DI V I N E I M AGES

DI V I N E I M AG E S
The Life and Work o f

W I LLI A M
BL A K E
Jason Whittaker

r ea ktion book s
To the memory of my grandfather, John Blake, who first piqued my
curiosity with jokes about being the reincarnation of William Blake.

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

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www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2021

Copyright © Jason Whittaker 2021

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

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isbn 978 1 78914 287 7

 Contents

Introduction: This World Is a World

of Imagination and Vision 7
1 Early Life and Work 27
2 Visions of Innocence 57
3 A New Heaven Is Begun 91
4 Lambeth and Experience 121
5 A New System of Mythology 159
6 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas 187
7 England’s Pleasant Land 223
8 Creating Systems 257
9 Final Visions 301
10 Death and Resurrection:
The Legacy of William Blake 335

References 365
select Bibliography 377
Acknowledgements 381
Photo Acknowledgements 383
Index 385
 Introduction:
This World Is a World of
Imagination and Vision

A ccording to a story by an early biographer, the poet and author

Allan Cunningham, three days before his death William
Blake was in bed completing a new version of The Ancient of
Days. The image, one of the most famous and most easily recog-
nized produced by Blake, had first been printed by him more
than thirty years previously. Now, ‘bolstered up in bed’, accord-
ing to Cunningham, he took the printed page and ‘tinted it with
his choicest colours and in his happiest style’. After working on
it for a while, according to Frederick Tatham, a friend and follower
of Blake who provided Cunningham with much of his informa-
tion, Blake laid it aside with the exclamation: ‘There! That will
do! I cannot mend it.’ His wife, Catherine, realizing that this would
be the last of his works, began to cry, whereupon William told her:
‘Stay, Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for
you have ever been an angel to me.’1 The story of Blake working
until the last hours of his life, painting and drawing in the small
rooms in Fountain Court off the Strand, would become a familiar
one during the nineteenth century. Alexander Gilchrist, today still
The Ancient of the most important of Blake’s biographers, recounted the episode,
Days, c. 1827, relief capturing the image of a saintly man and his loyal, loving wife
etching, Indian ink,
watercolour and attending his final days before he passed into obscurity after his
gouache on paper. death in 1827.

7
 divine images

‘The sublimity of Raffaelle or Michel Angelo’

In the immediate period after his death, the fading of William

Blake’s memory appeared to be almost complete. By the time
that Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus was published
in 1863, few of his closest friends at the time of his death remem-
bered his life and work. Many of these young men had been
known as the Shoreham Ancients because one of their number,
Samuel Palmer, had a home in the Kent village of Shoreham. It
was they who preserved the memory of one of the most remark-
able artists ever to have lived and worked in Britain. After the
appearance of Gilchrist’s Life, Blake’s reputation exploded among
a Victorian audience: he was celebrated by Pre-Raphaelites such
as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who collected his works and edited his
poetry. As we shall see in the final chapter, the Rossettis had an
important role to play in the transmission of Blake’s reputation, as
did Gilchrist’s wife, Anne, who completed the biography after her
husband’s sudden death. Such was the spell that the Romantic
artist cast on the poet W. B. Yeats, among other late nineteenth-
century writers, that one of Yeats’s earliest publications was a
collected edition of Blake’s complete works. In the twentieth cen-
tury his ‘difficult’ later writings often became a source for Modernists
such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, while his ever-popular Songs
of Innocence and of Experience inspired musical artists and compos-
ers as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Bob Dylan and u2. Into the
twenty-first century he is continually cited by writers and artists
including Patti Smith, Kae Tempest and Alan Moore, and such is
the appeal of his art that at the end of 2019 Tate Britain dedicated
an ambitious, wide-ranging exhibition on the legacy of his work.
The artist and poet who died in poverty has now become one of
the most popular and best-known figures of the Romantic era.
There are a few of his works that are known by many: ‘The
Tyger’, with its invocations of forests of the night and the fearful

8
 Introduction

symmetry of the tiger, is familiar to almost every child, while the

brooding dystopian vision of ‘London’ is commonly taught in
the English school system. Although a considerable number of
people may not know that it was William Blake who composed the
stanzas beginning ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, they will
recognize the song, better known as ‘Jerusalem’, from perform­
ances on television or radio, or from sporting events such as cricket
and the Commonwealth Games. Nor is Blake’s legacy restricted
to poetry: he trained as an engraver and artist, and there are a
number of his images that occur again and again. His large colour
prints from the 1790s have frequently appeared in the popular
imagination, with one in particular – a depiction of Isaac Newton
as an angelic, sublime figure – reproduced and adapted repeatedly:
a large bronze version of it by Eduardo Paolozzi is seated outside
the British Library. Likewise, Blake’s depiction of the Babylonian
king Nebuchadnezzar as a mad beast of the field is an image that,
once seen, is not quickly forgotten. As remarked at the beginning
of this chapter, however, The Ancient of Days is probably his most
famous artwork.
The image is a striking one, and was reportedly a favourite of
the artist himself. Certainly it remained significant to him long
after he first engraved the design in 1794. Frederick Tatham told
the story of Blake finishing the image on his deathbed, and it was
only one of a small handful of designs from the 1790s that Blake
returned to in the 1820s. The design is striking: in a circle of light
that appears as a sun surrounded by clouds, a muscular, bearded
figure with long, flowing white hair reaches down into the dark-
ness, extending a compass with which he intends to circumscribe
the universe. The engraver and biographer John Thomas Smith,
who had known Blake well, said of the piece that it ‘must at once
convince the informed reader of his extraordinary abilities’, and
claimed that it approached ‘the sublimity of Raffaelle or Michel
Angelo’ (br 613, 620). The final version was commissioned by

9
 divine images

Tatham for what Smith described as ‘the truly liberal sum of three
guineas and a half’, far more than Blake was used to receiving for
individual prints.
For most viewers, the subject at the centre of the print is
probably instantly recognizable as a relatively straightforward,
if unconventional, depiction of the God of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. Such an interpretation would appear even more likely
because of the title of the piece: the Ancient of Days is one of
the titles ascribed to God in the Book of Daniel, ‘I saw in the
night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with
the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they
brought him near before him’ (7:13). Although the title was not
used by Blake himself in his writings, John Thomas Smith referred
to the picture as such in his Nollekens and His Times, published
the year after Blake died, and Tatham also called it The Ancient
of Days in his letter to Rossetti. Title and image also seem to ref-
erence other parts of the Bible, such as the line from Proverbs 8:27
that begins: ‘When he set a compass upon the face of the depth’.
As the art historian Anthony Blunt was the first to point out, this
theme was a common one in medieval illumination and thus
would seem to fit well with Blake’s painting as a representation
of God.2
Yet the white-bearded figure is not God but Blake’s own
demiurge, the creator of our fallen world whom he called Urizen.
The scene of Urizen marking out the universe with his compass is
not referred to directly in Europe a Prophecy, where this image first
appeared, but the poem invokes him several times as the tyrant
figure who fights with Orc, the spirit of rebellion in Blake’s poetry.
Leo Damrosch observes that this particular representation of God
is crouched within the sun, his shoulders jammed against its cir-
cumference in an awkward posture as he reaches down into the
depths: yet while this God is compressed, confined, Damrosch
also observes that ‘powerful energy’ flows through the figure,

10
 Introduction

invoking the lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which the Son
uses compasses to measure out the circumference of the world:

Then staid the fervid Wheeles, and in his hand

He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d
In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things:
One foot he center’d, and the other turnd
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World.
(Paradise Lost, 7:224–31)

That it is the Son, or Messiah, who creates the universe

complicates the source for Blake’s depiction of Urizen, who is
elsewhere described as the ‘Father of jealousy’ (Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, 7.12, e50). That the demiurge, Urizen, is the
creator of a fallen world indicates another important theme that
will run throughout Divine Images: the notion of deism. Deism is
an obscure term in the twenty-first century but was a respectable
doctrine during Blake’s lifetime, influencing many major figures
such as Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
At its simplest, deism proposes a supreme being who sets creation
in motion but then no longer interferes in it, and many Enlighten­
ment thinkers considered this the most rational response to religion
in the universe: God exists, but as a distant, uninvolved figure.
That Blake satirized deism through the Ancient of Days draws
attention to how much he despised this attitude. He equated such
an approach to natural religion and natural morality, individuals
projecting their own prejudices onto a cosmic backdrop and then
ascribing them universal value and pretending to make such values
scientific. As he wrote in the section of Jerusalem dedicated ‘To
the Deists’, ‘Man must and will have some religion; if he has not

11
 divine images

the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will
erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World
“God”, and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the
name of God’ (Jerusalem 52, e201). While Blake was capable of
writing some of the simplest and most lucid poetry ever to be com-
posed in English, his verses and artworks were also often complex
and profound, wrapped up in a personal mythology that can be
hard to decipher, even for experts. The Ancient of Days is an image
that demonstrates Blake’s highly idiosyncratic reading of the reli-
gious and political events of his day, showing his wide-ranging
knowledge of other writers and artists, and appears strangely famil-
iar even though its subject matter may be completely obscure. It
is the aim of Divine Images to provide a guide to Blake’s art and
poetry, to untangle some of the meanings of his more complex
works by explaining them in reference to his life and the events
and movements of his day.

Blake as Artist and Poet

One of the most compelling features about Blake is his combina-

tion of artistic and poetic talents. He was not unique in terms of
being skilled in both the visual and verbal arts: Michelangelo was
a prolific poet as well as painter and sculptor, while Dante Gabriel
Rossetti almost certainly enjoyed Blake more because he saw an
affinity between the sister arts. Blake began his career as an artist
and was better known to his contemporaries in that capacity. In
general, his visual work may be considered in three categories: as
a painter, a printmaker and, as a special sub-category of engrav-
ing, a book artist. As a painter, he loathed working in oils: in the
Descriptive Catalogue that accompanied his one-man show of
1809, he remarked, ‘Let the works of modern Artists since Rubens’
time witness the villainy of some one at that time, who first brought
oil Painting into general opinion and practice: since which we

12
 Introduction

William Blake,
frontispiece
to The Grave
(1808), intaglio
engraving by Louis
Schiavonetti after a
portrait by Thomas
Phillips on paper.

have never had a Picture painted, that could shew itself by the
side of an earlier production’ (e530). Blake’s own preferred method
was what he called ‘fresco’, a version of tempera painting mixed
with glue that had little in common with classical techniques of
fresco. Many of his biblical paintings used this method and while
the technique could produce some astonishing works, such as his

13
 divine images

The Ghost of a Flea, the way that these paintings subsequently

darkened and cracked with age does not demonstrate his best
abilities as an artist. Alongside tempera, Blake was a masterful
watercolourist. That these paintings were often held to be inferior
to those of his contemporaries was owing to the false dichotomy
between oil and watercolour that became entrenched during the
eighteenth century. Blake would work with relatively thin colours
on paper without a ground, so the whiteness of the paper could
shine back through his pigments, making them appear to glow.
He often used this technique when illustrating other writers, most
notably Milton: his paintings of Paradise Lost, for example, remain
some of the most widely reproduced to this day.
While Blake’s results as a painter were often mixed, his mas-
tery of printmaking is second to none. Indeed, in contrast to many
of his contemporaries whose names are barely remembered now,
other than a very few such as James Gillray and William Hogarth,
Blake was experimental and viewed printmaking as an opportu-
nity to produce original designs. In his advertisement for a print of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, he wrote: ‘Execution is only the
result of invention’ (e576). By this, as Morris Eaves has pointed
out, Blake took issue with the separation of painting as an origi-
nal art of designing or inventing images, and printmaking as the
mere execution.3 It had been this artificial separation that, among
other things, prevented printmakers from becoming full members
of the Royal Academy until almost a century after Blake’s death.
As a printmaker, Blake’s initial training as an apprentice was
largely in the craft of engraving. This method, as we shall see in
Chapter One, was intensively laborious and required considera-
ble skill, patience and strength on the part of its practitioners.
Intaglio engraving required cutting into a copper plate, to produce
either lines or stippled effects that could be replicated quickly
once the hard work of preparing the plate was completed. Most
of Blake’s commercial work was produced this way, as well as a

14
 Introduction

number of original designs such as those for the Book of Job. It

was through his experimentation with etching, however, that Blake
demonstrated his true originality. Experts such as Robert Essick,
Joseph Viscomi and Michael Phillips have shown just how unu-
sual were Blake’s methods of relief etching, what he referred to as
his stereotype method: by drawing upon a copper plate with an
acid-resistant ink, Blake could then use nitric acid to burn away
the unprotected copper, a relatively fast means of production that
still retained enough detail for him to produce his illuminated books.
It is for these books, most notably the various printed copies of
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but also his truly magnificent
epic poems Milton and Jerusalem, that Blake is often best known.
These books show what W.J.T. Mitchell called Blake’s ‘compos-
ite art’, a mode of production where he displayed ‘an energetic
rivalry, a dialogue or dialectic’ between word and image.4
As an artist, then, Blake’s position in the history of British
culture is assured: at Tate Britain he takes his place among a tri­
um­virate of great British Romantic artists that includes Turner
and Constable. To this, however, must be added his achievements
as a poet, an activity that attracted only a little attention during
his lifetime. For the great majority of readers, he is probably better
known as a lyric poet, the author of works such as ‘The Tyger’,
‘London’, the stanzas from Milton a Poem and Auguries of
Innocence, which famously begins:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour (e490)

The formal simplicity of such verses, combined with a complexity

of temporal and spatial vision, placed Blake alongside contempo-
raries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. In 1818 Coleridge

15
 divine images

described Blake as ‘a man of Genius’ and ‘a mystic emphatically’

(br 336), while Wordsworth saw more of value in the supposed
madness of the engraver-poet than the sanity of Byron and Walter
Scott. Although his lyrical poetry has achieved more fame, Blake
himself devoted the greater part of his time to the complex works
that have come to be known as his prophetic books. He began to
compose these at a very early stage – The Book of Thel was printed
about the same time as his Songs of Innocence, for example – and
the prophecies fall into two main categories: those produced during
his and Catherine’s residence at Lambeth during the 1790s, and
the later pieces that he began work on following his return from
Felpham in 1804. These latter include Milton a Poem and Jerusalem
the Emanation of the Giant Albion, huge books in comparison to
his Lambeth Prophecies and works that attempt to provide truly
epic accounts of the complex mythology that Blake began to
devise from the 1790s onwards. It is this personal mythology –
provided most extensively in an unfinished and unengraved work,
Vala; or, The Four Zoas – that is frequently most confusing to new
readers of Blake and to which, in part, this current title has been
written as a guide.

Religion, Politics and London

The structure of this book is largely chronological, moving

through Blake’s life as the most straightforward means of explor-
ing his poetical and artistic works. That he lived during a time of
rapid political and social upheaval, however, also means that there
are some significant themes that cross the various chapters. One
important aspect of this book is Blake’s attitudes to religion and
the divine. Blake himself appears not to have specifically distin-
guished between religion and politics, an attitude that was familiar
to many of his contemporaries but which would soon seem a little
old-fashioned a century and a half after the Restoration of the

16
 Introduction

monarchy and dismantling of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. For

modern readers and critics there may often be a tendency to focus
more on Blake’s politics, but it is important to note that, as Naomi
Billingsley observes, for Blake ‘Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples
were all Artists’, and that his work was a means for readers and
viewers to ‘internalise the process of regeneration and inspira-
tion’.5 The early radical publisher with whom Blake worked,
Joseph Johnson, published radicals such as William Godwin and
Mary Wollstonecraft but was also the distributor of a wide range
of Unitarian and Nonconformist religious tracts. A close connec-
tion with the spiritual world was a fact of life for many in the
eighteenth century, for example in the works of the Swedish
engineer Emanuel Swedenborg, who had mystical visions in which
he conversed with angels:

On the grounds of all my experience, which has lasted for

several years now, I can say with full confidence that in their
form, angels are completely human. They have faces, eyes, ears,
chests, arms, hands, and feet. They see each other, hear each
other, and talk to each other. In short, they lack nothing that
belongs to humans except that they are not clothed with a
material body.6

Swedenborg, whose New Church in London was the imme-

diate cause for one of Blake’s most startling works, The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, is an example of the fact that for many writers
the division between religion and philosophy, or religion and sci-
ence, was not yet complete. The temptation to easily oppose Blake
to Enlightenment philosophy is a false one; rather, as with all the
Romantics, he was engaged in a dialogue with the most important
ideas of the Enlightenment. For Blake, as for Wordsworth and
Coleridge, simplistic assumptions about the perceiving subject as
a passive recipient of sense impressions in the wake of John Locke’s

17
 divine images

empirical philosophy made art effectively impossible. By contrast,

a fuller approach to Enlightened thinking would embolden each
person to fulfil their senses and abilities in a way that Blake con-
sidered holy, an ideal that was espoused by his maxim in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘If the doors of perception were
cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.’ In terms
of religious sentiment, the application of this cleansed perception
can be seen in the final stanza of the poem that provides the title
for this book, ‘The Divine Image’:

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too. (e12)

The profound humanism of this poem contrasts with one of its

sources, ‘Praise for the Gospel’ by Dr Isaac Watts, included in
his Divine Songs:

Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace,

And not to chance as others do,
That I was born of Christian race,
And not a Heathen, or a Jew.7

Blake’s vision of the human form divine is one that appeals to a

much wider sensibility than that of Watts. Yet the fact that Blake
was responding to Watts comes from a shared tradition of Non­
conformism. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the easy assumption among Blake scholars was that he belonged
to a Dissenting or Nonconformist tradition, that is, those believers
who, following the Restoration, refused to accept the complete
authority of the Anglican church. Such a view has been chal-
lenged more recently, most notably by Keri Davies who observes

18
 Introduction

that the marriage of Blake’s parents and baptism of their children

in a parish church, but burial in Bunhill Fields (a favourite site for
Nonconformists), suggests that ‘the Blake family were members
of the Church of England at the time of their marriage and moved
toward religious dissent during William’s childhood’ or that their
opposition to the Church was a political stance against its clergy,
rather than a religious one against its theology.8 The move towards
dissent, if it did take place within the family, may have been
inspired by Blake’s mother, whom recent research has identified
as a member of the Moravian Church, one of the oldest Protestant
sects, which had its origins in fifteenth-century Bohemia and was
very accepting of its members belonging both to Moravian and
Anglican congregations.9 The relationship between religious and
political dissent, then, is an important theme that runs throughout
this book.
The appreciation of Blake’s works is made easier by an under-
standing of his religious ideas and of the language of the Bible,
which informed his work in a way that is unfamiliar to many read-
ers today. This is by no means to ignore the fact that those works
are also profoundly political in their nature: his birth in 1757 was,
after all, only a century after the great religious wars between
Protestants and Catholics that had torn apart Europe and had
been reflected in the civil strife of the British Isles. During his life-
time he witnessed not one but two revolutions, first that by means
of which the American colonies were transformed into the United
States, and then the revolution in France that led to the bloodiest
conflicts in Europe prior to the First World War. David Erdman,
in his book Blake: Prophet Against Empire, was one of the first to
write persuasively of how the political antagonism between the
crown and a largely metropolitan group of ‘patriots’ opposed to
the attempt to subdue America shaped Blake’s own views from
an early age. It was the French Revolution, as with all the great
Romantics, that catalysed his own radical views. According to

19
 divine images

Gilchrist, Blake wore the bonnet rouge, the cap of liberty that was
a symbol of adherence to the ideals of the Revolution: ‘Down to
his last days Blake always avowed himself a “Liberty Boy,” a
faithful “Son of Liberty”.’10 His radicalism became overt in the
immediate aftermath of the Revolution: his only conventionally
set poem after the early Poetical Sketches was entitled The French
Revolution (1791), and during the 1790s he turned to the theme
of liberty and tyranny in a series of prophetic books that began
with America a Prophecy, a retelling of the American War of
Independence in the light of events in France.
Political and religious radicalism infuse Blake’s poetic and
visual art, providing a context for many of his most original – and
often challenging – opinions on psychology, sexuality and all
aspects of human relations. He was also affected by the changing
urban environment in which he lived. By the time of Blake’s birth,
London had a population of about three-quarters of a million
people; by 1815 it was already the largest city in the world with
nearly 3.2 million inhabitants. At this stage, many of those living
in London had not, like Blake, been born there, with most flood-
ing into the industrializing city from the countryside as rapid
changes in agrarian practices both enabled a population boom
and removed the means of subsistence living that had been in
place for generations. By the time of his death, the number of
people living in the capital would grow even further, especially
with an influx of immigrants from Ireland. The changing nature
of the city did not escape one of its greatest poets: many readers
are surprised to read so much pastoral poetry in Blake’s early
work, assuming that lyrics such as ‘The Ecchoing Green’ are fan-
tasias. And yet, as maps of London in 1770 show, areas such as
Green Park and St James’s Park were not minor incursions upon
the urban landscape but actual limits of the city. As a child, Blake
could have easily walked from his home in Soho to the farms and
countryside that surrounded London, and when he and Catherine

20
 Introduction

moved to Lambeth in the 1790s it was to take up residence in new

developments that were only just starting to cover the area south
of the Thames.
These pastoral surroundings had not entirely disappeared by
the time of his death, but London was already well on the way to
becoming the City of Dreadful Night envisaged by the Victorian
poet James Thomson. The wealthy areas of the West End were
increasingly distinguished from the slums of the East End, and by
the early decades of the nineteenth century the middle classes
were moving from the squalor of the older buildings in central
London to the suburbs of Highgate and St John’s Wood. Although
I am sceptical that the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ invoked in stanzas from
Milton a Poem are explicitly about the Industrial Revolution, Blake
was indeed living during a period that saw rapid industrialization
and urbanization. In 1812 the docks of London were integrated by
Act of Parliament into a growing national canal system, bringing
more trade and people to London, and the Albion Mills, the first
factory in the capital, was constructed in 1786 by Matthew
Boulton and James Watt. Although it burned down in 1791, its
steam-powered mechanisms would be adopted by an increasing
number of manufactories, especially as the new canals allowed the
cheap import of coal. While Blake’s own language was shaped by
older, more familiar motifs of the blacksmith, it is this city of indus-
try and darkness that Blake mythologizes in his later works such
as Jerusalem.

Blake’s Legacy

As well as exploring Blake’s art and poetry in the context of his

life and times, the final chapter of Divine Images is also concerned
with the legacy of those words and images. The appearance of
Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake in 1863 was some-
thing of a literary sensation. One of the reasons for its success was

21
 divine images

that, in contrast to more famous contemporaries such as Byron,

Wordsworth and Shelley, Blake’s very obscurity allowed him to
be remade in the image of those who discovered him first. For
Gilchrist, he was a saintly figure neglected by the world, while
the Rossettis began the transformation of Blake into a ‘complete
artist’, one who was concerned only with art for art’s sake. While
appreciating the aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne
re-created the Romantic as a true poet who was very knowingly

William Blake in Youth

and Age, c. 1830,
graphite with
brush and brown
ink on paper.

