard Price, the artist John Henry Fuseli, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the revolutionary Thomas Paine. Blake illustrated the second edition of Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life in 1791. He allegedly wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, though he despaired at the rise of Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror.

  Blake's trouble with authority reached a literal confrontation in August 1803 at Felpham, where he had moved to illustrate the works of the minor poet William Hayley. A physical altercation with a soldier named John Schofield led to charges not merely of assault but of uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed Blake had shouted "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake was cleared at the Chichester assizes. A report in the Sussex county paper noted the invented character of the evidence was so obvious that an acquittal resulted. Schofield later appeared in Blake's illustrations to Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, depicted wearing mind-forged manacles.

• 7. A Prophet Ignored, Then Reclaimed

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  Blake's 1809 exhibition at his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in Soho was a critical and commercial failure. He had set it up to market his own version of a Canterbury Tales illustration, titled The Canterbury Pilgrims, after a dealer named Robert Cromek had learned of Blake's idea and promptly commissioned Blake's own friend Thomas Stothard to execute it. The exhibition sold none of the temperas or watercolours on display. Its only review, published in The Examiner, was hostile.

  His fortunes shifted somewhat when, in 1818, the son of his acquaintance George Cumberland introduced Blake to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell, Blake met Samuel Palmer and the group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients, who shared his rejection of modern trends. Aged 65, Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job, later admired by John Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt. Vaughan Williams based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of those illustrations. The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy arrived through Linnell in 1826, but Blake died in 1827 before it could be completed. Only seven of the engravings reached proof form, though the watercolours that survive are regarded as among his richest achievements.

  Blake's work was nearly forgotten by the time Alexander Gilchrist began his biography in the 1860s. Its publication rapidly transformed Blake's reputation, drawing the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Scholars including S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye, and David Erdman built his standing further into the twentieth century. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison, Bruce Dickinson, and Aldous Huxley all cited him. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom set Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music ranging from modern techniques to Broadway to country to reggae. The exact location of Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields had been lost since 1965; a Portuguese couple named Carol and Luis Garrido rediscovered it after fourteen years of investigatory work, and a permanent memorial slab was unveiled there on the 12th of August 2018, inscribed "Here lies William Blake 1757-1827 Poet Artist Prophet."