22
 Introduction

of the Devil’s party and, slightly later, Yeats would re-imagine

him as an occultist and more thoroughgoing Swedenborgian than
Blake had ever been. In a sense, this re-creation of Blake in the
artist’s or writer’s own image has continued ever since.
In terms of Blake’s influence, the most immediate effects were
felt in the art world. This was because of the role played by the
Shoreham Ancients, particularly figures such as Samuel Palmer
and George Richmond who, in turn, were influential on later gen-
erations of artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites, a transmission of
Blakean ways of seeing the world that were not always fully con-
scious in the immediate decades following his death. In the
aftermath of the publication of Gilchrist’s Life, however, that
influence came to be very fully invoked, with Blake playing an
important role in such things as the Arts and Crafts Movement.
By the end of the century his poetry also had an important role
to play in the work of figures such as W. B. Yeats, but it was in
the early twentieth century, with the rise of Modernism, that his
complex illuminated prophecies finally began to be appreciated.
Writers as diverse as Joyce, Eliot and Auden would invoke Blake
as a forerunner of the difficult literary style they were promoting
at the same time that his art – so widely emulated by the Pre-
Raphaelites and in Art Nouveau – was starting to look rather
old-fashioned.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a pattern
of vogues and fashions for Blake become apparent: for a while he
would be the new discovery and thus become all the rage, but
then, with time, reproductions of Blake’s art or his poetry would
oversaturate the market. People grew bored of him and so he fell
out of fashion, only to be rediscovered by a later generation, so
that interest in Blake has often been cyclical. After the Second
World War, for example, Blake was adopted wholesale by the
Beats but then, from the 1980s onwards, seemed to fall out of
favour a little (including, even, in academia, where by the 1990s

23
 divine images

there were rumblings to remove him from the list of the ‘Big Six’ as
not being a proper Romantic). The change in interest appeared to
rise at the end of the 1990s when, among other things, an increas-
ing sense of millennial anxiety seemed a good context in which
to revive the works of the most visionary of the figures from the
Romantic era.
Much of Blake’s legacy has, unsurprisingly, centred on art
and writing, but he has been important to other areas such as film-
making, philosophy and even science: his continual opposition to
the worldview of Isaac Newton finally found favour at the end of
the twentieth century when the revolution begun by Einstein and
quantum mechanics almost a hundred years earlier seemed to
require a new paradigm beyond mechanistic philosophies. In one
area outside the visual arts and writing, however, that of music,
Blake appears to have been more influential than just about any
other poet. In the first years of the twenty-first century, I and
other critics could place Blake just behind Shakespeare and
Robert Burns in terms of the number of times his works had been
set to music, but in the intervening time musical adaptations of his
lyrical poetry in particular have soared in number while settings
of Shakespeare and Burns have remained relatively static. This
book can only look at a few examples of Blakean music, but it is
a field that is rich and growing.
At his simplest, as in Songs of Innocence and of Experience or
Auguries of Innocence, Blake writes in a way that even the smallest
of children can understand – yet such works comprise only the
smallest fraction of his output. Much that is difficult is so because
contexts that were common to Blake, such as a profound knowl-
edge of the Bible, are no longer widely shared. At other times,
however, Blake is difficult to understand because he is obscure,
sometimes deliberately so: as he wrote to Reverend Dr Trusler in
1799, ‘That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth
my care,’ the same letter in which he explained ‘The World is a

24
 Introduction

World of Imagination and Vision’ (e702). As anyone who has ever

appreciated the work of William Blake will know, this ‘World of
Imagination and Vision’ can sometimes be the simplest thing to
comprehend, immediately known by the smallest child: elsewhere,
however, a deeper, richer appreciation of Blake’s work will come
through understanding the range of his works, visual and poetic,
and the history of the times in which he lived. Divine Images is
intended as such a guide for readers who wish to know more
about what motivated and inspired this most original of artists.

25
 1
Early Life and Work

A brown granite tower occupies the spot where William Blake

was born. Built in 1966 by Stillman & Eastwick-Field to
house shops, offices and flats, William Blake House in Broadwick
Street stands on the site of 28 Broad Street where William, the
third son of James and Catherine Blake, was born on 28 November
1757. That terrace house was demolished in 1965 to make way for
high-rise accommodation and the street renamed; a plaque notes
his birth at this location in Soho, and some of the old buildings
that survive on Broadwick Street give an idea of what the family
home, where he lived until 1782, would have looked like.

Infant Joy

Blake’s parents were married on 15 October 1752 at the church

of St George, Hanover Square. The church had been built after
the parish of St George was established in 1724 to accommodate
the growing population in the city, in an area that included some
Joseph of Arimathea of the most fashionable parts of London such as Belgravia and
among The Rocks of Mayfair. Catherine Blake (née Wright) had been wed to Thomas
Albion, composed Armitage before she married James, and her new husband took
1773, copy made
c. 1803, intaglio over the Broad Street hosiery and haberdashery shop that had
engraving on paper. previously been run by the Armitages. Despite previous assertions

27
 divine images

that Blake’s family may have had links to dissenting traditions

such as the Muggletonians, a movement that had grown from the
Ranters during the English Civil War and which opposed philo-
sophical reason,1 more recent research has offered a stronger link
between Blake’s mother, Catherine, and the Moravian Church.2
The Moravians, formally known as the Unitas fratrum (Unity of
the Brethren), took their name from Protestant exiles who had
fled from Moravia to Saxony in 1722, with roots dating back to
the fifteenth-century Bohemian Reformation led by Jan Hus.
The followers of Hus, who wished for Mass to be celebrated in
the vernacular as well as for other reforms such as the abolition
of indulgences, were some of the earliest Protestants in Europe,
pre-dating Martin Luther by fifty years. Some of those living
in Moravia fled their Catholic homeland and established them-
selves on the estates of a German nobleman, Nikolaus Ludwig
von Zinzendorf; under his protection, the Moravians established
missions as far afield as the Americas, Africa and the Far East,
setting up a congregation in England by 1742. Much more than
this simple congregation, however, the pietism that these German
missionaries brought with them was to have a profound effect
on the eighteenth-century evangelical revival, inspiring Wesley,
among others, with their faith.3
As Keri Davies observes, the marriage of the Blakes and bap-
tism of their children in Anglican churches – but later burial
of family members at Bunhill Fields – suggests that the family
originally participated in the rites of the Church of England but
then may have become part of a dissenting congregation. The
Moravians had been recognized by Act of Parliament as an epis-
copal and thus sister church, but their places of worship had
to be licensed as Dissenting Chapels. As such, ‘they were and
then again were not Dissenters . . . Accordingly, one could be
an Anglican and a Moravian at the same time – and it turns out
that a majority of the English brethren were and remained loyal

28
 Early Life and Work

members of the Church of England.’4 In these circumstances,

Blake would have been accustomed to an evangelical upbringing
in which God’s agency in everyday life was very much expected,
in contrast to the cooler, Latitudinarian tendencies of the estab-
lished Anglican Church. Later in life he would refer to the more
distant attitudes of the Church of England and of deism and, as
we saw in the introduction, deism very much affected his vision
of Urizen, the tyrant god of reason.
William was baptized at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, the
parish church in an area that had only recently been developed
into what G. E. Bentley Jr describes as a ‘solidly bourgeois’ neigh-
bourhood.5 By all accounts, Blake’s early childhood was a happy
one: the biographer Stanley Gardner observes that ‘William had
chosen his parents well,’6 not least because they took the enlight-
ened view that their son would not benefit from education at school
and thus taught him at home. While contemporaries be­moaned
his lack of formal education, he avoided the drilling in the classics
that would have stultified his imagination, for all that it often left
him at a disadvantage among his later, upper-class patrons and
customers. Nor did his parents discourage his more un­­­usual per-
ceptions of the world around him. In letters and accounts recorded
by his earliest biographers, Blake and his acquaintances spoke
of visions from an early age, such as when he saw God putting his
head to the window of the family home, or angels in the trees at
Peckham Rye. The stories and incidents from this period that sur-
vive are largely drawn from Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William
Blake. Gilchrist also recorded how the young boy’s artistic talents
were recognized by his parents, so that at the age of ten he was
enrolled in the drawing school of Henry Pars. Train­­ing mainly con-
sisted of copying plaster casts of Greek and Roman models (thus
shaping Blake’s neoclassical visual tastes, if not his literary ones),
as well as prints of famous paintings. The young William was given
an allowance by his father to build up a collection of prints and

29
 divine images

books, developing an appreciation of literature as well as art that

was to have a lasting effect upon him.
Blake’s lifetime saw a radical period of change across Britain,
its colonies and Europe. In 1760 George iii was crowned king of
Great Britain and king of Ireland, his accession being acclaimed
by politicians of all parties, although political tensions and a per-
ceived preference for the Tories would soon end that period of
accord. Unlike his two predecessors, George iii spoke English
as his first language and, although he would eventually become
king of Hanover, he never visited the country of his forebears.
The new king came to the crown during the Seven Years’ War,
a global conflict between the powers of Europe that would end
with British victories against France in 1763, but which also
placed great strain upon the kingdom’s finances. What is more,
those financial difficulties led to increasing tensions with the larg-
est of Britain’s colonies across the Atlantic in North America,
which would eventually boil over into full revolution. As well
as immense, even catastrophic, change abroad, the United
Kingdom itself was to be transformed during the reign of George
iii. London grew relentlessly, containing more than a million
inhabitants when the first census was conducted in 1801 – a very
different place to the city of Blake’s childhood, when the capital
was much smaller and more rural than it would become in the
nineteenth century.

Apprenticeship and Marriage

The young William’s attitude to school may be surmised from

one of his later Songs of Experience, ‘The School Boy’:

But to go to school in a summer morn,

O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,

30
 Early Life and Work

The little ones spend the day,

In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour.
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learnings bower,
Worn thro’ with the dreary shower. (e31)

When taken to a potential schoolmaster, William Wynne Ryland,

according to Gilchrist, young William had told his parents that
the teacher had a face that ‘looks as if he will live to be hanged’
(Life i.13); that Ryland was indeed later hanged was seized upon
by Blake’s biographer as an example of his prophetic talents. It
is more likely the story was apocryphal but, in any case, his par-
ents decided that his education would be better served by an
apprenticeship when he was fourteen years old to James Basire,
an engraver who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, near Covent
Garden. Basire’s father had been an engraver, and his son and
grandson would follow in their footsteps. While he worked for a
number of clients, much of his most important work was carried
out for the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was a member,
and Blake’s apprenticeship from 1772 to 1779 established a lifelong
love for history and antiquarianism.
As Joseph Viscomi observes: ‘No printmaker before Blake had
incorporated the tools and techniques of writing, drawing, and
painting in a graphic medium, though the materials and tools were
commonplace.’7 Blake’s education began in earnest with Basire,
during which time he lived at the engraver’s home, as was common
at the time, learning the style of line engraving as well as other
techniques that would establish a trade by which he would be able
to make a living. His parents had been sensible in their choice:
recognizing their son’s artistic talents but also aware that painting

31
 divine images

was a risky career, they had provided him with what seemed a
more secure route to explore his creativity. From the seventeenth
century on, the explosion of print production had generated
markets around Europe for reproductions of art and luxury
goods, and such was the demand for prints that it was said that
in cities such as Augsburg, engravers outnumbered bakers by
the eighteenth century.8 While there were decidedly more
bakers in London, it would still have seemed to the Blake family
that the apprenticeship to Basire was a wise choice. The engraver
was eminently respected and Blake learned a great deal from
his master. As Mei-Ying Sung observes, the tendency to focus
Letter press
on Blake’s method of etching – drawing with an acid-resistant printing in a
ink on copper plates with the exposed parts eaten away, a tech- print workshop,
nique that we shall return to in following pages – tends to mean from Diderot’s
Encyclopaedia (1763),
that the more exacting art of engraving is often overlooked and intaglio engraving
that it has ‘lost its golden age forever’.9 Using great skill and care, on paper.

32
 Early Life and Work

the engraver would use a burin, a steel

cutting tool, to carefully groove lines in a
copper plate: the process was laborious
and, as Sung observes from examining
the 38 surviving copper plates engraved
by Blake (mainly for the Book of Job), the
artist would often have to resort to a form
of repoussage, hammering the back of the
plate to smooth its surface and so remove
mistakes. At the time when Blake was
work­­ing, most commercial engrav­­­ing was
via this intaglio process or, alternatively,
by scraping lines through a waxy varnish,
with acid then eating the exposed copper
plate before the lines were once more
worked over and enhanced with the
engraver’s burin.
At an early age Blake seems to have
demonstrated skill as a draughtsman and
An Account of Some so was entrusted to make accurate copies and prepare sketches
Ancient Monuments in Westminster Abbey for a commission on Richard Gough’s
in Westminster Abbey,
in Vetusta Monumenta, Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain, which would be completed
vol. ii: The Figures in 1786. The drawings that Blake produced show the early influ-
supposed to be those ence of medieval and Gothic art on his own style: for example, in
of King Sebert and
King Henry iii, 1780, the watercolour and pen sketches of the north front to the mon-
intaglio engraving ument for King Sebert in Westminster Abbey, Blake captures
on paper. the slender, elongated figures framed by ornate Gothic arches,
an elegant piece that has long been recognized as Blake’s handi-
work although the surviving copies bear the inscription of Basire.
A more dramatic example of the influence of antiquarianism and
the Gothic on Blake’s work, however, is to be found in the first
engraving we have to bear his name: Joseph of Arimathea among
The Rocks of Albion.

33
 divine images

Engraved by Blake ‘from an old Italian Drawing’, Blake

includes the observation that ‘Michael Angelo pinxit’, that is,
the Renaissance master painted the original. What Blake almost
certainly saw was a copy of an engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet
after the figure of Joseph painted on the walls of the Sistine
Chapel.10 The idiosyncrasy of Blake’s engraving is to transfer
Joseph from the Holy Land to ancient Britain, writing in a cap-
tion beneath the image: ‘This is One of the Gothic Artists who
Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages Wandering
about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the World was not
worthy such were the Christians in all Ages’ (e671). This trans-
ferral to Albion was probably brought to Blake’s attention from
his reading of John Milton’s History of Britain, in which the his-
torian briefly noted that Joseph was meant to have travelled to
Roman Britain, thus beginning a fascination with the earliest
history of the British Isles that would be explored more fully in
the epic poem Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and
the lyric from the Preface to Milton a Poem, better known today
as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’.
After completing his apprenticeship, Blake applied to be a
student at the Royal Academy in June 1779, submitting a histor-
ical painting for exhibition the following May, The Death of Earl
Goodwin. The importance of the Royal Academy was that it pro-
duced names – such as Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West and Angelica
Kauffman – who are still recognized as significant artists today.
Furthermore, it provided a variety of teaching and learning styles
designed to appeal to a range of students beyond the typical upper
classes. As Holger Hoock points out, the educational process
offered at the Royal Academy followed the standard pattern of
academies throughout Europe although, in contrast to them, tui-
tion was free of charge.11 Emphasizing this opening up of the
Academy’s purpose, its Summer Exhibition was one of the first
open submission exhibitions in the world, providing a democratic

34
 Early Life and Work

basis for the display of art that was profound in its implications
for the development of British art.12 Entering into this institution,
Blake’s choice of historical subjects corresponded to the tendency
at the time to consider history as the height of the painter’s art,
as demonstrated in famous productions such as James Barry’s
King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786).
As part of his studies at the Royal Academy, Blake would
have engaged in life drawing and copying plaster casts that were
kept on display for the training of artists. Through such activities,
Blake concentrated on what was seen as the ideal human form,
which, from the mid-eighteenth century, was far removed from
the slender forms he had copied in Westminster Abbey. Instead,
the influence of classical and Renaissance art was everywhere,
with muscular, naked torsos demonstrating a vision of harmony
that was often held up as the height of artistic taste – even if it
was far from the everyday experience of bodies in the streets
of London. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s president, greatly
emphasized the importance of the classical and Platonic ideal
form as the most forceful way to convey power and majesty, as
in the art of Michelangelo and Raphael; for all that he may have
objected to Reynolds, Blake was clearly affected by this element
of instruction at the Royal Academy, as evidenced in his early
work. One such study, a sketch from 1780 for what would become
known as ‘Albion Rose’ (or its erroneous older title from Gilchrist,
Glad Day), a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, shows
how Blake’s vision of the giant Albion as representative of the
country was taking shape very early in his career. Another sketch,
of a naked youth seen from the side, is a classical academic study
of the type that would become even more familiar throughout the
nineteenth century. It is beautiful, refined – and may not even
be by William, although he took care to preserve it. William’s
younger brother, Robert, also demonstrated an aptitude for art
and was lovingly trained by his sibling.

35
 divine images

Although Blake left the Royal

Academy shortly after en­­rolling, he
made some of his longest-lasting
friendships there, including John
Flaxman and George Cumber­land,
as well as an acquaintance with the
artist Henry Fuseli. Born Johann
Hein­rich Füssli in Switz­er­land, and
most famous today for his Gothic
painting The Nightmare, in 1779
Fuseli had taken up an extremely
profitable commission to paint
pieces for John Boydell’s Shake­
speare Gallery. Although they were
not close friends in the same way
that Blake was with Flax­­­­­­man and
Cumberland, Fuseli reportedly told
others that ‘Blake was damn good to
steal from’. Amid such friendships,
however, in 1780 London was in a
state of turmoil. Following an Act
of Parliament in 1778 to ease con-
ditions for Catholics, Lord George
Gordon, president of the Protestant Asso­ciation, stirred up pop- A Naked Youth
ular sentiments against the Act when it finally came into effect Seen from the Side,
Perhaps Robert Blake,
two years later. June 1780 saw nearly a week of rioting, known to c. 1779–80, black
history as the Gordon Riots, during which participants defied the chalk on paper.
authorities during widespread looting and attacks on Newgate
Prison and other buildings. According to Gilchrist, Blake himself
was caught up in the events:

That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route

chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from

36
 Early Life and Work

Justice Hyde’s house near Leicester Fields . . . bound for

Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of
triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a
great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in
the very front rank, and witness the storm and burning of the
fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates.
(Life i.35)

The houses of rich Catholics were, unsurprisingly, attacked, but

so were the Bank of England and the home of the Lord Chief
Justice. The army was called out on 7 June and order was slowly
restored over two days, during which time some 285 people were
killed and many more injured before the ringleaders were arrested.
Twenty-five of them were hanged; Gordon was charged with
high treason but found not guilty. Rioting was far from uncom-
mon in eighteenth-century London, but the events of the Gordon
Riots went beyond normal incidents, the authorities clearly having
lost control of the city for a brief period of time (an experience
that would make them far harsher when dealing with future
threats in the wake of the French Revolution). Even the former
radical John Wilkes ordered his men guarding the Bank of England
to open fire on rioters. Gilchrist presents Blake as an unwilling
bystander in the riots, although the young man may have been
swept up with the violent excitement of potential revolt, even as
that same violence caused him to respond with horror throughout
his life.
The events of the Gordon Riots were dramatic but, as Gardner
relates, the circumstances of the American Revolutionary War
could create further dangers in London. Conflict had broken out
in 1775 following a period of unrest caused by attempts to impose
taxes upon the colonies (in part to help pay for the expenses caused
in defending those colonies during the Seven Years’ War). Fighting
began at Concord in April 1775, and though the British forces

37
 divine images

originally had the better of it, Dutch and French entry into the
conflict sapped the United Kingdom’s ability to wage a long war
of attrition, resulting in a peace treaty signed in Paris in September
1783. During this time tensions were greatly raised at home and it
was probably in September 1780 that Thomas Stothard, who was
to remain a friend until the end of Blake’s life, went on a sketching
trip with William and his former fellow apprentice, James Parker.
Sailing up the River Medway to Chatham, the trio anchored and
began to draw the scenes around the military base at Upnor Castle.
The troops there, suspecting them to be French spies, arrested the
trio. Although they were soon released, in the late eighteenth cen-
tury ‘authorities everywhere, not only in London, suspected that
sketching pencils spelt treachery’.13
The most important change in Blake’s life, however, was nei-
ther involvement in rioting nor arrest for being a suspected spy; it
was, rather, the beginning of his lifelong love with his future wife.
Following an encounter with a young woman who called him a
fool when he complained after seeing her with another man (which
incident, wrote Gilchrist, cured him of jealousy), Blake lodged for
a time in Battersea at the home of William Boucher (or Boutcher,
according to Frederick Tatham). There he met Catherine Sophia,
the youngest of nine daughters and four brothers, who later
claimed to have instantly recognized her future partner as soon as
she saw him.14 William and Catherine were married on 18 August
1782, a marriage that was to last for 45 years. As a member of
such a large and relatively poor family, Catherine’s formal edu-
cation appears to have been largely non-existent (she marked
the parish register with a cross). Blake probably taught her to
read and write, as well as drawing, engraving and the prepara-
tion of colours to help him in his work: throughout his career,
Catherine was to provide invaluable help in preparing the printed
works and during the early 1780s Blake was starting to receive
his first commercial commissions. After the death of his father

38
 Early Life and Work

in 1784, he started a print business with James Parker, marking

one of the happiest – and certainly one of the most profitable –
periods of his life.

Poetical Sketches and An Island in the Moon

It was around the time of his marriage to Catherine that William

was introduced to two figures who would enable his entry into
the literary world, Reverend Anthony Stephen Matthew and his
wife, Harriet, the latter of whom, as Gilchrist would later note
in his Life, was a socialite and patron of the arts. Their house at 27
Rathbone Place drew musicians, artists and poets and it was at
these gatherings, as Gilchrist later recorded, that Blake was sup-
posed to have sung some of his early compositions. The Matthews
were impressed enough by his singing to provide funds, after the
solicitation of Flaxman, for the printing of his first collection of
poems, called Poetical Sketches, which also included some of the
juvenilia written in his early teens. Printed in 1783, the copies were
made without binding and had had little in the way of proofread-
ing, for Blake later corrected eleven copies in his own hand. This
small print run disappeared entirely without notice during his
lifetime, although William admired the work enough to give away
copies in later years.
The collection is divided into two main sections: the first,
‘Miscellaneous Poems’, consists of lyric poetry in the form of
songs, eulogies and ballads; the second part includes an unfinished
Shakespearean drama, ‘King Edward the Third’, as well as pro-
logues to two further pieces, ‘King Edward the Fourth’ and ‘King
John’, and the prose poems ‘The Couch of Death’, ‘Contemplation’
and ‘Sampson’. Unsurprisingly, considering he was still a teenager
when he wrote a number of them, many of the works derive strongly
from fashions of the day, although they are also a good indi­­cation
of just how widely read in contemporary poets the young Blake

39
 divine images

was. The opening quartet of poems – ‘To Spring’, ‘To Summer’,

‘To Autumn’ and ‘To Winter’ – draw their theme and much of
their style from James Thomson’s The Seasons, published from
1726 to 1730 and extremely fashionable in eighteenth-century
England. Likewise, the ballads ‘Fair Eleanor’ and ‘Gwin, King
of Norway’ demonstrate the influences of Walpole’s The Castle
of Otranto, the Norse and British poetry of Thomas Gray and the
prodigy Thomas Chatterton, whose death by suicide at the age
of seventeen in 1770 had made him a cause célèbre even as his
poetry was increasingly denounced by those in the know as for-
geries of verse in the medieval style. Blake was clearly familiar with
such writers, as well as William Collins, whose Odes and Persian
Eclogues had marked a turn away from the heroic couplets of
Alexander Pope from the 1740s onwards, and Thomas Macpherson,
whose ‘translations’ of the ancient Scots-Irish poet Ossian (actu-
ally forgeries like those of Chatterton) had made him one of the
most famous writers across Europe. By writing in the style of such
poets, Blake had indicated that he was fully aware of the popular
poetical styles and tastes of his day.
Yet Poetical Sketches is more than merely derivative, and one
clue to the writers’ future progress is indicated in its most ambi-
tious text: the unfinished play ‘King Edward the Third’. Doubtless
Blake sought to establish his poetic and dramatic credentials by
completing the work of Shakespeare: while The Raigne of King
Edward the Third had been printed anonymously in 1596, it was
not included in Shakespeare’s Folio edition and neither eighteenth-
century nor modern scholars believed it to be his work. By laying
claim to a missing masterpiece (unlike Edward ii, which Shakespeare
clearly avoided because Christopher Marlowe had made that tale
his own), the young William was demonstrating considerable con-
fidence in his own abilities, a confidence that was not always
misplaced:

40
 Early Life and Work

Here on the fields of Cressy we are settled,

’Till Philip springs the tim’rous covey again.
The Wolf is hunted down by causeless fear;
The Lion flees, and fear usurps his heart;
Startled, astonish’d at the clam’rous Cock;
The Eagle, that doth gaze upon the sun,
Fears the small fire that plays about the fen;
If, at this moment of their idle fear,
The Dog doth seize the Wolf, the Forester the Lion,
The Negro in the crevice of the rock,
Doth seize the soaring Eagle; undone by flight,
They tame submit: such the effect flight has
On noble souls. Now hear its opposite:
The tim’rous Stag starts from the thicket wild,
The fearful Crane springs from the splashy fen,
The shining Snake glides o’er the bending grass,
The Stag turns head! and bays the crying Hounds;
The Crane o’ertaken, sighteth with the Hawk;
The Snake doth turn, and bite the padding foot;
And, if your Majesty’s afraid of Philip,
You are more like a Lion than a Crane:
Therefore I beg I may return to England.
(Scene 3: 111–33, e430)

In this long speech, through which Dagworth offers a clever turn

of argument to convince Edward that apparent cowardice is
actually a source of cunning, we see some of the subtle argu-
ments that will be more pithily expressed in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, as well as echoes of phrases in The Book of
Thel. More significantly, however, this is also the clearest indi-
cation of one source of Blake’s style: while the influence of
Milton is, of course, profoundly felt throughout all of Blake’s
works, in many respects it is Shakespeare who first serves as the

41
 divine images

source for his poetry. This is immediately apparent in his more

conventionally printed poem The French Revolution, but it also
informs, to give one example, the speeches of the American rev-
olutionaries in America a Prophecy. Shakespeare’s dramatic
output was about to undergo a huge revival in fortunes during
the Romantic era and, with this early work, Blake demonstrates
himself as very much at the forefront of late eighteenth-century
poetic taste.
And yet, remarkable as this pastiche of Shakespeare is, the
most astonishing example of Blake’s immediate talent lies in some
of the shorter lyrics, such as perhaps the most famous poem from
the collection:

How sweet I roam’d from field to field,

And tasted all the summer’s pride,
’Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

He shew’d me lilies for my hair,

And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens far,
Where all his golden pleasures grow,

With sweet May dews my wings were wet,

And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty. (e412–13)

42
 Early Life and Work

In this short song, four quatrains long, Blake vividly demon-

strates some of the power that he will wield as the author of Songs
of Innocence and of Experience. The poem is almost perfect in its
metre and rhythmic quality, offering a simplicity that is almost
un­­­­paralleled in eighteenth-century verse. There is but one spasm
of contemporary poeticism that Wordsworth, in his Preface to
Lyrical Ballads, would have denounced as ‘defective’: ‘Phoebus
fir’d my vocal rage’ is the only example of this piece deviating
from ‘the real language of nature’. In every other sense, this is
something new in poetry of the period, as though the more direct
speech of the Elizabethans had been revived by a young man,
largely self-schooled in his understanding of poetry. As Bentley
observes of the collection as a whole: ‘had he written nothing
more, Blake would deserve our remembrance.’15 By contrast,
most of Blake’s contemporaries would have probably agreed
with Reverend Matthew’s prefatory comment that the ‘Sketches
were the production of untutored youth’ (e846). Similarly, Allan
Cunningham observed that while the non-dramatic poems were
‘rude sometimes and unmelodious’, they were also ‘full of fine
thought and deep and peculiar feeling’ (cited in br 629). It was
Gilchrist, however, who caught most fully the mood in which
Poetical Sketches came to be seen by later Victorian readers:

’Tis hard to believe these poems were written in the author’s

teens, harder still to realize how some of them, in their unforced
simplicity, their bold and careless freedom of sentiment and
expression, came to be written at all in the third quarter of
the eighteenth century: the age ‘of polished phraseology and
subdued thought’ – subdued with a vengeance. (Life i.23)

Poetical Sketches represents a singular demonstration of Blake’s

early talent, placing him as a talented successor to poets such
as Gray, Collins and Chatterton. A different, unfinished work,

43
 divine images

however, places him in the context of the Augustan age of satire

and the London of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Samuel
Johnson. The opening to his manuscript comedy An Island in
the Moon is among the most charming things that he ever wrote:

In the Moon, is a certain Island near by a mighty continent,

which small island seems to have some affinity to England.
What is more extraordinary the people are so much alike
their language so much the same that you would think you
was among your friends. in this Island dwells three Philoso­
phers Suction, the Epicurean, Quid the Cynic, Sipsop, the
Pythagorean. (e449)

This group of philosopher friends, from whom later critics have

identified Quid the Cynic as the alter ego of Blake, are joined by
a small and thoroughly eccentric cast of characters, many of
whom, such as Inflammable Gas the Wind Finder, are barely
disguised caricatures of contemporary figures, in this case Joseph
Priestley who in the 1770s had discovered oxygen or, as he called
it, ‘dephlogisticated air’. It was William Doxey who first observed
the similarities between the inhabitants of Blake’s island in the
moon and members of the Lunar Society, a dining club and
learned society in Birmingham that included Priestley and other
luminaries, such as Josiah Wedgwood and James Watt, among its
membership.16
The easy-going nature of the satire in An Island in the Moon,
which gently mocks the salons of the Matthews as well as people
such as Priestley, whom Blake actually admired in many ways,
indicates a degree of comfort in Blake’s satire that is not often evi-
dent in his later works. His print business with Parker was going
well, his marriage to Catherine a happy one, and the London of
late 1784 had resolved to put aside the tensions of the war with
America and concentrate on the business of daily life. Not that

44
 Early Life and Work

the conditions of life in the capital were perfect. One feature of

the manuscript, recognized very early on, was its role in the gen-
esis of a number of poems that would later gain fame as his Songs
of Innocence, including a draft of ‘Holy Thursday’:

Upon a holy thursday their innocent faces clean

The children walking two & two in grey & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white
as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like thames
waters flow

O what a multitude they seemd, these flowers of London

town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes were there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little girls & boys raising their innocent
hands

Then like a mighty wind they raise to heavn the voice

of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heavn among
Beneath them sit the revrend men the guardians of the
poor
Then cherish pity lest you drive an angel from your door.
(e462–3)

As Gardner observes, Blake’s humour is tempered by his ‘crea-

tive solicitude for children in distress’ and the conditions of the
poor, a concern that was widely shared in the 1780s, not least by
Priestley, who set up Sunday schools for deprived children in
Clapham at this time.17 Even on an island in the moon, the poor
are always with us.

45
 divine images

Early Career and Experiments in Printmaking

On 12 August 1787 William was hit by a tragedy that affected

him much more deeply than the death several years earlier of his
father. His younger brother Robert, who had come to live with
William and Catherine, succumbed to tuberculosis, leaving a
sense of deep loss that the poet and artist would still feel much
later in his life. It was following the death of Robert that Blake
began to experiment with a new kind of etching process, what
he would later refer to as stereotype printing in The Ghost of Abel
(e272). Because of his interest in writing and producing his own
designs, Blake sought to combine text and image without the
expense of hiring additional typesetters. Relief etching – burn-
ing away the copper to leave behind raised lines in relief – was
intended by Blake as a means of producing books more quickly.
Typically, when employing etching techniques, the artist would
cover the entire plate with acid-resistant varnish (also called the
‘ground’) before using tools to score or scratch lines through that
varnish down to the plate. By covering the plate with nitric acid,
or aqua fortis, the exposed lines would be eaten away, creating
grooves in the plate that would hold ink while the level surface of
the copper was cleaned for printing, a process reversed by Blake.
Instead of covering the entire plate with a varnish or ground and
cutting his design into it with engraver’s tools, he used the varnish
like ink and the copper plate like a sheet of paper. Dipping his
quill pen or fine pencil brush into the acid-resistant varnish, he
wrote his text and drew his design directly on the polished sur-
face of the plate, just as a writer would write out fair copy and as
an artist would draw. All of the surfaces that were not protected
were then corroded or eaten away by the acid, leaving raised
lines that would be inked for printing.18 The whole process was
described poetically by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

46
 Early Life and Work

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in

which knowledge is transmitted from generation to
generation.
In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away
the rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of
Dragons were hollowing the cave,
In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock
& the cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and
precious stones.
In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feath-
ers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite,
around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built pal-
aces in the immense cliffs.
In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging
around & melting the metals into living fluids.
In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the
metals into the expanse.
There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth
chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged
in libraries. (e40)

Here the various elements of preparation are alluded to meta-

phorically: the viper folding around the cave is acid eating away
the copper plate, while the wings of the eagle refer to the feather
used to brush away bubbles in the acid that can cause irregulari-
ties. John Jones points out that relief etching ‘would appear crude
compared to regularized typesetting and intaglio line engrav-
ing’, something that did not appeal to conventional publishers.
For Blake, however, the handmade look of his prints could also
appear much more artistic than the ‘perfection attained through
mechanization’.19
Joseph Viscomi, in Blake and the Idea of the Book, emphasizes
just how important this process was to Blake, allowing him to

47
 divine images

compose freely on the plate rather than (as was previously thought)
creating designs first on paper, which would then be transferred
onto the copper: ‘While Blake often used tools of the printmaker
in addition to the tools of the poet and painter, the initial design
was executed like a pen and wash drawing.’20 Blake came to refer
to this process as stereotype printing some time after 1820, but he
said that the technique had actually been developed in 1788, the
time that he was working on All Religions are One and There is No
Natural Religion.
Only one copy remains of All Religions are One. Held by the
Huntington Library, it comprises ten small pages, some six by
four centimetres in size, each of them combining illustrations with
seven principles as follows:

The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness

The Argument As the true method of knowledge is experi-
ment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which
experiences. This faculty I treat of.
principle 1st That the Poetic Genius is the true Man.
and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from
the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are
derived from their Genius. which by the Ancients was call’d
an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
principle 2d As all men are alike in outward form, So (and
with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius
principle 3d No man can think write or speak from his heart,
but he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are
from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every
individual
principle 4 As none by traveling over known lands can find
out the unknown. So from already acquired knowledge Man
could not acquire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius
exists

48
 Early Life and Work

principle 5 The Religions of all Nations are derived from

each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which
is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.
principle 6 The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An orig-
inal derivation from the Poetic Genius. this is necessary from
the confined nature of bodily sensation
principle 7th As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So
all Religions & as all similars have one source
The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius (e1–2)

Some of this voice will become familiar in the tone of The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell produced by Blake two years later:
there it is transformed into the voice of the Devil, an implacable
logic that refutes the common certainties of conventional reli-
gion. Important to what Blake considers the source of religion is
‘Poetic Genius’, that which the great Blake scholar Northrop Frye
argues is synonymous with another term: imagination. Thus, for
Blake, the reason why all religions are one is because all of them
have their source in the imagination. This is an astonishing claim.
Essentially, Blake is arguing that all religions are invented, man-
made. Rather than being the same in terms of external appearance
– ‘As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same
infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius’ – religions may
be one in their source (the poetic genius or imagination) but their
forms are infinitely varied.
This truly revolutionary claim is further supported by the
accompanying work There is No Natural Religion. Eight copies
survive, with different numbers of pages and ordered variously,
but again combining image and text in a format that would be
used regularly by Blake over the coming decades. It develops
the argument offered in All Religions are One, drawing upon a
common opinion of the Enlightenment that sought to explain
the origins of religion in a historical fashion, one we would

49
 divine images

perhaps understand today as sociology. The technique had its

origins in the Scienza nuova, or New Science, of Giambattista Vico,
published in 1725. In this work Vico argues that myth and folk-
lore came not from deities but were socially produced and
structured responses to natural phenomena, a line of thinking
that became increasingly familiar through works such as David
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776) and, later,
William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). While Blake sometimes
appears to hold a position similar to these historians of natural
religion, as in plate 8 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where,
as we shall see, he holds to religion as a human invention, through- There is No Natural
out his life he remained constant in his opposition to natural Religion, Plate 1,
theology, frequently referring to it as deism. For Blake, deism frontispiece,
c. 1788, relief
– which maintained that, in accordance with the dictates of etching on paper.
reason, God must be a creator who then no longer intervenes in
his creation – was the very worst of worlds as opposed to Leibniz’s There is No Natural
Religion, Plate 9,
assertion that it was the very best. The fundamental problem for relief etching
Blake with regard to deism was that it reduced the human mind on paper.

50
 Early Life and Work

to a passive recipient of external stimuli, a tabula rasa that could

do no more than respond to sense impressions. By contrast for
Blake, ‘Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of percep-
tion. he percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’
(e2). Imagination, or poetic genius, is the sign of man’s agency:
as he put it pithily in The Marriage, ‘A fool sees not the same tree
that a wise man sees’ (e35).
While experimenting on works in relief etching, Blake also
continued to produce commercial prints during the late 1780s.
One such commission included a frontispiece for the English trans-
lation of the book Aphorisms on Man by the Swiss theologian
Johann Caspar Lavater, published in 1788. Lavater, whose work
is now largely unknown, was something of a celebrity in eighteenth-
century Europe. As Sibylle Erle observes, he was esteemed for his
religious writings, although his new system of reading character
via the face in his Essays on Physiognomy attracted opprobrium as
well as sympathy.21 Blake produced a series of engravings for
the Essays as well, having received the commission via Fuseli,
who was friends with Lavater. Erle points out that the success of
Lavater’s attempts to systematize human character was due to
the rise in popularity of portraiture at the time, and while Blake
rejected the attempts by Joshua Reynolds, the leading portraitist
of the day and president of the Royal Academy, to define por-
traiture in terms of an idealized or generalized form of the subject,
he appears to have adapted Lavater’s system. Rather than depict-
ing the likeness of an individual, Blake’s subsequent art copied
the imaginative form to reveal the character of a person.22 Blake
thus largely ignores the pseudo-scientific approach of Lavater,
which had already been discredited on the Continent, in favour
of an aesthetic system of depicting the human form divine or infer-
nal. Nonetheless, by adapting the Swiss physiognomist to his own
system of archetypal representations, Blake appears to have held
Lavater in high regard: on the front page of Aphorisms on Man he

51
 divine images

Rev. John Caspar

Lavater, 1800,
intaglio engraving
on paper.

signed his name beneath that of the author’s and enclosed them
both in a heart.
If affection and friendship characterized Blake’s responses to
Lavater, the final work of this early period to be considered here is
very much an essay in anger, resentment and hatred. Throughout
1789 he worked on a dramatic poem, Tiriel, which although never
published exists in a fair copy manuscript that is very different
to the rougher notes of An Island in the Moon. Drawing upon
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear, Tiriel is

52
 Early Life and Work

the first of Blake’s prophetic books, its tone echoing the style of
Old Testament books such as those dedicated to Ezekiel and Isaiah
while also reflecting the rhythms of Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry.
It tells the story of the Sons of Har and Heva, who revolted against
and abandoned their parents, with Tiriel becoming a tyrant in
the west and enslaving his own children. The poem begins when
they have turned against him, with the now-blind Tiriel cursing
his sons for the death of his wife, Myratana:

And Aged Tiriel stood before the Gates of his beautiful

Tiriel Supporting the palace
Dying Myratana and With Myratana once the Queen of all the western plains
Cursing His Sons, But now his eyes were darkned & his wife fading in death
c. 1789, pen and
ink and grey They stood before their once delightful palace & thus the
washes on paper. Voice

53
 divine images

Of aged Tiriel arose that his sons might hear in their gates
Accursed race of Tiriel behold your father
Come forth & look on her that bore you. come you
accursed sons.
In my weak arms. I here have borne your dying mother
Come forth sons of the Curse come forth. see the death of
Myratana (e276)

The work, which was accompanied by twelve sepia drawings that

were never etched by Blake, shows how even before his more
famous works of the 1790s he was beginning to explore an allusive,
mythographic style that would flourish in his illuminated books.
There is a considerable irony in Swinburne considering Tiriel too
difficult (or, indeed, silly), as much of Blake’s style derived from
one of the most popular writers of his day. Macpherson’s Ossianic
poetry was full of references to legendary figures that readers
probably barely understood but still read in their thousands, as in
this introduction to Fingal, Macpherson’s epic poem published
in 1762:

Cuthullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling

sound. His spear leaned against the rock. His shield lay
on the grass by his side. Amid his thoughts of mighty
Cairbar, a hero slain by the chief in war; the scout of
ocean comes, Moran the son of Fithil!
‘Arise,’ said the youth, ‘Cuthullin, arise. I see the ships of
the north! Many, chief of men, are the foe. Many the
heroes of the sea-borne Swaran!’ – ‘Moran!’ replied the
blue-eyed chief, ‘thou ever tremblest, son of Fithil! Thy
fears have increased the foe. It is Fingal, king of deserts,
with aid to green Erin of streams.’ – ‘I beheld their
chief,’ says Moran, ‘tall as a glittering rock. His spear is
a blasted pine. His shield the rising moon! He sat on the

54
 Early Life and Work

shore! like a cloud of mist on the silent hill! Many, chief

of heroes! I said, many are our hands of war. Well art
thou named, the mighty man; but many mighty men are
seen from Tura’s windy walls.23

Blake’s early works, prior to Songs of Innocence, are often dealt

with in a very cursory fashion, but they provide an important
insight into his later development as a poet and artist, as well as
an indication of the social milieu in which he lived and worked.
Texts such as Tiriel or artworks such as his engraving of Joseph
of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion are far more explicable
when we place them in the contexts of antiquarian interests in the
early history of the British Isles, or a public obsession with the
forged epics of Ossian. Blake’s early poetry is very much part of
the pre-Romantic period that produced poets less well-read today
– Chatterton, Collins and Gray, as well as Macpherson – while
his visual style derived from both his apprenticeship to James
Basire and a fascination with the history painting that was widely
available in London during the 1770s and ’80s. Relatively pros-
perous, happily married and still only in his early thirties, Blake
was poised to begin a series of experimental books that would
establish him as a far more original figure than his pre-Romantic
contemporaries. These works, beginning with Songs of Innocence
and The Book of Thel, would earn him lasting fame even as they
failed to win him a more immediate audience and fortune.

55
 2
Visions of Innocence

I n his 1809 Descriptive Catalogue, an older and somewhat

embittered Blake remarked caustically that the poetry of
Chaucer ‘is a little difficult to him who has only blundered over
novels and catchpenny trifles of booksellers’ (e539). This wry
observation turned on the notion that difficult poetry was increas-
ingly eschewed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in
favour of sentimental fiction and Gothic horror. That Blake was
not being entirely fair, as evidenced by the mass fame that Lord
Byron would achieve a mere five years later, bears witness more to
the fact that his own poetry had found little favour in the preced-
ing decade than to the idea that the readership for poetry as a
whole was declining. The comment, however, is also testimony to
the transformations that had taken place in the book trade during
the previous century, a trade that made possible Blake’s ambitions
to become his own publisher, even if it did not provide him with
fame and fortune during his own lifetime.

Songs of Innocence,
Copy G, Plate 1, ‘Novels and catchpenny trifles of booksellers’:
frontispiece, 1789,
relief etching The Eighteenth-century Book Trade
with pen and ink
and watercolour The half century before Blake’s birth had seen the beginnings of
on paper. a truly national book trade throughout England. While the

57
 divine images

industry was still very much centred on London, as John Feather

observes, this was the period when it began to spread throughout
the provinces, caused by a series of events set in motion by the
lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Until this time, printers could
hope for no more than small and uneconomic markets outside of
London, Oxford and Cambridge, but the failure to pass replace-
ment legislation resulted effectively in an end to censorship. Not
that the House of Commons’ refusal to renew the Act was an
unmitigated success for London printers: publishers were con-
cerned that the new liberty of the press would lead to a period of
chaos as they were denied the crucial privilege of having sole rights
to a particular work. For a period of time this led to what Feather
called a potential ‘economic catastrophe’ as texts were widely
pirated, a state of affairs that was eventually averted only with the
Copyright Act of 1710.1 Nonetheless, despite these early fears,
book publishing in the eighteenth century was to flourish in
England as never before, and nowhere was the growth of this trade

Thomas
Rowlandson,
The Author and his
Publisher (Bookseller),
1784, watercolour
and grey wash over
graphite on paper.

58
 Visions of Innocence

Beggar’s Opera, Act

iii, 1790, intaglio
engraving on paper.

more in evidence than in the rise of the novel. The publication of

Robinson Crusoe in 1719 established the public’s taste for sustained
fictional accounts, a trend that was cemented by the publication
of the first best-seller, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in 1740.
Richardson, who only turned to writing in his fifties, had built his
fortune before that time as a printer and bookseller. After the suc-
cess of Pamela and then Clarissa, no one could doubt that the
eighteenth century was the age of the novel.
Nor was publishing restricted to this format. One successful
bookseller and publisher who became increasingly significant to
Blake was Joseph Johnson. Born to a Dissenting family, in the
1760s Johnson set up business in London, primarily selling reli-
gious books. Over the next two decades he became more and
more successful, befriending figures such as Henry Fuseli and
Joseph Priestley, as well as issuing books by other religious dis-
senters such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and philosophers such
as Thomas Malthus. By 1770, months after a fire that had threat-
ened to completely ruin him after it destroyed his shop, Johnson

59
 divine images

established himself at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, the largest shop

on a street of booksellers, where he was to remain until the end
of his career. Offering a wide range of dissenting books, he
became a major publisher in distributing nonconformist works
around the country. In the 1780s he began to use Blake as an
engraver and throughout the 1780s and ’90s his reputation as a
publisher, especially of politically and theologically freethinking
works, began to grow. His home became the centre for a group
of radical thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William
Godwin, although as Joseph Byrne remarks, the idea that Blake
was a fully fledged member of this group, as is often assumed, is
not necessarily supported by the evidence.2
Regardless of how well he knew the individuals who met reg-
ularly at Joseph Johnson’s house, the Johnson circle offered one
route for Blake to make inroads into commercial print and book
markets. It was in such circumstances that his method of relief
etching, outlined in the previous chapter, offered him possible
commercial advantages over traditional engraving methods. It
enabled him to combine text and image without the expense of
hiring typesetters to lay out the words of his books and, because
he controlled every aspect of production, it allowed him to pursue
highly idiosyncratic art forms. It used to be common to view such
experimentation on Blake’s part as an act of deliberate opposition
to profit, but his first major works to be printed using relief etching
– The Book of Thel and Songs of Innocence – were produced to take
advantage of a growing market for children’s books in particular.
As Andrew O’Malley has demonstrated in his comprehensive
book The Making of the Modern Child, children’s literature during
the eighteenth century was greatly transformed, moving from
simple chapbooks, aimed at semi-literate adults and children alike,
to specialized texts produced for the sons and daughters of the
middle and upper classes.3 Blake’s unusual education, as we have
already seen, made him much less sympathetic to many of the

60
 Visions of Innocence

pedagogical intentions of fellow writers. For him, as O’Malley has

observed, childhood was linked to the plebeian as the potential
site for revolutionary change,4 and if the full effects of the French
Revolution had yet to be felt in his work, he nonetheless shared
some of the underlying ideals that motivated the Enlightenment
thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Emile; or, On Education. Blake’s
method of illuminated printing was not to reinforce ignorance and
compliance, but to unveil instead the human form divine in all
children.
For Songs of Innocence, Blake refined greatly the fairly crude
experiments he had made for All Religions are One and There is
No Natural Religion. Michael Phillips provides a comprehensive
account of how Songs came to be composed and printed, observ-
ing that there are two surviving sources for some of his poems.5
One of these, the manuscript of An Island in the Moon, contained
versions of ‘Holy Thursday’, ‘Nurses Song’ and ‘The Little Boy
Lost’; the other, a copy of Poetical Sketches, contained an early ver-
sion of ‘Laughing Song’ handwritten on the pages. At a later date,
Blake also began to produce drafts of his poems that would become
Songs of Experience, such as ‘The Tyger’, revising them until he
was satisfied enough to prepare them for printing.
Songs of Innocence has 31 plates, of which 22 surviving copies
include all of the plates (and a further eight with only 27 plates
when Blake moved ‘The Little Girl Lost’ and ‘The Little Girl
Found’ to Songs of Experience). Some of these copies were printed
posthumously, probably by Frederick Tatham, who befriended
Blake towards the end of the artist’s life and cared for Catherine
after his death. Blake had also taught Catherine how to print and
colour the copies of the books they made together, both of them
sharing the task of illuminating the prints.6
Viscomi observes that Blake had a very relaxed attitude
towards his Songs, regularly moving poems between Innocence
and Experience.7 By considering individual copies as part of print

61
 divine images

runs or editions, it is easy to see that there are distinct phases in Songs of Innocence,
the production of the Songs: for example, many of the early copies Copy F, Plate 29,
‘Infant Joy’,
of Songs of Innocence produced in 1789 are hand-coloured with relief etching
delicate washes, in contrast to the more vivid colour-printed with pen and ink
versions of the mid-1790s and heavily hand-painted copies from and watercolour
on paper.
the nineteenth century. According to Viscomi, while some choices
made by Blake – such as the decision to completely change col- Songs of Innocence,
ours in some copies – are significant, others are not necessarily Copy L, Plate 5,
‘Infant Joy’,
intentional on the artist’s part: not every printed copy is a unique relief etching
version, but rather they are copy-editions, reflecting Blake’s with pen and ink
attitudes to his Songs at different periods in his life.8 and watercolour
on paper.
Blake’s hopes for his new printing techniques had been to
create copies of books for children that could be sold in sufficient
quantities to support him and Catherine, if not necessarily make
his fortune. The process of creating his lavishly beautiful illumi-
nated books, however, was such that few copies were distributed
during his lifetime. Among the owners of the Songs were the English
Swedenborgian and politician Charles Augustus Tulk, who lent
his copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Coleridge.
Other collectors included Thomas Butts and George Cumberland.
Although she did not own a copy of the Songs, a fascinating
insight into the milieu of early Blake collectors can be seen via
Rebekah Bliss, who purchased a number of Blake’s works, includ-
ing one that we shall consider later in this chapter: For Children:
The Gates of Paradise. Bliss lived in a romantic partnership with
another woman, Ann Whitaker. Rebekah and Ann were accepted
quite happily into a London society that constantly denounced
male homosexuality. By contrast, as Lillian Faderman has shown,
passionate friendships with other women were a constant fea-
ture of the lives of many middle-class women in the eighteenth
century, and Keri Davies has gone as far as to suggest that Rebekah,
who appears to have struck up an acquaintance with Blake, may
have been in part the inspiration for characters such as Thel and

62
 Visions of Innocence

Oothoon.9 It is an astonishing feature of Blake’s early works in

the late 1780s and early 1790s – and in marked contrast to the mores
that would prevail in the nineteenth century – that, while funda-
mentally believing in the innocence of children, he also believed
such innocence to partake in an enlightened and liberated under-
standing of all forms of human sexuality and behaviour.

Songs of Innocence: Pastoral Visions

When Blake began to work on Songs of Innocence, the market

for children’s books had grown considerably but was still dedi-
cated to teaching readers a conventional morality. Hannah More,
writing at the end of the century, would observe that it was ‘a
fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings’,
and Andrew Lincoln observes that Blake ‘probably had little

63
 divine images

sympathy with the education aims of these books, or indeed with

much of the children’s literature written for the polite market.
But he seems to have known the market well.’10 Popular books
throughout the eighteenth century, such as Isaac Watts’s Divine
Songs (1715), were intended to provide moral instruction for chil-
dren. Even liberal-minded writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld
sought to improve readers in her Hymns in Prose for Children
(1781), following the advice of John Locke who, in Some Thoughts
Concerning Education (1693), had argued that the minds of chil-
dren were blank slates and education must be carefully managed
to create worthy citizens. To make them more appealing, children’s
books were often illustrated with engravings or woodcuts, some
even being coloured by the end of the century. Their designs cre-
ated a familiar vocabulary of images: children playing, mothers
with their young, sheep and shepherds. They emphasized the
moral and religious nature of their compositions, but almost none
of them drew attention to the special nature of childhood that
Blake was to present, what Alexander Gilchrist called a ‘Golden
Age’ (Life i.71). Perhaps the only exceptions before Blake’s Songs
were the works by Christopher Smart, Hymns for the Amusement
of Children (1770), and Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories (1786),
both of which were much less morally judgemental in their stance.
The poems from Songs of Innocence are some of the simplest
and clearest that Blake ever wrote, even if – as many commenta-
tors have remarked – such simplicity masks a piercing irony, as
in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ or ‘Holy Thursday’. The themes that
run through the collection, the relations of children to nature, the
love of mothers for their children, the likeness of Christ to a child,
are often straightforward and direct: while Blake could be a com-
plex thinker, the reader should not always rush to look for hidden
depths of meaning in a collection that truly was intended for chil-
dren. There is plenty of time in life to view the world with the
eyes of experience, as Blake would demonstrate again and again

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 Visions of Innocence

in his later poetry, but it is also important that we understand the

perspective and perceptions of childhood. In this respect, some of
his ideas would have been clearly familiar to those who followed
Rousseau’s school of thought, who argued that malign society cor-
rupted the true nature of children; although he would later show
himself hostile to many elements of the Swiss writer’s philosophy,
poems such as ‘The School Boy’ (itself from Songs of Experience)
indicated considerable sympathy towards Rousseau:

How can the bird that is born for joy,

Sit in a cage and sing.
How can a child when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring. (e31)

Blake is clearly at the forefront of those later Romantics, particu-

larly Wordsworth, who would see something special in the time
of childhood. Blake’s radicalism as a writer was often due not to
his clear ability to perceive the injustices of experience, but rather
his belief in the power and importance of innocence as a funda-
mental part of our humanity.
Nelson Hilton has suggested that Songs of Innocence may be
‘imagined as a series of vignettes concerning the psyche’s birth
into language’.11 Such a view is complicated, as he himself points
out, by the varying order of different poems in different copies,
so any pattern of a child’s growth and development must be
inferred rather than explicitly stated. Nonetheless, certain poems
such as ‘Infant Joy’, ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ do
seem to move from a child incapable of speech to one who can
invoke a simple, even pure, language – sometimes very much in
contrast to their guardians. This entire progression can be viewed
as the theme of the ‘Introduction’ that opens the collection:

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 divine images

Piping down the valleys wild

Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me.

Pipe a song about a Lamb;

So I piped with merry chear,
Piper pipe that song again –
So I piped, he wept to hear.

Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe

Sing thy songs of happy chear,
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear.

Piper sit thee down and write

In a book that all may read –
So he vanish’d from my sight.
And I pluck’d a hollow reed.

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear. (e7)

This entire poem moves from the inarticulate music of piping,

which reflects the cheerful sound of the infant without language
(from infans, one who does not speak), through to song and then
writing. Critics such as Stephen Power perceive an ambivalence in
this progression, from the simple innocence of the piper who then
stains the ‘water clear’ to write his songs just as the Christlike child
vanishes.12 Such a reading should not be pushed too far: the songs,
after all, are happy ones that every reader ‘may joy to hear’, but

66
 Visions of Innocence

the child in the clouds weeping as he hears a song about a lamb is

also surely reminded of the story of the Paschal lamb and Christ’s
sacrifice. Even at their simplest, Blake’s poems contain multitudes.
It is also important to recognize Blake’s vibrant, even daring,
fluidity of rhythm and metre. In the Songs he perfects the music
evident in his earlier Poetical Sketches. This was an element of his
poetry that appealed greatly to contemporaries such as Wordsworth
and Coleridge, and Victorian commentators such as Alexander
Gilchrist and Algernon Swinburne too recognized that much of
the delight of the poetry is its musicality, for example in ‘Spring’:

Sound the Flute!

Now it’s mute.
Birds delight
Day and Night.
Nightingale
In the dale
Lark in Sky
Merrily
Merrily Merrily to welcome in the Year (e14–15)

Perhaps because of its lack of semantic and symbolic complexity,

‘Spring’ has tended to attract less attention than many of the other
Songs, but its simple pleasures of rhythm and rhyme demonstrate
Blake’s virtuosity: the truncated metrical foot of the first eight
lines is an iambic dimeter, the first, unstressed syllable being omit-
ted in each line to create a more vivid effect, balancing the final,
explosive word, driving home the sheer joy of the season. After a
century dominated by the regularity of the heroic couplet and
iambic pentameter (or, if a poet was feeling particularly adven-
turous, tetrameter), these short, joyful lines were truly radical,
capturing in their rhythm the song and dance of a rejuvenated
natural world.

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 divine images

The Songs of Innocence brim with nature, which can appear Songs of Innocence,
odd considering Blake’s attacks on natural law and natural reli- Copy B, Plate 29,
‘The Lamb’, relief
gion. As we shall see later, Blake considered nature (as defined etching with pen
by the scientists and moralists of his day) utterly unnatural. Kevin and ink and water-
Hutchings has rightly criticized the commonplace view that colour on paper.
Blake is a poetic adversary of nature, indicating just how much
the lines and illustrations of his Songs are full of living creatures
and natural settings in opposition to the materialist philosophies
of Bacon, Locke and Newton.13 Throughout his life Blake’s work
was often pastoral, and while he may only have lived fully in
the country for a short period, when he and Catherine resided
at Felpham, nonetheless late eighteenth-century London was a
very different city to the one that it would become over the fol-
lowing hundred years. Although north London was becoming
increasingly dirty and polluted, south of the Thames was still
largely rural and, according to Stanley Gardner, Blake often took
long walks to Peckham, Dulwich and Camberwell: ‘From Golden
Square, Westminster Bridge led into the country.’14
Pastoral poetry was a popular form in the eighteenth century
and Blake had already experimented with it in Poetical Sketches.
Beginning with the Idylls of Theocritus in the third century bc, the
pastoral was established as a classical genre via the highly influ-
ential Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, passing into English poetry
through works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar
(1579) and Milton’s Lycidas (1637). Throughout the eighteenth
century, many poets turned their hand to this type of poetry, as
in Alexander Pope’s Pastorals (1709) and Thomson’s The Seasons
(1730). As such, images of Arcadian fields and happy leisure away
from the city were a familiar theme when Blake invoked them in
verses such as ‘The Shepherd’:

How sweet is the Shepherds sweet lot,

From the morn to the evening he strays:

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 divine images

He shall follow his sheep all the day

And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lambs innocent call,

And he hears the ewes tender reply,
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their Shepherd is nigh. (e7–8)

These simple verses, written in a lilting, anapaestic metre, suggest

the peaceful nature of the pastoral ideal. Nicholas Marsh suggests
that there is some uncertainty in the poem, hinting as it does at
the fear of the sheep when their shepherd is not nigh,15 yet this
should not be overstated: its clearer meaning is to emphasize the
Christian imagery of Blake’s poetry – for, unlike even the most
Christian of his eighteenth-century forebears, as a poet he looks
less to the classical tradition of the pastoral than the Judaeo-
Christian tradition of the Psalms and New Testament proverbs.
The role of the shepherd reminds us of Christ as the good shep-
herd, who ‘giveth his life for the sheep’ (John 10:11), and this
implicit religious symbolism is made explicit in ‘The Lamb’:

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name. (e9)

Divine Innocence

The classical tradition of pastoral poetry had frequently been

associated with sexual love, but the love of Songs of Innocence is
the love between parent and child, or child and the natural world.

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 Visions of Innocence

In ‘The Lamb’, as in ‘The Little Boy Lost’ and ‘The Little Boy
Found’, as well as ‘The Divine Image’, it is the love of the father
for his children that is most clearly expressed, as in the convention
of Christian love from God the Father towards his creation. And
yet, more often than not, it is maternal love that is given primacy.
The Little Boy poems, full of anxiety as they are, were later trans-
ferred to Songs of Experience, but this ambivalence is completely
missing in Innocence when it is a mother’s love for her child that
is the subject of Blake’s poetry.
In ‘The Little Black Boy’, for example, the verses begin with
the speaker’s relation to his mother:

My mother taught me underneath a tree

And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.

Look on the rising sun: there God does live

And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noon day. (e9)

The end of the poem transfers this love to God the Father, but
several critics have noted an ambivalence within those final lines
and the illustration: both children may be freed from their black
and white clouds, yet it is on the little white boy that Christ stares
more intently. Upon his mother’s lap, by contrast, the speaker
receives God’s love equally with all flowers, trees, beasts and men.
The protective, nurturing role of mothers is evident in many other
poems in the collection. ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, for example,
begins ‘When my mother died I was very young, / And my father
sold me while yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep
weep weep’ (e10). Paternal love can be fickle, but that of the

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 divine images

mother is constant and requires no explanation in Innocence, as

when a mother sings ‘A Cradle Song’ to her child:

Sweet dreams form a shade,

O’er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams. (e11)

This sustaining maternal love may become complicated in the

later Songs of Experience, but throughout Songs of Innocence it is
not viewed cynically or critically. The importance of innocence
to Blake cannot be emphasized enough. While many of his fellow
radicals succumbed to the despair of cynical experience after the
collapse of their earlier hopes, Blake’s belief in the importance
of innocence kept his radicalism alive. An example of how such
belief in innocence endures – while at the same time being very
much aware of the exploitative conditions of the society of his
day – is to be found in one of the most famous of the poems from
Songs of Innocence, ‘Holy Thursday’:

Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean

The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as
snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow

O what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London

town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent
hands

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 Visions of Innocence

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of

song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door
(e13)

In the early eighteenth century a tradition began in which char-

ity school children would attend a special service at St Paul’s
Cathedral. As Gardner points out, these children were not des-
titute, nor rescued from the ‘lowest order of poverty’, but rather
came from the families of the ‘deserving poor’.16 It has been esti-
mated that as many as six thousand of them had attended the
ceremony by the time that Blake saw it at St Paul’s, although it
did not actually take place during Easter week. The services were
an opportunity to educate the children and for them to express
their thanks, and Gardner observes that it was more of a festival
than a strictly disciplined procession. From this not unfamiliar
sight, Blake has created one of the most exemplary verses in the
entire Songs, and it is worth noting that part of the arresting effect
of this poem comes from its metrical form. While couplets were
common in eighteenth-century verse, Blake’s long fourteener lines
(that is, fourteen syllables rather than the more common ten syl-
lables of pentameter) were not. Like many of the songs included
in the earlier Poetical Sketches, Blake seemed to take particular
delight in experimenting with forms that had last been commonly
used during the Elizabethan period. Here the fourteeners create
a slow, stately rhythm, making the pace of the poem gentler; as
Gardner observes, Blake’s intention is not at all satirical – rather,
in the careful pacing of this poem the poor children of London
are as elegant and noble as any prince or statesman. David Fairer
believes that in this particular poem ‘Blake’s texts lose their
innocence more easily than most’, while Andrew Lincoln argues

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 divine images

that ‘the exuberant tone of the poem is to some extent modified

by a sense of anticlimax’,17 but it is a mistake to assume any sar-
casm on Blake’s part to the ‘wise guardians’ watching over the
‘flowers of London town’. That the final moral of the poem seems
sentimental to modern readers draws attention more to our cyn-
icism: Blake, seeing a multitude of children in the cathedral, was
filled with awe at the sight, even as he recognized (and the ver-
sion of ‘Holy Thursday’ in Songs of Experience makes this very
clear) the terrible social conditions that made such poverty
possible.
Again and again in Songs of Innocence, Blake uses apparently
familiar motifs of eighteenth-century verse written for children,
whether pastoral themes or the love of a mother for her child, yet
the aim and tone of his poetry is radically different, sometimes
deceptively so. The underlying break between the Songs and
much of what was published during his lifetime becomes very
clear in one of his most beautiful pieces, ‘The Divine Image’:

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,

All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,

Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart

Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

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 Visions of Innocence

Then every man of every clime,

That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too. (e12–13)

Upon first reading, this poem seems very familiar from genera-
tions of Christian devotional verse, its pronouncement that God
is love apparently no different to hymns such as Charles Wesley’s
‘Stupendous love of God most high!’, first published in 1780.
However, as Andrew Lincoln and others have pointed out, the
fundamental, startling difference between Blake’s poem and the
hymns of his contemporaries is clearest when considering the
following lines from Isaac Watts’s ‘Praise for the Gospel’:

Lord, I ascribe it to thy Grace

And not to Chance, as others do,
overleaf:
Songs of Innocence, That I was born of Christian Race,
Copy L, Plate 10, And not a Heathen, or a Jew.18
‘Holy Thursday’,
relief etching
with pen and ink Watts published his Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for
and watercolour the Use of Children in 1715, and many of the hymns promise justice
on paper.
and retribution for those who fail to follow the message of God’s
Songs of Innocence, word. ‘Praise for the Gospel’ ends with the promise that Gentiles
Copy F, Plate
25, ‘The Divine and Jews will ‘in judgement rise’ against the speaker if he does
Image’, relief not keep God’s law. In ‘The Divine Image’, by contrast, there is
etching with no mention of God’s anger or retribution (just or otherwise), only
pen and ink
and watercolour the constant refrain that God is mercy, pity, peace and love.
on paper. Lincoln suggests that Blake’s hymn asserts that all religions have

75
 divine images

the same emotional basis, but also that all religions are essentially
Christian. There is no reason to doubt that Blake may have believed
this, but the poem does not state this quite as clearly as Lincoln
suggests. It ascribes, rather, the simple belief that God is a series
of gentle virtues, nothing more than this, and it is easy to see how
this Song of Innocence could be adapted by certain types (though
by no means all) of Muslim, Hindu, Pagan or various other creeds.
In All Religions are One (1788), Blake had written that ‘The
Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different
reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the
Spirit of Prophecy’ (e1). And this is where Blake’s poem reveals
its radicalism. God is not something separate to man, but revealed
entirely within and through man: it is the human face and human
heart that demonstrates to us the reality of divinity. Rather than
a metaphysical presence behind this world, we encounter God
whenever we experience (or, indeed, demonstrate) the virtues of
mercy, pity, peace and love. While these are familiar Christian
virtues, their choice is significant: it would be very easy to con-
ceive a God based on righteousness, or obedience, but these are
far from Blake’s conception of the human form divine. In his later
works, particularly the epic poems Milton and Jerusalem, Blake
was to identify this tendency to self-righteousness as the Moral
Law, and to ascribe it as a spiritual condition closer to the Devil
than to Christ.

The Book of Thel

Around the time that Blake was completing his Songs of Innocence,
he began a new work that would introduce a very different tone
to his poetry, both in terms of its poetic metre and also the subject
matter, which was a foretaste of some of the mythological themes
that would dominate his illuminated books from the 1790s
onwards. While it may have been radical in some of its suggestions,

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 Visions of Innocence

Innocence was clearly recognizable as a collection of lyric poetry

that would have been familiar to many readers in the eighteenth
century, and while the tone of The Marriage was startling, it was
at least in a spectrum of religious polemical pamphlets and texts
dating back at least to the time of the English Civil War. The Book
of Thel, however, in its gentle form introduces a new way of story­
telling, one that Blake was experimenting in with an unpublished
manuscript poem, Tiriel, at the same time that he composed the
eight plates of Thel.
The plot, what there is of it in The Book of Thel, is extremely
slight. Thel, a shepherdess and a virgin, is troubled by her own
sense of mortality, so that the apparently idyllic Vales of Har,
where she lives under the auspices of Mne Seraphim (who appears
nowhere else in Blake’s work), begins to take on the dimensions
of a prison to her. As such, she seeks out various creatures in the
valley, seeking some answer to her questioning lament:

O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the spring? born but to smile
& fall.
Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud.
Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water.
Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face,
overleaf:
Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the
The Book of Thel,
Plate 2, title page, air;
1789, relief etching Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head.
with pen and ink
And gentle sleep the sleep of death. and gentle hear the
and watercolour
on paper. voice
The Book of Thel, Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.
Plate 3, relief (1.6–14, e3)
etching with
pen and ink
and watercolour All the flowers and elements she encounters are unable to provide
on paper. a suitable response until the ‘matron Clay’ summons her beneath

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 divine images

the earth, promising her something more definitive and assuring

her that she will not come to any harm – immediately at least.
Accepting her invitation, Thel descends into the land of the dead,
where she sees them fixed within fibrous roots, until finally she
encounters her own grave. There she is given an answer at last:

Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?

Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!
Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn,
Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?
Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show’ring fruits & coined gold!
Why a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?
Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror trembling & affright.
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?
(6.11–20, e6)

Thel’s reaction to this is to run with a shriek from the grave back
to safety in the Vales of Har: however claustrophobic those valleys
may seem, what lies beyond this life is very much worse, as both
those epic heroes, Odysseus and Aeneas, realized when they
descended into the lands of death to consult with prophets there.
What makes The Book of Thel so unusual is not merely a
profoundly philosophical – and, it must be said, adult – under-
standing of sexuality and death in what may be read as a
children’s book, but the style and form in which it was told.
Blake had already begun to experiment with his wonderful form
of illuminated printing with Songs of Innocence, but in addition he
adopts an unusual metre in Thel as well as increasingly strange
symbolic creatures. Thel is the first of Blake’s books to use exten-
sively the long fourteener line. This was a verse form that had
been relatively common from the medieval period until the

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 Visions of Innocence

sixteenth century, when a preference for iambic pentameter in the

work of Shake­speare and Milton, along with the occasional alex-
andrine (twelve-syllable) line in Spenser’s poetry, had meant that
the fourteener had become increasingly overlooked. Blake’s own
use is loose, with lines typically between eleven and fourteen syl-
lables in length, but his deployment of that metre allowed him to
convey a slower, more weighty effect in his verse. He would next
use the form in The French Revolution and then throughout most
of his illuminated books.
The Book of Thel, As well as the unusual poetic form, Thel is also the first indi-
Plate 7, relief cation that Blake was considering a new style of mythological
etching with thinking in his work. In The Book of Thel it is perhaps best seen
pen and ink
and watercolour as a text on the brink of Blake’s full mythology: the young shep­
on paper. herdess speaks to animated creatures – a lily, a cloud, a worm,
a clod of clay – that are unusual in
terms of the animation attributed to
them, but which would have been
familiar to readers of Pope’s The Rape
of the Lock or Shake­speare’s A Mid­
summer Night’s Dream as part of the
supernatural ‘machinery’ of a poem,
spirits that live among us and are made
visible by the poet. Yet previous writ-
ers almost always tended to work
within an established mythos, whether
Chris­tian or pagan, and those few
that did not, such as the inventions of
Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels,
clearly intended their satirical inven-
tions to look ridiculous. The Book of Thel,
however, is our first introduction to
Blake’s style of world creation, which
will become increasingly important

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 divine images

throughout the 1790s. The indications that some new process is

at work are subtle, consisting of little more than two names. Mne
Seraphim is only mentioned once, but alludes to a more occult
world behind the apparently simple pastoral of Thel’s world.
S. Foster Damon thought the name a misspelling of ‘Bne Seraphim’,
or the sons of the seraphim angels.19 More significant, because
repeated more frequently, are the Vales of Har themselves. In
Tiriel, composed alongside The Book of Thel, Har and his wife
Heva sit beneath an oak ‘like two children’ (2.5, e277), although
it is made quite clear that this is a sign of their increasing senil-
ity rather than some happy state of innocence. Har and Heva
appear again in The Song of Los and The Four Zoas, occupying
only minor roles but clearly established as the parents of man-
kind who were restricted and diminished, as when Los and
Enitharmon gave ‘Law and Religions to the sons of Har binding
them more / And more to Earth’ (The Song of Los, 4.4, e68). At
the same time that he was composing what would become some
of the most famous children’s poetry ever written in Songs of
Innocence, Blake was also weaving the complex fabric of his
personal mythology.

Stories for Children

By the time that Blake had completed Songs of Innocence and The
Book of Thel, Joseph Johnson had published the first edition of
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life. The first
edition of 1788 sold well enough for Johnson to decide to release
a second version in 1791, for which he commissioned Blake to
prepare a series of illustrations. Of the eleven produced by Blake
(of which ten are still extant), Johnson then selected six to be
engraved, which were also included in the third print run of 1796.
Johnson’s friendship with Wollstonecraft was such that in 1787 he
had found her accommodation at 49 George Street. He had taken

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 Visions of Innocence

sympathy on his new protégée when she

had confessed to him her sense of ‘despair
and vexation’ that she would not be able
to take care of her sisters as well as herself.
Wollstonecraft feared that she would need
to return to her previous grim existence as
a governess, having been devastated by the
death of her friend Frances Blood in 1785.20
It was during this period that she first met
William Godwin (although the two of them
were, initially, somewhat disappointed in
each other) – as well as beginning her infat-
uation with Henry Fuseli – and she would
work on her writings and studies during
the day before visiting Johnson’s house for
dinner each day. It was after publication
of Original Stories from Real Life that she
went on to write her much more famous A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which
Johnson published in 1792. That work, writ-
ten in response to Talleyrand’s assertion to
the French National Assembly that women
should only receive a domestic education,
Original Stories from would have a profound influence on Blake in the 1790s, but there
Real Life, 1796, is some evidence that he was perhaps less than impressed with
intaglio engraving
on paper. Original Stories.
Wollstonecraft wrote the book to provide a model of moral
education to teachers and pupils that would ‘fix principles of truth
and humanity on a solid and simple foundation’.21 As such, the
book consists of a series of conversations between Mrs Mason – a
thinly veiled alter ego of Mary herself – and two children of wealthy
parents, Mary and Caroline, whose upbringing has taught them
‘every prejudice that the vulgar casually instill’. Through these

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 divine images

conversations, the two girls learn how to deal with emotions such
as anger, the true dignity of character and the proper treatment
of animals. While Mrs Mason was truly horrified by the ‘wanton
cruelty’ of people who mistreated such creatures, there was also
a great deal of the Enlightenment ideologue about her, as when
she instructs Mary and Caroline of mankind’s innate superiority
to animals, which ‘have not the affections which arise from
reason’.22 Despite – or, indeed, because of – her best intentions,
there is something intrinsically Urizenic about Mrs Mason, who
can be viewed as a more benevolent version of Blake’s rationalist
despot.
As well as a frontispiece depicting Mrs Mason with her wards,
Blake’s five illustrations show scenes of domestic life and, in one
instance, his fascination with traditions of bardic music in the
figure of a Welsh harper included in Chapter xiv. One particular
illustration, however, demonstrates the gulf between illustrator
and author: Chapter xxiv relates the visit to a poor family in
London, who are reduced to extreme distress as the father is made
unemployed and unable to find further work:

They ascended the dark stairs, scarcely able to bear the bad
smells that flew from every part of a small house, that contained
in each room a family, occupied in such an anxious manner to
obtain the necessaries of life, that its comforts never engaged
their thoughts. The precarious meal was snatched, and the
stomach did not turn, though the cloth, on which it was laid,
was died in dirt. When to-morrow’s bread is uncertain, who
thinks of cleanliness? Thus does despair increase the misery,
and consequent disease aggravate the horrors of poverty!23

We are very far here from the simple virtues of Songs of Innocence,
yet Blake was clearly as aware of such circumstances of extreme
poverty in London. What is very different is his attitude to the poor

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 Visions of Innocence

themselves: as we have already seen, Blake rarely neglects an

opportunity to depict the poor with a sense of their own dignity
– or, indeed, as in ‘The Little Vagabond’ from Songs of Experience,
to raucously reject middle-class definitions of virtue. In Wollstone­
craft’s Original Stories, by contrast, the dereliction of the poor
becomes an opportunity not only for charity but for moral instruc-
tion: tellingly the line that Blake decided to illustrate for this
chapter was ‘Economy and self-denial are necessary in every sta-
tion, to enable us to be generous, and to act conformably to the
rules of justice’, and, according to Dennis Welch, he would parody
some of the attitudes of Original Stories in Songs of Experience.24
Despite the charity of these well-meaning children, it is impossi-
ble not to read the story and feel that Wollstonecraft considered
the filthiness and indigence of the poor a condition at least partly
of their own making.
Even among radicals and liberals, then, the temptation to mor-
alize was strong, making the achievement of Songs of Innocence
even more profound. Nor was this a one-off event for Blake: shortly
after he sent his engravings to Johnson for Wollstonecraft’s book,
he completed a remarkable little book of emblems, For Children:
The Gates of Paradise, in 1793. At this time he was living in Lambeth
and listed Johnson on the title page as co-publisher (although
there is little in the way of evidence that Johnson ever sold the
book). Unlike the majority of his illuminated books, this delight-
ful piece is not an example of relief etching but intaglio engraving:
scenes with delicate cross-hatched shading that would have been
familiar in style from children’s books at the time. What seems
much less familiar to a reader today is the strange subject matter
of those eighteen plates: the frontispiece depicts a child wrapped
in a chrysalis as a caterpillar climbs on a leaf above it, with the single
inscription ‘What is Man!’ beneath it. Other plates depict the ele-
ments of air, water, fire and earth in human form, striking poses
– in particular for Fire – that will become very familiar in Blake’s

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 divine images

later works. One of the most famous illustrations from this little For the Sexes (For
book shows the moon in the sky with a group of figures looking Children): The
Gates of Paradise,
on while one of their number reaches up to rest his ladder on the Plate 1, title page,
crescent, accompanied by the simplest yet most poignant of human composed 1793,
cries: ‘I want! I want!’ copy c. 1826,
intaglio engraving
Blake returned to these astonishing images at the end of his on paper.
career, providing them with the more ambiguous title For the
For the Sexes (For
Sexes, along with the following enigmatic prologue: Children): The Gates
of Paradise, Plate 11,
Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice ‘I want! I want!’,
intaglio engraving
Such are the Gates of Paradise on paper.
Against the Accusers chief desire
Who walkd among the Stones of Fire
Jehovahs Finger Wrote the Law
Then Wept! then rose in Zeal & Awe

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 Visions of Innocence

And the Dead Corpse from Sinais heat

Buried beneath his Mercy Seat
O Christians Christians! tell me Why
You rear it on your Altars high (e259)

These lines, written towards the end of 1793 and then included in
the version printed by Blake in 1818, demonstrate some of Blake’s
intentions with the collection of strange, surrealist pictures. As
Joseph Salemi has observed, while many critics have been unable
to comprehend the very brevity of these pages, The Gates of Paradise
is best seen in the tradition of emblem books, collections of alle-
gorical images that were popular in the sixteenth and seven­teenth
centuries, and which drew their inspiration from Aesop’s Fables
and Plutarch’s Lives. While the poetry of such books was, as
Salemi points out, frequently banal and the allegorical connec-
tions between image and meaning tedious, Blake’s take on this
familiar form is subtle and intriguing. Rather than simple, moral
didacticism, The Gates of Paradise was meant to lead its readers to
an understanding of the human condition, to understand the limits
of mortality not as fatalism, but as the opportunity to transform
the world by imagination.25 In the sphere of children’s literature,
both traditional Christian doctrine and the new Enlightenment
morality inspired by John Locke tended to view the capacity of
the human soul in limited terms. For both, the task of the child
was to obey – whether God or the dictates of the material world.
In perhaps his most remarkable work, completed shortly after he
had printed Songs of Innocence, Blake was about to turn upside
down all the conventions of morality, religion and politics as he
sided with the devils against the angels.

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 3
A New Heaven Is Begun

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three

years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo!
Swedenborg is The Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings
are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of
Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah
xxxiv & xxxv Chap:

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction

and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and
Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call

Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason
. . . Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (e34)

The Marriage of
T he Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790, is one
of the strangest and most remarkable books ever written.
Although little noticed during Blake’s lifetime, it has also become
Heaven and Hell, one of the most important of his works to writers as varied as
Copy H, Plate 1,
frontispiece, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie,
composed 1790, whose books have been greatly influenced by its astonishing ideas
printed 1795, relief and rhetoric. The Marriage began as a pamphlet denouncing the
and white line
etching, hand- system devised by the eighteenth-century mystic and scientist
coloured on paper. Emanuel Swedenborg, but it quickly developed into a much

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 divine images

more radical assault on the conventions of religion, politics and

morality, as well as providing ironic critiques of the theology of
Milton and the Bible. Blake’s idiosyncratic, unsettling style and
his resolution to write in the voice of the Devil was also a response
to the drama of the French Revolution, a time when the entire
world appeared to have been upended, when the conventions
and certainties of Europe became less certain.

‘The Commons convene in the Hall of the Nation’

[A]bove all, it was not reason that created the French Revo­
lution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions;
never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.1

At the time Blake was working on Songs of Innocence, France –

and, indeed, all of Europe and much of the world – was in the
early stages of being turned upside down. A century of new
political ideas that had emerged from the Enlightenment, the
example of the American War of Independence (in which many
French soldiers had served), disastrous levels of debt and econ­
omic mismanagement, agricultural failure and rising levels of
social and political inequality had made the most powerful nation
in Europe effectively ungovernable. The decline of the ancien
régime, the system of absolutist monarchy established most effec-
tively by Louis xiv in the seventeenth century, had been in decline
throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century. Support for
American rebels had been a rare instance in which France had
been able to bloody England’s nose, but the cost of that war had
rendered the already unstable system of French finances – in
which the wealthiest members of the country all but evaded
taxation – untenable. Successive Comptroller-Generals, Jacques
Necker and Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, attempted to reform
the tax system, but when they failed Louis xvi called a meeting

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

of the Estates General in May 1789, the assembly to represent

the three estates of the country: nobility, clergy and commoners.
It was the first time that the Estates General had been called since
1614, and by this means Louis and Calonne hoped to bypass the
parlement of Paris, whose noble members were resisting his
reforms.
The royal edict of 24 January 1789 promised to address the
grievances of the people, with elections taking place in spring of
that year. It appeared as though the malaise that had gripped the
country would finally come to an end, heralding a new dawn, as
Wordsworth would later write:

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the Auxiliars, which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! – Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in Romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress – to assist the work
Which was then going forward in her own name!2

This enthusiasm, reflected in the words that begin this section,

which have been drawn not from Blake but from Benjamin Disraeli
in his 1844 novel Coningsby, would become a defining feature of
what later generations would recognize as Romanticism – and,
within a few short years, would also cause many of those Romantics
such as Wordsworth himself to despair. His extract, as printed in
his 1815 Poems, is titled ‘French Revolution, as it appeared to
enthusiasts at its commencement’. By the end of the Napoleonic

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 divine images

James Gillray,
The National
Assembly Petrified/
The National
Assembly Revivified,
1792, etching,
hand-coloured
on paper.

Wars, Wordsworth, like many of his generation, was no longer

an enthusiast.
In 1789, however, those in England who recognized that
something was changing in France were largely sympathetic. If
France was finally calling its national assembly, then this surely
meant that it was following the constitutional lead of England. A

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

sour note came from Edmund Burke, who wrote (to the surprise
of some, considering his support for American independence) in
Reflections on the Revolution in France:

To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide;

it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free govern-
ment; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of
liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought,
deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.3

Burke himself had written in August 1789 with something

approaching admiration for the French people, but the violence
that was spreading across the country caused him to refrain from
further approval. The immediate cause for Burke’s Reflections was a
sermon by Dr Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,
in which Price compared the French Revolution to the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, in which James ii had been banished as king.
During the summer of 1789, the Estates General had dissolved
itself, forming instead a National Assembly the better to represent
the will of the people. In the weeks following the storming of the
Bastille, this had abolished the feudal rights of nobility and clergy.
Blake himself would write in The French Revolution an encomium
to this remarkable state of affairs:

For the Commons convene in the Hall of the Nation.

France shakes! And the heavens of France
Perplex’d vibrate round each careful countenance!
Darkness of old times around them
Utters loud despair, shadowing Paris; her grey towers
groan, and the Bastile trembles. (e286)

Yet while Blake was an enthusiast who, according to Gilchrist, wore

the bonnet rouge, or red cap, of liberty – at least before the events of

95
 divine images

the September Massacres – some premonitions of the later terror

were already stalking France. Rumours of counter-revolution led
peasants and townspeople throughout the countryside to mobi-
lize themselves, giving rise to what later historians called ‘the
Great Fear’ and peasant uprisings against the feudal regime, which
Burke saw as a bulwark of order against anarchy.
Burke’s defence of the ancien régime, in which he mingled
rhetorical love of a passing chivalric age with political commen-
tary on the new situation, prompted the pen of another major
political figure who had been on the same side during the American James Gillray,
war. Thomas Paine published the first part of Rights of Man in French Liberty –
March 1791 as a direct riposte to Burke. Over the following months British Slavery,
1792, etching,
it was estimated that a million copies of the book were in circula- hand-coloured
tion, meaning that Paine’s arguments for the reform of the British on paper.

96
 A New Heaven Is Begun

government entered into a wide discussion among reformers,

dissenters and democrats. Burke saw that his own Whiggish prin-
ciples did not correspond with those of the ‘New Whigs’ who had
succumbed, in his opinion, to the siren call of Paine’s words.
Those New Whigs included his friend Charles Fox, leading to a
break between the two men in June 1791. By that year Britain
would be in a state of political foment that, while not as extreme
as events in France, would lead to a threat of revolution that
continued in fits and starts into the nineteenth century. In the
months following the first meeting of the Estates General, how-
ever, Blake’s own early enthusiasm for the French Revolution
was also mingled with his experience of finding – and then reject-
ing – a new faith, one that had failed to create the new heaven it
promised: Swedenborgianism.

Swedenborg and the New Church

Emanuel Swedenborg was a remarkable figure in eighteenth-

century Europe, a man of Enlightenment and science who also
established a new church dedicated to his particular type of mys-
ticism. His father, Jesper Swedberg, was a pious man who would
later become Bishop of Skara. Jesper’s own beliefs included the
importance of communication with God as well as the presence
of angels and spirits in everyday life, beliefs that would become
factors in his son’s religious system. Born in Stockholm, Sweden,
in 1688, the young Swedberg went to university in Uppsala and,
upon completing his degree in 1709, travelled throughout west-
ern Europe, remaining in London for four years before returning
to Sweden in 1715 to work on scientific and engineering projects.
By 1719 Emanuel was ennobled like his father, the family name
having been changed to Swedenborg.
Throughout the 1720s Swedenborg concentrated on his sci-
entific and technical work, being offered the chair of mathematics

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 divine images

at Uppsala (a post he declined), but it was in the 1730s that his

attention turned to religious and philosophical subjects. In works
such as De infinito (On the Infinite, 1738–40), Swedenborg
attempted to reconcile scientific and religious world views in order
‘to show that God in natural philosophy is the same as God in
Christianity’,4 a stance that shared some elements with the ration-
alism of deism although, unlike deists, Swedenborg did not believe
that the creator of the universe did not intervene in his creation.
In 1743, having requested permission to travel abroad to gather
materials for another scientific book, he began to experience strange
dreams and, a year later, had abandoned his scientific study and
instead devoted himself to understanding the nature of the divine.
He published The Worship and Love of God the following year, later
resigning from his post at the Board of Mines to devote himself to
biblical studies. In his final years until his death in 1772, Swedenborg
travelled between Stockholm, London and Holland, writing a
number of theological works that expounded his new theological
system. In The Last Judgment in Retrospect, he claimed that the
Last Judgement had begun in 1757 (the year of Blake’s birth) and
that it had been a spiritual judgement, God having seen that the
churches had lost their true purpose. His last book, Vera Christiana
religio (The True Christian Religion), was completed in 1770, the
year after which he suffered a stroke during a visit to London and
was buried at the Swedish church in Shadwell.
In an entry in his Spiritual Diary for 27 August 1748,
Swedenborg wrote that he would have ‘five sorts of readers’: the
first type would reject his writings entirely, the second would take
interest in them as curiosities, the third would accept them intel-
lectually but not be influenced by his ideas, the fourth would
change some of their behaviour in accordance with his teachings,
and the fifth type would ‘receive [these teachings] with joy and
[be] confirmed in them’.5 Some, such as the Bishop of Gothenburg,
condemned them outright, believing them to be tinged with

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

‘Mohammedanism’, but others among his early followers, such as

C. F. Nordensköld and Thomas Hartley, considered Swedenborg’s
system to be a necessary corrective to the failings of the Church.
During his lifetime Swedenborg had relatively few followers
because he was unwilling to proselytize. Where he did attract
followers, this itself brought difficulties, particularly in Sweden
where prominent Swedenborgians such as Johan Tybeck, a Luth­
eran minister, were persecuted for their adherence to his teachings.
His influence gradually spread through Europe, however, and as
George Trobridge observes, it was in England that his ideas found
most acceptance (and where his influence has proved most lasting).6
John Clowes, rector of St John’s church, Manchester, translated
Swedenborg’s works into English and by the 1780s a small group
of enthusiasts gathered regularly to discuss the mystic’s works,
including William Cookworthy, a Quaker, and John Augustus
Tulk, the father of Charles Augustus Tulk who was a patron of
Blake.
Because of their relative isolation in these early years, Sweden­
borg’s followers often formed societies to discuss his works.
Nordensköld established the Exegetic Philanthropic Society in
Stockholm after Swedenborg’s death, and by the late 1780s a
‘Society of the Friends of Peace’ had formed in Rouen. His doc-
trines were even taken up in Moscow and Constantinople.7 The
most significant development, however, took place in London
on 5 December 1783. At the Queen’s Arms Tavern in St Paul’s
Churchyard, six people – John Augustus Tulk, Peter Provo,
Thomas Spence, William Bonington, Henry Peckitt and Robert
Hindmarsh – established a ‘Theosophical Society’ to discuss and
promote the doctrines of the ‘New Jerusalem’ through activities
devoted to translating and disseminating Swedenborg’s works.8
Among the names of early sympathizers with the project were
the engraver William Sharp and Blake’s friend John Flaxman.
The discussions that took place among these theosophists included

99
 divine images

those on the wisdom of establishing a new Church to consolidate

Swedenborg’s teachings, and there was considerable disagree-
ment among his followers. Clowes, for example, who had done
so much to make Swedenborg’s works available in England, vehe-
mently rejected any notion that there should be a break from the
established Church of England. The New Church, or New
Jerusalem Church, remained small in terms of membership, but
it continued to spread throughout the English-speaking world
(helped in no small part by Clowes, who set up the Swedenborg
Society in 1810, for all that he opposed an ecclesiastical organi-
zation). In America, the spread of Swedenborgianism was helped
by the missionary work of John Chapman, more popularly known
as Johnny Appleseed, who preached the New Church gospel
alongside the nurseries that he cared for.
Blake had begun reading Swedenborg’s works in the 1780s,
annotating his own copies of Heaven and Hell (1784) and Divine
Love and Divine Wisdom (1788). As such, he received a general
invi­­t­­ation sent in late 1788 that invited sympathetic readers to a
conference, the purpose of which was to establish a Church based
on Swedenborg’s teachings. At the meeting, which both William
and Catherine attended in Great Eastcheap, all participants were
asked to sign the following paper:

We whose Names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us

approve of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg,
believing that the Doctrines contained therein are genuine
Truths, revealed from Heaven, and that the New Jerusalem
Church ought to be established, distinct and separate from
the Old Church.9

A manifesto of 32 resolutions, including the rejection of the

notion of the Trinity and a separation from the ‘Old Church’, was
accepted unanimously. Bentley suggests that although Blake must

100
 A New Heaven Is Begun

have agreed to these resolutions at the time his attitude quickly

became ambiguous, then openly hostile. He never attended the
New Church itself, and within a year he was satirizing Swedenborg­
ianism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Yet while The Marriage
is Blake’s most sustained commentary on Swedenborg’s teachings,
it is not his final word on the subject. In Milton a Poem, he describes
the Swedish mystic as ‘strongest of men, the Samson shorn by
the Churches’ (Milton 23.50, e117), and in his solo exhibition of
1809 he cited the Swedish mystic favourably as inspiration for his
painting The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

According to Robert Rix, the general appeal of Swedenborg at

the end of the eighteenth century was his apparent ability to
explain occult material ‘scientifically’, and for some of his follow-
ers this became a social gospel that combined radical Christianity
and politics.10 While Blake took issue with Swedenborg’s ana-
lytical approach, as well as finding that elements of the Christianity
and politics of him and his followers were not radical enough, it
is important to note that he adapted as well as attacked Sweden­
borgianism. Joseph Viscomi argues that plates 21 to 24 of The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell were originally composed as a sep-
arate pamphlet aimed at the New Church before Blake developed
it into a much more ambitious project:11

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of

themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’
it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he
was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d

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himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with

Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hyp-
ocrites, till he imagines that all are religious. & himself the
single One on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one
new truth:
Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who
are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate
religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.
Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all
superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but
no further.
Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical
talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen,
produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Sweden­
borg’s. and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite
number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows
better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.
(Plates 21–2, e42–3)

As it is not clearly indicated on its title page, for some time

there was considerable confusion as to when Blake published The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with scholars selecting dates between
1790 and 1793 according to contextual hints that they sought within
the text. It is now accepted that Blake completed all 27 plates in
1790 and that most extant copies come from this time, although
The Marriage of he produced three more in the mid-1790s and two richly coloured
Heaven and Hell, versions in 1818 and 1827. As the editors of the William Blake Trust/
Copy H, Plate 15, Tate Gallery edition of the book have observed, the overall effect
relief and white
line etching, hand- of this mashup of revolutionary political, religious and philosoph-
coloured on paper. ical themes is frequently disconcerting and always entertaining:

103
 divine images

The Marriage, provocative, mocking, sexy, pushy, and playful,

bristles with . . . rebellious optimism. Its gumption is never
exposed as bravado, and, although it hammers mercilessly
on Emanuel Swedenborg and his ‘angelic’ followers, the
mockery is never disillusioned but youthfully, cheerfully
antagonistic to foolish conventionality.12

S. Foster Damon called it a ‘scrap-book of Blake’s philosophy’,

while Michael Ferber thought it a ‘structureless structure’ and
Martin Nurmi argued that the book ‘developed according to no
traditional logic or plan’.13 One attempt to escape the formal
impasse offered by the book was to label it as a ‘Menippean satire’
after the works of the Greek cynic and parodist Menippus of
Gadara, whose works are necessarily fragmentary because they
only remain as citations in other authors. Although it defies the
logic of normal literary structures, there is a remarkable similarity
of tone of voice throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with
a mocking lightness of touch that motivates Blake’s use of dynamic
contraries: attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and
hate and, of course, heaven and hell. For a truly dynamic system,
Blake argues that the opposing elements of human experience
must engage equally with each other, although his attempts to
avoid hierarchy ultimately fail in a text that, perhaps for the first
time in the history of English literature, knowingly places itself
on the side of the devils.
Despite the difficulties created by the form of The Marriage,
some coherence is provided by thematic consistencies as well as
repeated formal motifs. As Howard suggests, there is an infernal
philosophy to the book and it does have ‘a unity, though it escapes
the reader at first’.14 The clearest example that there is not a
complete absence of formal structure is by the repeated series of
Memorable Fancies, which comprise a substantial part of The
Marriage. The precise incidents recounted in each – whether

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

dining with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, for example, or

witnessing an angel and devil conversing over the true nature of
Jesus – may vary, but there is an unusual coherence in the joyful
anarchy of each episode. The first of these is offered as a short
prologue to another recurring form throughout the work, that of
the Proverbs of Hell:

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the

enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment
and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking
that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so
the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom
better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where
a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw
a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on
the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the
following sentence now percieved by the minds of men,
& read by them on earth.
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses
five? (e35)

Many of the individual proverbs that follow, such as ‘The road of

excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ or ‘Prisons are built with
stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion,’ have become
famous in their own right, easily detached from their context in
The Marriage. They take their source from biblical proverbs such
as those found in Ecclesiastes, but their tone is far from con-
servative, and perhaps only Nietzsche’s aphorisms have ever
approached Blake’s in terms of disturbing boldness.
In its final two lines, this Memorable Fancy, as Blake refers to
his short pieces of imaginative prose, also introduces an important

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 divine images

theme of the work, the transformation of perception that Blake

expects from the act of reading: as he more famously expressed it,
‘if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear
to man as it is: infinite.’ (e39) Throughout the eighteenth century
a common notion of perception and experience had developed
from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1689), which argued that the human mind was originally a blank
slate, a tabula rasa, which responded to external stimuli in the
process of creating thoughts. For Blake, this philosophy rendered
the mind too passive, a closed cave of human senses that could
only be illuminated by the external world: Blake unfolds the cave,
opens up the abyss so that the bird becomes an ‘immense world’
when understood by the imagination. Rather than the operation
of transcendent reason organizing passive sense impressions,
active imagination proceeds from the desires of the body. This
idea had been first formulated as the idea of ‘Poetic Genius’ in
All Religions are One, and is expressed in a similar form in that
Memorable Fancy where the poet sits down to dinner with Isaiah
and Ezekiel:

I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God

spake to them; and whether they did not think at the
time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the
cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite
organical perception; but my senses discover’d the
infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. &
remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is
the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. The Marriage of
Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, Heaven and Hell,
make it so? Copy H, Plate 21,
relief and white
He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of line etching, hand-
imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; coloured on paper.

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 divine images

but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any

thing. (e38–9)

As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to

compel this perception of the infinite in everything, the ‘firm per-
swasion’ that it is imagination that shapes the world rather than
vice versa. Blake’s point is polemical and contentious – deliber-
ately so – but the important point here is that by refusing the
conventions of an orderly narrative, the support of rational, organ-
ized, and also restricted thought, the book brings reason to the
abyss of senses so that by falling into the precipice at the edge of
rational thought it will be forced to take flight, for ‘No bird soars
too high. if he soars with his own wings.’ (e36)

The Devil’s Party

While Blake’s Marriage may have begun life as an anti-

Swedenborgian pamphlet, it very quickly transformed into a
much more wide-ranging satire as the events of 1790 unfolded.
David Erdman was one of the first critics to trace in detail the
connection between The Marriage and the events of the French
Revolution, although unfortunately the fact that he dates its
composition between 1790 and 1793 means that he frequently
looks for allusions that are simply not there, seeing the final ‘Song
of Liberty’, for example, as a celebration of ‘the casting out of
French monarchy and the rout . . . of Brunswick’s starry hosts’
at the end of 1792.15
By contrast, if we view Blake as being inspired into a new way
of thinking by the progress of the Revolution in 1789–90, it is pos-
sible to understand more profoundly what Eaves, Essick and
Viscomi recognize as the optimism of his diabolic support for
what was taking place in France. After the meeting of the Three
Estates in 1789 and the formation of a new National Assembly at

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the end of that year, which brought with it the promise of potential
republicanism or at the very least constitutional monarchy, the
Revolution was largely still in its benevolent phase. Certainly,
there had been the Great Fear of the summer of 1789, which beto-
kened the potential tyranny that would come, but the brief fits of
violence that occurred, such as the storming of the Bastille, could
still be presented as part of the progress of France towards enlight-
ened government. Feudalism had been abolished and in May the
Assembly had even renounced any involvement in wars of con-
quest. With the exception of Edmund Burke, few suspected that
the Revolution itself would lead directly to despotism, and even
he could not have realized just how bloody the Terror would be
when it was unleashed in 1793.
As such, Blake’s Marriage is a joyful manifesto, one which
celebrates fully the revolutionary fervour that had exploded in
France. Announcing himself as being of the Devil’s party, he
launched into radical visions with an exuberance that rapidly
disappeared from his illuminated books as the decade pro-
gressed. Although Blake had originally sought to mock the tenets
of a fashionable but still slightly obscure sect in London, he
quickly expanded his vision to politics, religion and philosophy,
easily sweeping in literary giants such as Milton. In tone and style,
if not always in content, the source of the various errors that Blake
seeks to attack is a mistaken understanding of the relations
between body and soul that he outlines on Plate 4:

All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the follow-
ing Errors.

1 That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body

& a Soul.
2 That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that
Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.

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 divine images

3 That God will torment Man in Eternity for following

his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

4 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld
Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses.
the chief inlets of Soul in this age
5 Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason
is The bound or outward circumference of Energy.
6 Energy is Eternal Delight (e34)

The origins of good and evil lie in religions and the errors of
their sacred codes, fundamental to which is the separation of
soul and body, the latter being repressed in the service of the
former. However, religious folly, which denies the true nature
of humanity by denying the body, is also served by philosophy.
Since Plato’s division of reason from appetite, at least, philosophy
had been complicit in the error of dualism and this is an impor-
tant area in which Blake distinguishes himself from Enlightened
anti-religious commentators: Cartesian dualism may have been an
extreme version, but to Blake most if not all Enlightenment phi-
losophers had mistakenly deposed a theistic god, only to replace
him with deistic reason, which was equally effective in repress-
ing the desires and energy of the body, forgetting the origins of
intellectual life that lay in those desires:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods

or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning
them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains,
lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged &
numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city &
country. placing it under its mental deity.

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage

of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or
abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus
began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd
such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
(e38)

Much of what Blake writes here would not look entirely out
of place in the works of Enlightenment thinkers such as David
Hume, Voltaire, Pierre Bayle or Constantin Volney, but Blake’s
attitude to perception creates an important distinction from them:
to the philosophes, reason operates upon the faculties of sense as
a higher order, ordering and categorizing sense impressions. For
Blake, by contrast, the role of energy and imagination as the ani-
mating motivation of such systems of categorization (whereby
poets placed cities and countries under mental deities) returns the
desires of the body to the highest capabilities of which humanity
is capable. Blake’s final statement, that ‘All deities reside in the
human breast’, can be read as remarkably close to atheism; how-
ever, it is more accurate to emphasize that in this and his other
works he emphasizes again and again the divine nature of human-
ity. God is a creation of imagination, and Blake appears to have no
problem with conceiving of man as the creator of God. Man’s mis-
take is to apotheosize his reason, abstracting a system of mental
deities as separate from the material world and projecting it onto
the heavens. Plate 11 explicitly attacks priestcraft, denounced by
many Enlightenment philosophers as that scheme by which God
was removed to the heavens from where he could still meddle in
human affairs. The radical nature of Blake’s critique is that ulti-
mately he sees little difference between such abstraction and that

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of the philosophers themselves, who removed the divine entirely

from the universe and, through deism, contented themselves with
a prime mover which, like Newton’s pantocrator, established an
immutable system of nature that imposed upon the passive per-
ception of mankind. Both priest and philosopher forgot that all
divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out
there, whether heaven or the origin of the universe.
While The Marriage began as a counter-argument to Sweden­
borgianism, as the events of the French Revolution unfolded Blake
himself seemed to engage in a more profound argument with the
most famous of revolutionary English writers, John Milton. On
plates 5 and 6, Blake provides a summary of his response to Paradise
Lost that has become one of the most famous readings ever to have
been made of that epic poem, which is even more remarkable
considering its brevity:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak

enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason
usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is
only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the
Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command
of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his
children are call’d Sin & Death
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but
the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a
heaven of what he stole from the Abyss
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father
to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have

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Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other

than he, who dwells in flaming fire.
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of
the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote
of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell,
is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party
without knowing it (e34–5)

It is important to note that, as with Swedenborg, Blake’s comments

on Milton in The Marriage do not represent his whole opinion of
the poet, which was much more complex throughout his later
poems and illustrations to Milton’s work. If, as Lucy Newlyn
points out, Milton is more important in Blake’s works after the
return to London from Felpham then his concerns have also deep-
ened, for he saw that ‘the classicist had won out over the Hebrew
prophet’,16 impairing Milton’s poetic craft and corrupting it to the
service of war.
While being aware, then, that Blake’s response to Milton is
much more complex than the few lines from The Marriage cited
previously would indicate, there remains a pugnacious attitude
that runs through all his references to the poet. Although much
more receptive to Milton’s revolutionary credentials than many
writers of the eighteenth century, Blake had little time for the
hagiography that had attended the epic creator of Paradise Lost.
The irony of the rebuke to one who could only write at liberty
when writing of the Devil’s party should not be forgotten (after
all, this is not Blake’s voice, but that of the Devil); it is also quite
clear from Milton a Poem that Blake does not regard Satan as the
hero of Paradise Lost. However, the remark in The Marriage draws
attention to the unconscious energies of Milton’s work and
seems especially perceptive insofar as it highlights the repressed

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 divine images

features of the poet’s life: the pamphleteer of political liberty could

also serve a republican dictatorship, the theological freethinker
ended with a vision of God as predestinarian tyrant, and the bib-
lical prophet was seduced by the possibilities of neoclassical
militarism.
Aside from occasional notices of sale, there was little in the
way of response to The Marriage in Blake’s lifetime, and if his orig-
inal intention of provoking a reaction among Swedenborgians met
with any success there is no record of it. Of those later acquaint-
ances such as John Linnell and Samuel Palmer who read the book,
they left few comments and the reason why may be gathered from
a letter that Palmer sent to Anne Gilchrist in 1862, in which he
recommends she censor the text:

I think the whole page at the top of which I have made a cross
in red chalk would at once exclude the work from every
drawing-room table in England. Blake has said the same kind
of thing to me; in fact almost everything contained in the
book; and I can understand it in relation to my memory of
the whole man, in a way quite different to that roaring lion
the ‘press,’ or that red lion the British Public.17

Anne did, in the end, allow substantial portions of The Marriage

to be published in her husband’s Life of William Blake, although
with very little in the way of critical commentary, remarking
instead in the second edition that ‘the student of Blake will find
in Mr Swinburne’s William Blake, A Critical Essay, all the light
that can be thrown by the vivid imagination and subtle insight of
a poet on this as on the later mystic or “Prophetic Books”’ (Life
i.78). Swinburne himself declared The Marriage ‘the greatest of all
his [Blake’s] books: a work indeed which we rank as about the
greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high
poetry and spiritual speculation’18 and, in contrast to the majority

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of nineteenth-century commentators, saw the variety and audacity

of its paradoxes, heresies and eccentricities as examples of Blake’s
writing at its most profound.

The French Revolution

The Marriage ends with a ‘Song of Liberty’, a prophecy that

concludes with the line: ‘Empire is no more! and now the lion &
wolf shall cease’ (e45). During the early months of 1790, as he
was concluding this remarkable work, it must have indeed seemed
that the old order was coming to an end. On 19 May the National
Assembly completed the task begun when it had removed feudal
rights by abolishing the nobility and, in July, introduced a civil
constitution for the clergy, dismantling two of the pillars of the
Ancien Régime. Power now resided in the commons, an act that
turned the monarchies of Europe and the papacy more fully
against the Revolution. This was, as Peter McPhee has called it,
the period of ‘the Revolution triumphant’.19
In England, attitudes to events across the Channel largely
ranged from optimistic to indifferent, so much so that Burke’s
fellow Whigs largely considered his warnings alarmist in 1790.
While Burke considered his Reflections a defence of ‘Old’ Whig
principles established in the Glorious Revolution of 1788, plenty
of pamphlets from English radicals and dissenters quickly appeared
to refute his support of the old order. Thomas Jefferson probably
spoke for many when he remarked: ‘the Revolution in France
does not astonish me so much as the revolution in Mr Burke.’20
The most important rebuttal came, of course, from Thomas Paine.
Rights of Man carried the subtitle ‘Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s
Attack on the French Revolution’, and it was addressed to George
Washington as a project to continue the advance of the rights of
man that had begun during the American War of Independence.
Paine’s attack on Burke was direct and to the point:

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 divine images

When the French Revolution broke out, it certainly afforded

to Mr Burke an opportunity of doing some good, had he been
disposed to it; instead of which, no sooner did he see the old
prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing
the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England
and France would cease to be enemies. That there are men
in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping
up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true.21

Paine’s twisting of Burke’s defence of more conservative constitu-

tions against revolution into a desire to maintain enmity between
Britain and France is untrue – of which Paine himself was proba-
bly aware. His words also had the most profound effect on Blake,
who would echo them over a decade later when he wrote in the
Preface to Milton a Poem, ‘believe Christ & his Apostles that there
is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying’ (e95).
Joseph Johnson had contracted to publish Rights of Man in
February 1791 but quickly transferred the project to Jeremiah
Jordan of Fleet Street. Why Johnson suppressed his own print-
ing of Paine’s work is not immediately clear: sedition laws were
passed after publication of Rights of Man, and though Johnson
would eventually be tried and imprisoned that did not take place
until 1798. John Bugg’s observation that ‘it is notable that Johnson
was able to stay out of jail for as long as he did’ may indicate an
incipient sense of self-preservation that would serve him well for
most of the ensuing decade.22 The notion that events in France
would be increasingly difficult for English radicals may have also
affected his involvement with another project of Blake’s, the poem
The French Revolution.
This manuscript, only one copy of which remains in the
Huntingdon Library, bears on its title page the information that
it was printed in 1791 for J. Johnson at the price of ‘One Shilling’.
It is only the second conventionally typeset version of Blake’s

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works after Poetical Sketches, and although it was conceived as

a project in seven books, only the first of these is extant, with
no evidence that Blake ever wrote the rest. William Richey has
rightly pointed out that the tendency of early critics to treat the
book purely as a backdrop for his evolving personal philosophy
is incorrect and that, rather, it should be treated in the immedi-
ate contexts of late 1790 and early 1791, when a number of radical
writers published works attacking Burke’s conception of the rev-
olution in France.23 As with Paine, Blake sought to provide an
overview to his contemporaries of the events taking place over the
Channel, via poetry rather than prose in this particular instance,
and what remains of the poem focuses on the early incidents in the
summer of 1789. The long, septenary lines of The French Revolution
create a slow, sombre effect, and the verse is clearly intended to
present as heroic the actions of the early participants in the Revo­
lution. Unlike Blake’s later work of the 1790s, with the partial
exception of America a Prophecy, this book is concerned entirely
with contemporary figures from the time: the poem opens with
Necker approaching the king when he is summoned, and the work
is full of references to familiar names such as the dukes of Burgundy
and Orleans, or Abbé Sieyès and Mirabeau. While the metre is an
unusual one, some of its style would not be unfamiliar to other rad-
ical poets from the period, such as Robert Southey who, in 1796,
composed his epic Joan of Arc on themes similar to those of Blake’s.
While The French Revolution should by no means be treated
as a workshop for the later prophetic books, it does invoke ideas
that Blake would return to again and again throughout his artistic
career, as in the following opening lines:

Hear, O Heavens of France, the voice of the people, arising

from valley and hill,
O’erclouded with power. Hear the voice of vallies [sic], the
voice of meek cities,

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 divine images

Mourning oppressed on village and field, till the village and

field is a waste.
For the husbandman weeps at blights of the fife, and
blasting of trumpets consume
The souls of mild France; the pale mother nourishes her
child to the deadly slaughter. (e295)

At this point, as indeed throughout much of the poem, Blake’s

immediate concerns are for the poor and the dispossessed. Also,
while his opinions of the Revolution would change as it entered
its darker phase (though he, unlike Southey, Wordsworth or
Coleridge, would never renounce his earlier support), Blake
appears to have been generally consistent in terms of his paci-
fism. The lines above certainly refer to the crop failures that had
affected France, but also to the consequences of war, announced
by the ‘blasting of trumpets’. Perhaps only America offers a possible
defence of revolutionary violence – and even that, as we shall see
in the next chapter, was at best ambivalent; in all other circum-
stances, Blake’s art and poetry denounced war in all its forms.
The French Revolution offers an insight into the development
of Blake’s poetic forms and styles. While agreeing entirely with
Richey that the poem should be seen within the immediate con-
texts of responses to Edmund Burke, it also provides us with clues
as to how Blake’s later prophetic form emerged. The long line of
The French Revolution, with its seven beats employing either ana-
paests or iambs, is a complement to the fourteener line that
Blake was already experimenting with and which would become
a familiar element of his later work. The poem also dem­on­­strates
how Blake’s use of Shakespearian form in Poetical Sketches was
now developing into something more unique to him, combining
Shake­speare’s elevated language with a highly metaphorical and
symbolical style of writing that mythologized revolutionary fig-
ures just as he would later mythologize Orc, Urizen and Los.

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 A New Heaven Is Begun

Furthermore, if The Marriage of Heaven and Hell carried within

it the exuberant energy of the early months of the Revolution,
the sombre tone of the later poem, while viewing events in
France in a wholly positive light, appeared to presage the darker
experience of the coming years that would utterly transform
Blake’s work.

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 4
Lambeth and Experience

I n 1791 the Blakes moved from their residence in Poland Street

to 13 Hercules Buildings in Lambeth on the other side of
Westminster Bridge, where they settled in what would be their
home for nearly ten years. This was a two-storey house with a
garden at the front and back, located near Lambeth Vale which,
along with the surrounding areas of the Surrey Hills, was still
largely rural. Clapham, Peckham, Brixton and other villages were
still separated from the capital and would only slowly be con-
nected during the nineteenth century, although the convenience
of Lambeth’s location had long made it a place of ‘commercialised
charity, tough factories and seedy pleasure’.1 Storehouses, stables
and timber yards lay between the river and nearby marshland;
just west of the bridge was Lambeth Palace, while Vauxhall
Pleasure Gardens further south were popular with crowds from
the city who, until Vauxhall Bridge was constructed in the 1810s,
would be ferried across the Thames in boats. These gardens were
Songs of Innocence immensely popular: a fancy-dress jubilee in 1786, for example,
and of Experience,
Copy F, Plate 39, attracted more than 60,000 revellers.
‘London’, colour- Yet the pleasure gardens were also famous for their ‘dark
printed relief walks’, where prostitution was so frequent that it was assumed
etching with pen
and watercolour any woman on her own there was a sex worker. Indeed, such was
on paper. the acceptance that girls born to poor families would be sold into

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 divine images

prostitution that attempts were made in Lambeth to prevent the

trade. Near to the Blakes’ residence, the old Hercules Inn had
been converted into the Female Orphan Asylum, a workhouse that
had been established in 1758. Girls aged between nine and twelve,
more often from one-parent families than true orphans, would be
admitted to be trained as domestic servants and thus prevented
from entering prostitution. Gardner cites a letter from The Observer
in 1791, which remarked that a West Country gentleman was sur-
prised ‘at the flocks of chicken prostitutes [a derogatory term for
child sex workers] which he observed before Somerset House,
and which he actually mistook for the pupils of some large board-
ing-school’.2 The lives of such young prostitutes, as Gardner points
out, was as desperate as those of the chimney sweeps whose exist-
ence was brutal and short; many of them contracted syphilis
before they even reached their teenage years.
The life of William and Catherine, then, was one of innocence
in comparison to that mere streets away. It is at Lambeth that the
probably apocryphal story is recorded by Gilchrist of the pair
being discovered naked in their garden and telling their visitor
that they were playing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
(Life i.112), but they were also aware of the grim world of expe-
rience that lay beyond their garden walls. It was in his later poem
Milton that Blake referred to ‘Lambeths Vale / Where Jerusalems
foundations began’ (6.14–15), and clearly there was a transforma­
tion that took place in his writing at this time. A mere seven years
lay between publication of Poetical Sketches and The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, yet in that short space of time Blake’s writings
had changed as utterly as the world around him. Henceforth, his
works would frequently take on a much darker tone. It is not
correct to assume that he was suddenly radicalized by the events
of the French Revolution: even in Poetical Sketches, he was aware
of the depredations of the wealthy and powerful against the weak
and poor, but increasing political agitation in the capital, as well

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 Lambeth and Experience

as his own involvement on the fringes at least of the Johnson circle,

intensified his own sense of engagement with social and political
justice.
Lambeth was also the scene of a period of greater artistic activ-
ity in Blake’s life, resulting in a series of illuminated works that
have since become known as the Lambeth Prophecies. While The
Marriage had been infused with the beginnings of a spirit of revo-
lutionary politics prompted by the outbreak of revolution in
France, these books of the 1790s explicitly dealt with social and
political upheavals in a new light. In texts such as Visions of the
Daughters of Albion (1793), America a Prophecy (1793), Europe a
Prophecy (1794) and The First Book of Urizen (1794), Blake also
introduced the personal mythology that was to become an impor-
tant feature of his art, with figures such as Orc, Los and Urizen
engaged in titanic struggles in this new form of poetry. In America
Blake develops the first chapter of those struggles as the direct
conflict between Urizen and Orc, a development from his ear-
lier French Revolution. Blake’s best-known work from this period,
how­­ever, is Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The addition of
Songs of Experience transformed the perception of Blake’s original
Songs of Innocence in order to show ‘the Two Contrary States of
the Human Soul’. Several of the later poems directly reflect those
in the earlier collection, sometimes sharing the same title, as with
‘Holy Thursday’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, while others echo
their counterpart, such as ‘The Divine Image’ and ‘The Human
Abstract’. The later collection includes some of Blake’s most
famous and powerful lyrics, such as ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Sick
Rose’. Whereas Songs of Innocence had concentrated on a world
of child-like freedom and artlessness, Songs of Experience drew
attention to that view as sometimes limited.
All the time that Blake was working on these books that would
bring him posthumous fame, even if they were not widely read
during his lifetime, he also engaged in commercial activities,

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 divine images

engraving designs produced by other artists for publishers such

as Johnson. Despite Blake’s hopes for illuminated printing as a
means of reaching a wider market, these early prophecies were
still time-consuming to produce and did not sell particularly well.
After 1795 he did not return to the format for nearly a decade.
Part of the reason for their failure was almost certainly the obscu-
rity of Blake’s style, but also the fact that by the mid-1790s
London had become a much more dangerous place for anyone
with revolutionary sympathies. ‘Church-and-King’ mobs attacked
notable radicals across the country, and the government led by
William Pitt passed the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act
(which defined as high treason any conspiracy to overthrow the
constitution) and the Seditious Meetings Act (whereby any meet-
ing of more than fifty people had to be approved by a magistrate).
These two acts, the so-called ‘Gagging Acts’, became law in 1795,
having a severe effect on free speech in Britain during the period
of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. By 1798 Blake
would write in his copy of An Apology for the Bible by Richard
Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, that ‘to defend the Bible in this
year 1798 would cost a man his life’ (e611).

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Aside from his emblematic book For Children: The Gates of

Paradise, the first of his illuminated works that Blake etched and
printed in Lambeth was Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793.
The existence of the female workhouse in the old Hercules Inn
clearly weighed heavily on his mind during this time, and after
the ecstatic celebration of revolutionary feeling that had blos-
somed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the first of his Lambeth
Prophecies concentrated on the struggle of women rather than
that of men – with much darker forebodings than had been appar-
ent in his earlier works. From the very beginning, the Lambeth

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 Lambeth and Experience

Prophecies would be books of experience. Perhaps his thoughts

were turned to the subject in part because of the death of his
mother, who had succumbed to illness on 7 September the pre-
vious year. The more obvious and immediate influence, however,
was publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman in 1792.
Blake’s attitudes towards Original Stories from Real Life are
perhaps best described as ambivalent, but his reactions to the
Vindication were much more profoundly enthusiastic. Wollstone­
craft’s book was actually the second of her responses to the events
and political milieu of the French Revolution, following on from
A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This title had been issued in
1790, around the same time that Paine had published Rights of
Man, and, like his work, was a reaction to Burke’s Reflections on
the Revolution in France. This was made clear in the full title of the
book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right
Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the
Revolution in France. Both this and her Vindication of the Rights
of Woman were published by Johnson. As Gordon observes, the
two books were successful – a second edition of Rights of Woman
appeared in the same year – establishing her not only as a liberal
opponent of Burke but as ‘an original philosopher in her own right’.3
Prior to Wollstonecraft, those books that appeared arguing for a
reformation of the education of women tended to do so from an
assumption that they should be made more fitting companions to
men. In her introduction, by contrast, Wollstonecraft wrote:

The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove,

that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flow-
ers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness
are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after
having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the
stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived

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 divine images

at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to

a false system of education, gathered from the books written
on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as
women than human creatures, have been more anxious to
make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the
understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious
homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with
a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they
ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and
virtues exact respect.4

As Elizabeth Bernath observes, this passage contrasts two types of

mind: that of matured rationality versus immature, sensual minds,
a ‘surfeit of sensibility [that] Wollstonecraft identifies is a cultural
epidemic akin to a poorly kept garden’.5 The immediate cause of
the Vindication was a report by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-
Périgord to the French National Assembly that the education of
women be restricted to domestic matters. At the same time that
the Revolution in France appeared set to advance the cause of all
men, regardless of class and status, it seemed that at least some of
its leaders were more than happy to restrict any similar progress
by their fellow women.
Reactions to Wollstonecraft’s book were often hostile. Thomas
Taylor wrote what he considered a witty rebuke in the form of a
bitter pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, arguing that
if women were to receive rights then so should animals (which
idea, indeed, Blake would later take up non-ironically in his
Auguries of Innocence), while a journalist for the Critical Review
attacked the author’s unmarried status and wished her book to
be condemned ‘to oblivion’.6 Even among liberals she was treated
with caution, in particular because the Vindication attacked
Rousseau’s ideals of education in Emile. Among both liberal and
conservative male readers, then, with some notable exceptions

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 Lambeth and Experience

such as Johnson and William Godwin, Wollstonecraft proved a

difficult pill to swallow. Female readers were often, although by
no means always, more appreciative. Anna Laetitia Barbauld
published her poem ‘The Rights of Woman’ in the same year,
which advocated a similarly enlightened attitude towards wom-
en’s education (although still ended by suggesting that marriage
was more important), while Mary Robinson and Mary Hays spe-
cifically alluded to the Vindication in their work. As R. M. Janes
suggests, the notion that Wollstonecraft’s book was greeted with
shock, horror and derision was not true, although by 1798 with
the publication of Godwin’s ill-judged memoir her reputation
would decline inexorably.7 Blake, however, appears to have been
one of the few men to have enthusiastically taken up her ideas in
his Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
The Visions begins with its main protagonist, Oothoon, in
America, lamenting her condition and seeking flowers to comfort
her, to which one, a Marygold, she speaks thus:

Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph! I see thee now

a flower;
Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy
dewy bed!
The Golden nymph replied; pluck thou my flower
Oothoon the mild
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet
delight
Can never pass away. she ceas’d & closd her golden shrine.
(e46)

The exchange, and Oothoon’s reaction, has long been recognized

as a sexual one. Plucking the flower, Oothoon flies to her lover,
Theotormon, seeking delight in him, for which ‘sin’ she is raped
by Bromion:

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divine images

Visions of the
Daughters of
Albion, Plate 1,
frontispiece, 1793,
relief etching
with pen and
watercolour
on paper.

Bromion spoke. behold this harlot here on Bromions bed,

And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid;
Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north
& south:
Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:
They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:
Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent:

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 Lambeth and Experience

Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the

child
Of Bromions rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine
moons time (1.18–2.2, e46)

Some aspects of Bromion’s speech, apparently to Theotormon, are

ambiguous: it is most likely that Theotormon is a mythical form
of the American fathers, and Oothoon his European lover (although
the speech may be directed to Oothoon herself), whom Bromion
has treated like one of his African slaves. As James Heffernan
observes, this makes the poem complicated and disturbing, in
that its central figures are all tainted by the legacy of slavery.
While accepting this ambiguity, it is also clear that Heffernan is
correct when he identifies Oothoon as ‘the most remarkable
woman Blake ever conceived’.8 The reason for this, as other critics
such as Helen Bruder have noted, is that she remains potently in
control of her imaginative and rational faculties, even when raped
by a slave-master and falsely imprisoned for her ‘sin’ by her lover.
The truly astonishing extent to which Oothoon remains in control
of her faculties is demonstrated by the series of incredible speeches
that she delivers:

With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous

hawk?
With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the
expanse?
With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the
mouse & frog
Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations.
And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their
joys:
Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek
camel

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 divine images

Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin

Or breathing nostrils? No. for these the wolf and tyger
have.
Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her
spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the
rav’nous snake
Where she gets poison: & the wing’d eagle why he loves
the sun
And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid
of old. (3.2–13, e47)

There is much that is typically Blakean about this speech: it

demonstrates a culmination of the Shakespearean and Miltonic
techniques that he had been developing since Poetical Sketches,
combining both with a sonorous, biblical flow. It also provides a
profoundly poetic and philosophical response to what Blake saw
as the limitations of materialist philosophy of the day: if the human
mind is formed by the senses, then that multiplicity of senses,
which we can observe in creatures around us, indicates that we
are not restricted to the five conduits of the soul Blake had so caus-
tically mocked in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Theotormon,
entering the room and seeing his lover on a bed with Bromion,
was all too eager to believe his limited perceptions and thus dis-
cover her a harlot. Helen Bruder powerfully argues that Oothoon
is broken by this rape, even perverted – in contrast to contempo-
raries who all too often used ‘ravishment’ as entertainment before
putting the abused woman on trial.9 Oothoon is literally rent on
Bromion’s bed by the patriarchal world of slavery that sees both
other races and women as chattels; tellingly, this poem is the first
to refer to Urizen, ‘Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven’
(e48), and the cause of this world. I would, however, add that
what makes her probably the most remarkable female character

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 Lambeth and Experience

Visions of the Daughters

of Albion, Plate 7,
relief etching with
pen and watercolour
on paper.

in Blake’s works is that her imagination is not similarly destroyed.

Bromion cannot see her as more than a possession for his pleasure,
while Theotormon cannot move past his sense of her as a harlot.
Oothoon, however, invoking the great, rhythmical vision of Job
in his tribulations, perceives an entire universe of creation in the
long speech that dominates plates 5 to 7. While Theotormon sees
her as a whore and a ‘crafty slave of selfish holiness’, Oothoon her-
self refuses this definition, just as Job faced with his false friends

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 divine images

who argue that God’s punishment must be because of his sin.

Instead she cries:

But Oothoon is not so, a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies

Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears
If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d
In happy copulation (6.21–7.1, e50)

The poem remains a dark one, dealing directly as it does with

rape and slavery, yet in this speech she returns to the vision that
opens the poem: innocence is not a one-off thing to be bought and
sold with virginity and defined by penetration. Oothoon declares
herself still a virgin, for when a flower is plucked ‘Another flower
shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight / Can never pass
away’.

The Continental Prophecies

Blake’s interest in America as symbolic of revolutionary change

in the world was evident in his most direct commentary on the
events of the American War of Independence, which had con-
cluded little more than a decade previously. America a Prophecy
is, rightly, one of the most famous of Blake’s works and important
because it introduces a recurring theme of his mythic cycle: the
battle between Urizen as the forces of convention and tradition
and the spirit of revolution that is Orc. Before leaving Visions of
the Daughters of Albion, however, it is worth diverting slightly from
a strict chronology of Blake’s works to consider another book that
he was commissioned to illustrate during his residence at Lambeth:
John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition,
Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
Although Stedman’s Narrative was published in 1796, Blake
began work on it in 1791. John Gabriel Stedman was of mixed

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 Lambeth and Experience

Dutch and Scottish heritage, having left the Dutch Republic in

1772 to serve in the West Indies, where he was given the rank of
captain and served in seven campaigns in Surinam, a colony that
‘A Negro Hung had passed between the English and Dutch during the seven-
Alive by the Ribs
to a Gallows’, teenth century before becoming wholly ruled by the Dutch from
from John Gabriel 1668 onwards. Most of the work in the South American colony
Stedman, Narrative, was done by African slaves, who frequently fled the brutal con-
of a Five Years’
Expedition, Against ditions in which they were kept. Known as maroons, the escaped
the Revolted Negroes slaves frequently attacked the plantations for supplies. Stedman
of Surinam (1796), arrived at the colony in 1773 and remained there until 1777; al­­
intaglio engraving,
hand-coloured on though no abolitionist, he witnessed a number of events there that
paper. sickened him, including a woman who received two hundred
lashes for her inability to complete
a task and a man who was broken on
a wheel and left to die over a period
of several days.
Stedman kept a diary of his time
in Surinam, which he wrote up ten
years later as the Narrative, a heavily
edited version that, for example,
omitted most of the sexual encoun-
ters he purchased from enslaved
women. His publisher was Johnson,
who commissioned Blake to produce
sixteen separate plates and a title page
for the book. So impressed was
Stedman by a number of the designs
that he sought the acquaintance of
the engraver after seeing them in
1793, staying with Blake a number
of times between 1794 and 1796. As
well as depictions of the natural
beauty of the South American colony,

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 divine images

Blake illustrated a number of scenes

involving the torture and brutaliza-
tion of slaves there, which influenced
his depiction of slavery in Visions. In
the most enigmatic and sophisticated
of his designs, ‘Europe Supported by
Africa and America’, he portrays a
naked, pale Europe held up by two
other equally nude women, one
clearly an African slave, the other a
Native American. While the Euro­
pean woman has her eyes closed
demurely and avoids the viewer’s
gaze, the other two figures stare out
boldly at the reader, challenging him
to recognize the economic and im­­
moral reality of slavery and colonialism
in upholding European wealth.
The transatlantic slave trade was
one way by which the world had been bound into a net of cruel ‘Europe Supported
commerce during the Enlightenment, the extension of capital- by Africa and
America’,
ism and colonial power that the revolutions of the late eighteenth from Stedman,
century were meant to abolish. The promise of those revolu- Narrative, of a Five
tions, and the intimations of their ultimate failure, provided Blake Years’ Expedition,
intaglio engraving.
with many of his themes in the Lambeth Prophecies, beginning
with a series of short books that have become known as the
Continental Prophecies because their titles, America, Europe,
‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ (the latter two combined in The Song of Los),
explore in Blake’s idiosyncratic style a global geopolitics. It is in
these books that he also begins to explore some of the features of
his emerging mythology of the four Zoas, archetypal represen­
tations of human characteristics at war with each other, which
would recur throughout his work for the next two decades.

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 Lambeth and Experience

America a Prophecy,
Copy M, Plate 1,
frontispiece, 1793,
relief etching with
pen, watercolour
and opaque colours
on paper.

Of the Continental Prophecies, America is both the simplest

to understand (in a series of works that are frequently opaque)
and the most influential. Unlike the remainder of the Continental
Prophecies, it follows a loose narrative after a prologue in which
Orc, the spirit of revolution, and the ‘shadowy daughter of
Urthona’ are revealed. Although early readers found the book

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 Lambeth and Experience

difficult and obscure, critics in the twentieth century have tended

to agree with David Erdman who, in Prophet Against Empire,
saw it as a conflict of ‘tyrant and patriot facing each other across
the Atlantic on the world stage’.10 Erdman’s reading has been
hugely influential and is clearly reflected in the vision of George
iii envisaged as ‘Albions wrathful Prince’, who takes on ‘A dragon
form’ to fight the Americans. Against him rises up Orc, the first
appearance of one of the most iconic of Blake’s mythical figures:

As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed

heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of
blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky
atmosphere (4.5–10, e53)

Alongside this ‘terror’, who clearly brings to fruition many of

the elements of the devils from the earlier The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, Blake depicts the American revolutionaries in that high,
Miltonic-Shakespearean style that he had experimented with
in The French Revolution. As Albion’s Angel, the dragon repre­
sentative of Britain’s tyranny, prepares to unleash plague on the
newly United States, Blake describes the oncoming battle in
terms reminiscent of Milton’s war in heaven:
America a Prophecy,
Copy M, Plate 2,
title page, relief In the flames stood & view’d the armies drawn out in the sky
etching with pen, Washington Franklin Paine & Warren Allen Gates & Lee:
watercolour and
opaque colours And heard the voice of Albions Angel give the thunderous
on paper. command:

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 divine images

His plagues obedient to his voice flew forth out of their

clouds
Falling upon America, as a storm to cut them off
As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear.
Dark is the heaven above, & cold & hard the earth
beneath;
And as a plague wind fill’d with insects cuts off man &
beast;
And as a sea o’erwhelms a land in the day of an earthquake
...
Then had America been lost, o’erwhelm’d by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,
But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire
The red fires rag’d! the plagues recoil’d! then rolld they
back with fury (14.1–20, e56)

Blake’s sympathies clearly lie with the American revolution-

aries: Linebaugh and Rediker see in Orc the ‘symbol of energy,
desire, and freedom’,11 recognizing in this eternal revolutionary
a representation of Neptune, an African slave who had killed an
overseer and was tortured on the rack, as depicted by Blake in
his illustrations to Stedman’s Narrative. The reading is convinc-
ing in many ways, in particular as the Prologue to America has
the Shadowy Female address Orc as ‘the image of God who
dwells in darkness of Africa’ (e52). Yet the sexual encounter
between the young Orc and the Shadowy Female is not so simply
dismissed by Linebaugh and Rediker’s prim, ‘They make love.’
Although it is not explicitly described as a rape, as in Visions of
the Daughters of Albion, her womb is described as both ‘struggling’
and joyous, and in the later Lambeth Prophecies as well as The
Four Zoas the Oedipal familial relationship between Orc, Los and
Enitharmon is dark and jealous. Experience, both as an abstract,
structuring motif in Blake’s work and as his literal experience of

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 Lambeth and Experience

the aftermath of the early, optimistic phase of the French Revolution

as it slowly turned to terror, made his visions of revolution in the
1790s extremely complex. America, an emblem of revolution, also
remained a slave-owning nation and in such conditions how could
sexual relations be anything but corrupt? Blake had depicted the
torture and murder of the Surinam slave Neptune in a way that
would deeply affect abolitionists throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, but he was also aware of the female slaves that Europeans
such as Stedman used for their own pleasure. Julia Wright captures
this complexity when she declares that Orc, in America, is closer
to ‘a nihilist than a revolutionary’.12 Wright sees the encounter
between Orc and the Shadowy Female more unambiguously as
rape, one that owes much to the politics of Wollstonecraft and
forces the reader to face the realities of sex in a slave-owning
society.13
Blake’s views of the American Revolution – as indeed, of its
successor in France – quickly became much more complex in the
1790s. Gilchrist wrote that he refused to wear the bonnet rouge, the
cap of liberty, after hearing of the September Massacres, and those
who rush to equate Orc with a wholesome consummation of the
devils of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell neglect an important
critique of the ebb and flow of revolution that Northrop Frye
famously referred to as the ‘Orc cycle’. ‘As soon as we begin to
think of the relation of Orc to Urizen,’ wrote Frye, ‘it becomes
impossible to maintain them as separate principles.’14 This is clear-
est in two of the most striking images from the poem in plates 10
and 12, in which both figures are presented in the same pose, arms
outstretched and leg resting as a reflection of the other figure.
Urizen, bearded, ancient, coloured in blues and greys in later edi-
tions of the poem, rests upon a cloud – clearly a representation of
trad­itional forms of God in heaven. Orc, by contrast, appears in
red and gold, rising from the flames of hell, his hair like fire upon
his youthful head. God and Devil: if in The Marriage Blake had

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seemed to more clearly belong to the Devil’s party, by the time he

wrote America his earlier, innocent hopes for the French Revolution
were tinged with the experience of what such a revolution would
actually mean. Throughout the remainder of his prophetic books,
Urizen and Orc would need to reconcile the divorce that led them
to war throughout the world and throughout the ages.
While Blake was already beginning to consider the complex-
ities of revolutionary politics, while writing America in 1793 there
is much in the poem that retains his earlier optimism, as in these
glorious lines from Plate 6:

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave

their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk
& dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are
burst;
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors
are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors
scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
America. A Prophecy,
Copy M, Plate 3, Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a
preludium, relief fresher morning
etching with pen, And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
watercolour and
opaque colours For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall
on paper. cease. (6.1–15, e53)

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 divine images

Blake’s next illuminated book, Europe a Prophecy, is not such

a panegyric to revolution. Darker and more obscure in style, this
Continental Prophecy deals with the events of the French
Revolution but, unlike America, it does so entirely through the
prism of Blake’s mythology. Unlike the previous text, there is no
Robespierre or Mirabeau to ground the reader in the events of the
early 1790s: instead, we are introduced more fully to Enitharmon
and Los, two more of Blake’s ‘Eternals’, whose significance would
increase throughout his lifetime. During the period that Blake
was writing Europe, the French Revolution had entered its dark-
est phase: between June 1793 and the fall of Robespierre in July
1794, the Terror was at its height, with some 17,000 official death
sentences being passed in France by the Committee of Public
Safety, while civil war in the Vendée claimed the lives of tens of
thousands more. In London, government reaction against revo-
lutionary sympathizers was also beginning to take effect. In 1792
the London Corresponding Society had been formed by Thomas
Hardy, calling for a reform to voting rules and for annual parlia-
ments, but in 1794 Hardy and two other of its members, John
Thelwall and John Horne Tooke, were placed on trial for treason.
While they were acquitted by a jury because of patent falsehoods
on the part of the government, others ended very differently, as
in the case of Thomas Muir who, after a show trial in Scotland
in 1793, was transported to Botany Bay. Anti-French sentiment
was spreading across the country: Joseph Priestley, who had fled
to London after his home in Birmingham had been burnt down
by an angry mob in 1791, finally decided in 1794 that he could no
longer remain in England under Pitt’s government, leaving for
Pennsylvania shortly before radicals were being arrested for sedi-
tious libel. In such an environment, open opposition to the crown
was increasingly dangerous and Blake’s own writing may have
become deliberately obscure in part to prevent easy accusations
of sedition.

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 Lambeth and Experience

Europe a Prophecy,
Copy A, Plate 2,
title page, 1794,
relief etching with
pen and watercolour
on paper.

After a strange prologue, in which a fairy sings to the narrator

from a tulip on the theme of how we restrict ourselves to the world
of the five senses, a theme that Blake had been exploring since
the very first of his illuminated books, Europe opens in the after-
math of the Preludium of America, with the ‘nameless shadowy
female’ rising from Orc to address Enitharmon, a mother goddess
whose role in the poem is far more significant – and sinister – than

143
 divine images

that of her consort, Los. In a print from 1795, entitled The Night of Europe a Prophecy,
Enitharmon’s Joy (and previously referred to as Hecate), Enitharmon Copy A, Plate
10, relief etching
is shown in darkness, her hand resting on a book while two fig- with pen and
ures hide their faces behind her, with animals surrounding the watercolour
trio. It is easy to see how this print could be misrecognized as a on paper.
depiction of the goddess of witchcraft, and Enitharmon’s baleful
influence is felt in the following lines of Europe:

Enitharmon slept,
Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream!
The night of Nature and their harps unstrung:
She slept in middle of her nightly song,
Eighteen hundred years, a female dream!
Shadows of men in fleeting bands upon the winds:
Divide the heavens of Europe:
Till Albions Angel smitten with his own plagues fled with
his bands
The cloud bears hard on Albions shore (9.1–9, e63)

This dream of Enitharmon corresponds with European history

after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, a period of war and
bondage for people that will end with the events of the American
and French revolutions. Yet when Enitharmon is awoken (signif-
icantly by the spirit of Newton), the apocalyptic act ends with
a hiatus rather than revelation:

Then Los arose his head he reard in snaky thunders clad:

And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole,
Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood. (15.9–11, e66)

The concluding ‘finis’ has the feel of ‘To be concluded’ about

it, with Los and his sons gathered to engage in the wars that, no
one realized in 1794, would consume Europe for the next two

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 divine images

decades. In the final part of the Continental Prophecies, however,

Blake turns not to the end of days but the beginning of history.
The brief Song of Los, printed in 1795, is divided into two parts:
‘Africa’ outlines the origins of the error that have lain across Europe
during the night of Enitharmon’s dream, how Urizen gave ‘his
Laws to the Nations’ to Adam, Noah and Moses. No religion is
free from the error of priestcraft: Islam, Hinduism, classical and
northern paganisms all fall under its sway, and even Jesus ‘receivd
/ A Gospel from wretched Theotormon’. The Song of Los includes
a remarkable frontispiece in which a white-haired figure (presum-
ably Urizen) kneels at an altar to prostrate himself before a black
sun, its dark luminescence spreading poisonous rays across the
earth. In the companion piece, ‘Asia’, this religious error is com-
pounded by political power as the kings of Asia react with horror
to the cry of revolution from Europe. As they gather to prepare for
battle, so the final revelation starts to become apparent, the pos-
sible end of days in which the motif of resurrection is deployed by
Blake in a startlingly sexual fashion to indicate the possible new
age to come:

Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones

Join: shaking convuls’d the shivring clay breathes
And all flesh naked stands: Fathers and Friends;
Mothers & Infants; Kings & Warriors:
The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes
Her hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:
Her bosom swells with wild desire:
And milk & blood & glandous wine
In rivers rush & shout & dance,
On mountain, dale and plain. (7.31–40, e69–70)

After his early enthusiasm in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

Blake did not view revolution as the easy road; rather it was ‘the

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 Lambeth and Experience

perilous path’ where roses would be planted and springs found,

but which could also fall to villains. In his frequently bizarre
Continental Prophecies, Blake attempts a new kind of verse that
had not been tried before, employing the Miltonic style of Paradise
Lost (and, before that, the poetry of Shakespeare and of the Bible)
to create his own mythology, an imaginative recreation of the
political events of his day that will chart the difficult task of undo-
ing millennia of falsehood and repression. It is no accident that
Urizen, the ‘mistaken Demon of heaven’ who, more than any other
of Blake’s eternals represents error, concludes the Continental
books as he looks on the prophecy of revolution: ‘The song of los
is ended. Urizen wept.’

Songs of Experience

At the same time that he was beginning to explore his complex

mythology of the forces of oppression and revolution, Blake would
also complete the most famous of his works, which demonstrates
a lucidity and clarity rarely achieved in English poetry. Northrop
Frye once made the astute observation that it was foolish to see
the relationship between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
as reflecting a transformation in the author’s own sensibilities, ‘for
when Blake engraved the latter he was no longer a child of thirty-
two but a grown man of thirty-seven’.15 Nonetheless, as we have
already seen, the French Revolution and its aftermath in London
were to have a remarkable effect on a great many people in Europe.
In 1789 many liberals in England had looked optimistically to
the early events of the French Revolution, but on 1 February 1793
France declared war on Britain. This conflict was to last – with one
brief intermission – 22 years, and between the summers of 1793
and 1794 Paris ran red with the blood of the Terror.
Blake issued seventeen copies of the collection in 1794. The
following year, he printed several more complete copies of Songs

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 divine images

of Experience, although from then on he almost always issued it

alongside Songs of Innocence (despite occasionally printing separate
copies of Innocence until 1818). In contrast to the earlier publica-
tion, Experience was always colour printed or hand-coloured, with
some of those, particularly of the combined Songs of Innocence and
of Experience, being very richly illuminated. When he issued the
combined Songs, Blake added a title page with the additional
heading, ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’.
Although Songs of Innocence had been intended as a complete and
discrete work, it was clear that from 1794 onwards Blake now
conceived many of the songs from the two volumes to be read in
conjunction, neither one alone capable of offering a complete
view of mankind.
This contrary, and complementary, vision is frequently
reflected in the repetition of titles across both volumes, such as
‘The Chimney Sweeper’ or ‘Holy Thursday’. In the most famous
pairing, the titles relate to each other as the clear opposites of ‘The
Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’. While the former has become the more
famous of the two, despite being overshadowed, in many ways
‘The Lamb’ is an archetypal song of innocence:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!

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 Lambeth and Experience

Songs of Innocence and

of Experience (1794),
Copy F, Plate
32, frontispiece,
colour-printed relief
etching with pen
and watercolour
on paper.

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee. (e8–9)

149
 divine images

The apparently conventional imagery that links together child,

lamb and Christ in the song is handled with what Marsh points
out is a beautiful simplicity, as a conversation between child
and lamb: the child is talking to the lamb, asking the question
(‘who made thee’) before providing an answer in the second
stanza.16 Significantly, while the poem could be read as an
example of anthropomorphism, strictly speaking this is not
entirely the case: Christ becomes both child and lamb, Godhead
entering into all things. Blake’s own view of divine humanism
prob­ably would find little to object to in the anthropomorphism
of the natural world, but he was also happy to see divinity
infused throughout that world, as in ‘The Little Black Boy’ in
Innocence.
The nature of the divine is approached much more ambigu-
ously in ‘The Tyger’, one of Blake’s best-known works:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

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 Lambeth and Experience

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (e24–5)

The popularity of ‘The Tyger’, unlike much of Blake’s other

work, began during his lifetime. The poem was reprinted in
Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs (1806), translated
by Henry Crabb Robinson for the Vaterländisches Museum (1811),
and appeared in Alan Cunningham’s Life shortly after Blake’s
death. Charles Lamb thought it ‘glorious’, and Dorothy and William
Wordsworth copied the poem along with several other of Blake’s
songs into a commonplace book, although William Beckford made
a note in his copy of Malkin that the lines of Blake’s verse were
stolen ‘from the walls of bedlam’. Many readers have been per-
plexed by the poem, despite the fact that it is often anthologized in
collections of children’s verse such as the Oxford Book of Poetry for
Children. Similarly, plenty of critics have drawn attention to the
incongruities between the forceful, sublime text and the rather
domestic example of a tiger included in the illustration to this Song
of Experience, looking for all the world like a stuffed toy.
The rhythm of the ‘The Tyger’ is relentless, and the constant
repetition of words such as ‘what’ function as hammer blows,
pounding away at the stanzas in an act of ruthless creation. The
question of who is responsible for this creation is one of the

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fundamental reasons for the perplexity of the poem, and Stanley

Fish in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980) took great pleasure in
providing two equally forceful, equally clear examples of readings
of the text by Kathleen Raine and E. D. Hirsch that demonstrated
completely opposing answers to the question ‘Did he who
made the Lamb make thee?’ Ronald Paulson believed, by con-
trast, that this question was only superficially to do with the act
of creation, and of God’s justice and mercy: on a deeper level, it
was concerned with the conflicting experiences of the French
Revolution.17 Certainly, the events of the Revolution, especially
the Terror, appear to have influenced Blake’s verse, but the lines
that precede the question are an allusion to the Book of Job
(‘Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth . . .
When the morning stars sang together’) and Book vi of Milton’s
Paradise Lost. Blake reacts strongly to the political situation of
his day, but for him to reflect on the world about us is not to
choose between ‘real’ and ‘spiritual’ life – rather, that real world
reveals itself as simultaneously one of the spirit when viewed with
imagination.
By 1794 the events of the Revolution and the war between
Britain and France were at the forefront of most people’s thoughts.
After a period of enthusiasm in Paris following the fall of the
Bastille, tensions had increased throughout 1790 and 1791. Factions
in the French National Assembly were also beginning to form,
between those who supported a constitutional monarchy along
the lines of that in Britain and a radical group known as the
Jacobins who spread their ideas throughout the country. It was
against the backdrop of these conditions that Louis xvi attempted
to flee the country, being arrested at Varennes on 21 July 1791. As
France declared war on Austria, Prussia and then Britain, waves
of violence and massacres shook the French capital in September
1792. Attempts to find a constitutional compromise failed and on 21
January 1793 Louis Capet, no longer king of France, was executed

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 Lambeth and Experience

in Paris and the country became a republic. Many features of

government had now passed to the Committee of Public Safety,
dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, and for a year the Terror
was instituted in an attempt to suppress counter-revolutionaries
at home and ensure support for the war abroad. The Jacobins were
able to avoid defeat and expand the military capabilities of France,
but Robespierre was now accusing many former companions of
being counter-revolutionaries and on 27 July 1794 the Thermidorian
Reaction saw his arrest and execution.
Fear of revolution in Britain led the government of William
Pitt to a loyalist reaction, first felt in Scotland where a series of
sensational trials for seditious libel took place in 1793, resulting in
draconian sentences against Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer.
Historians are divided about the extent of the British govern-
ment’s reaction: figures such as Boyd Hilton (2007) see this period
as an extension of the coercive powers of the state, while Edward
Royle (2000) has argued that it was a reasonable reaction to a gen-
uine threat.18 In 1794, as members of the London Corresponding
Society called for an English Convention, Pitt suspended habeas
corpus and ordered the arrest of its leading members, as well as
those of the Society for Constitutional Information. The radical
Thomas Paine had already fled the country at the end of 1793, and
although the three men finally brought to trial were acquitted
there could be no doubt that Britain was a dangerous place for
those with radical sympathies.
It was against such a context that Blake composed and pub-
lished another of his most famous poems, ‘London’:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

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 divine images

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I heart

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse (e26–7)

As we have already seen, the final stanza of the poem does not
refer to some abstract horror but the very real social problem of
child prostitution that existed in London at that time and would
remain for much of the nineteenth century. In four simple stanzas,
Blake encapsulates the despair of such existence and also the
oppressive atmosphere of a city at war. For E. P. Thompson,
‘London’ is ‘among the most lucid and instantly available of the
Songs of Experience’.19 As he and several critics have pointed out,
the drafts of the poem in the notebook show how Blake was respond-
ing very directly to the events of his day. Thus the ‘mind-forg’d
manacles’ were originally ‘german forged links’, a reference to the
Hanoverian dynasty of George iii and the billeting of Hessian
mercenaries in London to maintain order in the capital. Similarly,
the change of ‘dirty street’ and ‘dirty Thames’ to ‘charter’d’ was
a direct allusion to Paine who, in Rights of Man, had argued that
charters granting liberties actually worked by taking away the
intrinsic rights of the people so that they could be permitted only
by those in power.

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 Lambeth and Experience

In the end, however, it is cruelties against the young that pro-

vide much of the anger in Songs of Experience, an anger that
contrasts so clearly with the blissful state of childhood in Innocence.
If the earlier collection had been a golden Arcadian vision,
Experience depicts the city of dreadful night that London could
become at the turn of the nineteenth century. ‘Holy Thursday’ in
the later collection refers to ‘Babes reduced to misery’, and one of
the most significant elements of Songs of Experience is how it depicts
innocence corrupted by those who should be its protectors. In some
cases that corruption was already implicit in Songs of Innocence.
The version of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ that appears in Experience
makes explicit the sense of anger at injustice that had been left
unsaid in its companion song in Innocence. It could be argued that
the clarity of this wrath removes some of the complexities of the
earlier poem, replacing it with more straightforward denunciation
that exemplifies Blake’s outrage towards his contemporary
society:

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,

They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery. (e23)

Chimney sweeping as an apprenticeship was increasingly

rejected during the late eighteenth century, and in 1788 the
Chimney Sweepers Act was passed, restricting the ability to recruit
apprentices. However, professional sweeps continued to use their
own children to climb the narrow chimneys (made even dirtier by
the increased use of coal), and the practice of sending children up
chimneys was made illegal only in 1864.20 As such, while the poem
ends with a general denunciation of God, priest and king who
allow such atrocities, the origins of the degradation lie with those
parents who seek to exploit, rather than protect, their own children.

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 divine images

Another aspect of Experience that had been absent from

Innocence was the subject of sex. In many respects, the sexuality
of Experience is loss, rape, restriction and fear. This is not to say
that Blake saw sex as something intrinsically sinful: rather, from
his early poetry onwards, desire when freely expressed was an
essential part of our humanity. ‘A Little Girl Lost’, for example,
begins with the lines:

Children of the future Age,

Reading this indignant page;
Know that in a former time,
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime. (e29)

As with several of his contemporaries, notably William Godwin

and Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake believed that it was the treatment
of sexuality as a crime and its repression that led to future perver-
sions. One of his Proverbs of Hell made the point pithily: ‘He who
desires but acts not, breeds pestilence’ (e35). While the causes of
such repression were manifold, including social, familial and
political power relations, unsurprisingly Blake identified religion
as the main root of this distortion of human desire, as in ‘The
Garden of Love’:

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

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 Lambeth and Experience

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. (e26)

The contrast with the Songs of Innocence is a powerful one: play,

love and the green are all elements of a past that has not been
superseded as a natural consequence of development and growth.
They have, rather, been vandalized, suppressed by the grim com-
mand ‘Thou shalt not’ (which also, significantly, breaks the rhythm
of the poem). If it is sometimes possible to read Songs of Experience
as a necessary corrective to the ignorance of Songs of Innocence, that
is not at all the case here: the destruction of the Garden of Love
is, rather, its own form of wilful ignorance and there is nothing
but a sense of lament for what has been lost.
The consequences of repression finding expression in per-
versity is the theme of one of Blake’s most powerful, and most
famous, lyrics, ‘The Sick Rose’:

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy. (e25)

These two short stanzas have attracted considerable critical com-

ment. Jon Mee, following Northrop Frye’s observation that the
poem was one of those few lyrics that was popular because it
provides a direct key to poetic experience for educated and

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 divine images

uneducated alike, notes that it is a poem that appeals to genera-

tions of readers in an intensely personal way.21 Critics such as
Michael Srigley have pointed out that the sickness caused by the
‘invisible worm’ is that of the transmission of disease, but Elizabeth
Lang­land warns against traditions of prescribing how the poem
should be read, taking Harold Bloom to task, for example, for
seeing pity in the opening line where the tone may even be con-
demnation of the rose.22 Langland draws attention to the
ambiguity of the words of the poem, which do not clearly express
where guilt lies (with the rose or the worm). Yet the illustration
that accompanies the text does, it seems to me, evoke something
of the pity that Bloom expresses, with images of women falling,
many of them pursued by this invisible, rapacious power.
That sex so often brought with it death at the time Blake was
writing, whether by the plagues of sexually transmitted diseases
referred to in ‘London’, or even, as Tristanne Connolly wrote in
her book William Blake and the Body (2002), the more mundane,
but no less terrible, mortality associated with childbirth, which
made pregnancy so dangerous for Catherine Blake and killed Mary
Wollstonecraft, is an unfortunate commonplace. What is so effec-
tive about these later Songs, however, is that rather than simply
adopt another commonplace, on the sinfulness of sexuality, Blake
addressed rather the terrible wisdom that experience brought.
This wisdom, and its terrible price, would be the subject of one
of his strangest and most astonishing books, The [First] Book of
Urizen, which was a rewriting of Genesis that he had promised as
part of his Bible of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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 5
A New System of Mythology

In Book x of The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls how he heard

news of Robespierre’s death on 28 July 1794 while crossing
Morecombe Bay after visiting the grave of his schoolteacher:

I paced, a dear Companion at my side,

The Town of Arras, whence with promise high
Issued, on Delegation to sustain
Humanity and right, that Robespierre,
He who thereafter, and in how short time!
Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist Crew.1

Wordsworth, who had been at Arras to see the celebrations sur-

rounding the appointment of Maximilien Robespierre to the
Estates General, recollected that in the space of five years his
feelings of early enthusiasm for the Revolution had become the
experience of the folly of such hopes. Ruth Scurr, in her biogra-
phy of the leader of the Committee of Public Safety, remarks that
Wordsworth misunderstood Robespierre completely and that he
was anything but an atheist.2 Nonetheless, it is easy to see why,
by the standards of the time, Wordsworth should have thought so.
The dechristianization of France under the Revolutionaries had
resulted in the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy by which

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clerics were subordinated to the national government, while a

significant number of prominent revolutionaries were outright
atheists or deists. It was against these figures, such as Jacques
Hébert or Anacharsis Cloots, that Robespierre implemented the
Cult of the Supreme Being, which was inaugurated at a festival
on 8 June 1794, mere weeks before his death. Although often
described as deist – that is, the belief in a rational creator who does
not intervene in creation – Robespierre’s beliefs were more com-
plex, incorporating a belief in the immortality of the human soul as
a means to cultivate rational behaviour in support of civic virtue.
The festival, organized by Jacques-Louis David, took place on the
Champ de Mars where a huge, artificial mountain was erected.
Robespierre presided over an event at which he proclaimed the

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supreme utility of his new faith, by means of which he was also

able to purge the more radical Jacobins pressing for even greater
equality and redistribution of wealth.
Although Blake himself did not comment directly upon the
Cult of the Supreme Being – nor, indeed, give more than the brief-
est mention of Robespierre in his writings – nonetheless the events
of the summer of 1794 appear to have had a profound influence
on his development of Urizen, the ‘mistaken Demon’ who began
to appear in his illuminated books at the time of the Terror. While
contemporaries such as Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth
increasingly disapproved of what they saw as Jacobin irreligion, it
was Blake who provided the most extensive critique of the ration-
alist religion of Robespierre and his fellows in a series of works
sometimes referred to as the Urizen books. As Robert Maniquis
has observed, ‘those with an unshakeable religious belief in trad­
itional concepts of good and evil easily accounted for and
condemned the French Terror. This was not so easy for philo-
sophical radicals and rationalist dissenters.’3 This was certainly
the case for Blake, who wished to account for the reasons why
the promise of the Revolution had turned to terror, but also to
understand the roots of its attacks on established religion. While
figures such as Edmund Burke saw the Revolution as the epitome
of irreligion, Blake instead gradually came to view its failures as
the inability to rise above the corrupting influence of power, best
exemplified as priestcraft, which was all too evident in Robespierre’s
assumption of the role of high priest in a cult of reason. Unlike
Wordsworth, who would increasingly turn his back on his early
revolutionary politics, Blake did not believe that revolutionaries
in France – or, indeed, English radicals such as Thomas Paine, who
G. Texier, The would publish the first part of his assault on conventional religion,
Festival of the Supreme The Age of Reason, in 1794 – were simply atheists. As he wrote in
Being, 1794, intaglio
engraving, hand- his copy of Bishop Watson’s answer to Paine, An Apology for the
coloured on paper. Bible, ‘It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines

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 divine images

attack but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible’ (e611).
Paine’s fault, for Blake, was that in coming over to the Devil’s
party and seeking the overthrow of 1,800 years of false religion
(the dream of Enitharmon in Europe a Prophecy) he had forgotten
that such an overthrow had also been the ambition of Jesus in his
opposition to the priestcraft of the Sadducees and Pharisees and
the statecraft of imperial Rome. Paine, then, was half right: in the
words of E. P. Thompson, Paine had understood the failings of
the Moral Law, but had not yet discovered the Everlasting
Gospel.4
In his three final Lambeth books – The [First] Book of Urizen,
The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los – William Blake created
part of the Bible of Hell, which, in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, he had promised the world ‘whether they will it or no’ (e44).
Much of the critique of conventional religion to be found in these
three books would be familiar to Paine and other self-styled deists,
yet Blake’s poetry is so oblique and strange that his attacks on
the Church of his day are frequently misunderstood. At the same
time that he was working on these illuminated books, he made
prints of figures such as Newton and Nebuchadnezzar that are
widely recognized as some of the most profoundly imaginative
condemnations of political and religious oppression ever to have
been created.
One reason for the strangeness of Blake’s mythology is his
early fascination with antiquarian historians and mythographers
and their obsession with what we would call comparative religion
today. Since his apprenticeship with Basire, Blake regularly read
and was commissioned for antiquarian writers who sought to
explain the development of religion in pseudo-historiographical
terms. Such texts proliferated during the Enlightenment era, each
of them seeking to explain how the ancient tribes of Israel might
have emigrated across Europe or how the Druids and Jews were
one and the same, but one book will suffice as an example: in 1774

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 A New System of Mythology

Jacob Bryant published his A New System; or, An analysis of ancient

mythology. Bryant, who had been born in Plymouth and was
eventually awarded a lucrative post on the Board of Ordnance that
allowed him to pursue his antiquarian studies, tried to recon­cile
all the mythologies of the world with Hebrew scripture. According
to his system, Ham, the son of Noah, was father to the most ener-
getic – but also the most rebellious – of the descendants of the
original inhabitants of earth after the Flood, and his descendants,
the Cuthites, had spread across Europe, creating great but also
barbaric pagan civilizations in their wake. It was Steven Svatik
who first, in 1969, explored the influence of Bryant on Blake’s
thought, which began when Basire was commissioned to illus-
trate A New System. At least one of the images included in the book,
an engraving of Noah’s Ark in the third volume of Bryant’s work,
was made by Blake, and this moon-shaped ark would feature
regularly in the later illuminated books.5
The figures of Urizen, Ahania, Los, Enitharmon and Orc
appear strange, yet their roots lie in the attempts by antiquarians
such as Bryant to try and reconcile the world’s mythological sys-
tems with Hebrew scripture. Even as respected a figure as Isaac
Newton would attempt the same thing in his The Chronology of the
Ancient Kingdoms Amended, which was published posthumously
in 1728. What was different about Blake was that he did so in a
clearly imaginative and poetic fashion, inventing his deities or
Eternals, as he preferred to call them, fashioning a new system of
mythology. This system was not intended to force the reader into
rational agreement with a manifesto of (often spuriously) argued
historical facts, but rather to lead them on to a different spiritual
enlightenment where they would invent their own gods, thus not
merely rendering priestcraft ineffective but avoiding the lure of a
new cult of the supreme being of reason.

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 divine images

The Bible of Hell

Even today, The [First] Book of Urizen remains one of the most
astonishing of Blake’s works, an overt reworking of the Book
of Genesis that is utterly audacious in its ambition. Everything
about this book, from its unsettling illustrations to its format that
echoes the conventions of the Bible to its production history,
makes this a truly remarkable work, almost unlike any other ever
made. As we have already seen with regard to Songs of Innocence
and of Experience, Blake was not averse to experimenting with the
format of his printed books, moving poems to different positions
and colouring plates differently to change readers’ perceptions.
In Urizen, however, he deliberately undermines the fixed nature
of the book at a fundamental level that is without precedent in
Western art. Of the 28 plates produced for Urizen, only copies
A and B contain them all, and even then in a different order,
this variation being repeated in copies E and F. As Paul Mann
observes, Urizen is ‘a book about books’, while Jason Snart follows
W.J.T. Mitchell in observing that the ‘composite art’ on display
in this book is there to destabilize the reader’s certainties and
convictions – not least in deciding what the actual order of plates
should be.6 If the Bible is the book that is meant to determine all
meaning, according to conventional religion, and if Urizen con-
stantly attempts to pin down that meaning in his books of brass,
the better to establish the dictates of his law, then what better
way to destroy that power than by writing a book that cannot be
fixed and ordered: this is Blake’s Bible of Hell.
In the copies printed in the 1790s, Blake included the word
The First Book of
First in his title, although by 1818, when he printed copy G, this Urizen (1794),
had been dropped. It may be that, as with Milton, the title page Copy C, Plate 1,
indicated that this was intended as part of a longer work, the title page, relief
etching, colour
plans for which changed during composition. It is also possible printed with hand
that the title was a satirical jab at the Bible itself, with elements colouring on paper.

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such as the first and second Book of Kings; this is also possible
as The Book of Ahania, which he completed the following year,
works almost directly as a sequel to some of the events included
in The [First] Book of Urizen. That the book is intended to be
read satirically when dealing with religion is clear from its open-
ing Preludium:

Of the primeval Priests assum’d power,

When Eternals spurn’d back his religion;
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.
Eternals I hear your call gladly,
Dictate swift winged words, & fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment. (e70)

Urizen, who had first appeared in Visions of the Daughters of

Albion but more substantially as the enemy of Orc in America a
Prophecy, is introduced in the work bearing his own name in the
most remarkable fashion:

Lo, a shadow of horror is risen

In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon
Hath form’d this abominable void
This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? – Some said
‘It is Urizen’, But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid. (1.1–7, e70)

This creature is very different to the bearded Ancient of Days by

means of which he is usually presented in Blake’s works; rather,
he appears as a form worthy of Milton’s hell, where from the
eternal fires ‘No light, but rather darkness visible / Serv’d onely
to discover sights of woe’ (2.62–4). Urizen is a parody of the

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 A New System of Mythology

creator god, struggling with a chaotic, amorphous world of matter

in which ‘beast, bird, fish, serpent & element’ merge and fight to
take shape. This is a double parody, for not only is Blake’s work
using the creation of the world as presented in Genesis ironically,
but there is no need for this abominable act to take place at all:
while Urizen seeks to assert control over the horrors he has called
into existence, his fellow Eternals stand around in bemusement,
wondering why he has set himself this despairing task when the
universe already exists. Urizen’s answer is that he seeks ‘for a joy
without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation’ (4.10–11, e71) –
for, ultimately, a world without death, not realizing that all things
are intimately tied to their contraries. Urizen, sitting alone with
his ‘Book / Of eternal brass’, cannot endure change and so is
reduced to a state of death-in-life, one dominated by ‘One com-
mand, one joy, one desire . . . One King, one God, one Law’
(4.38–40, e72).
It is in Urizen that one of these Eternals, Los, is properly
introduced to us, rather than as a secondary character as in Europe
(following the current conventions for dating The Book of Los and
The Song of Los as having been produced after The Book of Urizen).
Los appears in chapter three, after another remarkable scene of
false creation, in this case of a black globe, the ‘vast world of
Urizen’ (5.37, e73),which shuts him off from the other Eternals
and, in dreadful irony considering his search for joy without
pain, for life without death, condemns him both to agony, mad-
ness and the shadow of death. For those used to the noble, calm
figure of Los the prophet who appears in the later illuminated
books, this first appearance of the Eternal who will serve as Blake’s
alter ego comes as something of a shock:

Los wept howling around the dark Demon:

And cursing his lot; for in anguish,
Urizen was rent from his side;

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 divine images

The First Book of

Urizen, Copy C,
Plate 7, title page,
relief etching,
colour printed with
hand colouring on
paper.

And a fathomless void for his feet;

And intense fires for his dwelling. (6.2–6, e73–4)

Rather than the quietly heroic figure who guides Albion from
death in Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, in The Book
of Urizen Los is an agonized individual, full of terror and appar-
ently resentful of his task to watch over Urizen who, it appears,
has been created from him. One characteristic that is established
even at this early stage, however, is Los’s profession: he is a

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 A New System of Mythology

The First Book of

Urizen, Copy C,
Plate 8, title page,
relief etching,
colour printed with
hand colouring on
paper.

blacksmith, one who labours at his furnaces to give form to his

fellow eternal who, utterly unconscious now and trapped in deathly
stillness, is in danger of losing all identity completely. To complete
his labours, Los begins one of the most gruesome examples of a
creation myth ever to be written:

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 A New System of Mythology

5. Restless turnd the immortal inchain’d

Heaving dolorous! Anguish’d! unbearable
Till a roof shaggy wild inclos’d
In an orb, his fountain of thought.

6. In a horrible dreamful slumber;

Like the linked infernal chain;
A vast Spine writh’d in torment
Upon the winds; shooting pain’d
Ribs, like a bending cavern
And bones of solidness, froze
Over all his nerves of joy.
And a first Age passed over,
And a state of dismal woe.

7. From the caverns of his jointed Spine,

Down sunk with fright a red
Round globe hot burning deep
Deep down into the Abyss:
Panting: Conglobing, Trembling
Shooting out ten thousand branches
Around his solid bones.
And a second Age passed over,
And a state of dismal woe. (10.31–11.9, e75–6)

Having completed this terrible labour, Los unsurprisingly shrinks

back, appalled by his handiwork just as Victor Frankenstein with-
The First Book of draws from his own creation. In this instance, however, Los also
Urizen, Copy C,
Plate 9, title page, realizes that the act of giving form to Urizen has closed him into
relief etching, the fallen world, limited him to an existence of five senses cut off
colour printed from the other Eternals. In anguish, his body begins to divide
with hand
colouring once more, another parody of the Book of Genesis: instead of
on paper. God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, Enitharmon is formed

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from a globe of blood, branching out into fibrous roots and ‘All
Eternity shudderd at sight / Of the first female now separate’
(18.9–10, e78). While those Eternals flee in horror from this scene
(and, it must be admitted, every act of creation in The Book of
Urizen appears grotesque to a lesser or greater degree), Los pities
her and embraces her, a sexual act that ends with the birth of a
child Orc. This primal family scene, here taking place in a kind of
hell rather than the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve
were expelled, is one of the most clearly Oedipal in all of Blake’s
works: suffering jealousy towards Enitharmon’s love for her child,
Los forms a chain from his own body with which to bind his son.
These descriptions form a dreadful parody of the creation of
the world and of the first man and first woman. They are an utterly
astonishing reworking of the first chapters of Genesis and are
accompanied by truly incredible images. A number of the illumi-
nated plates are images with no accompanying text, such as that
depicting Urizen drowning in the waters of the material world he
has created, or him weeping as he is chained in the dark, cavern-
ous world he has called into existence. Others depict the horror
of the creation of the fallen human form, as when Los cries out
amid the flames of his furnace when he sees the dead, shrivelled
body of Urizen that he must bring to life, or leans forwards in
agony, a globe of blood forming the embryo from which Enitharmon
will be born. These images are abominable, horrific and utterly
sublime, a truly catastrophic attempt to envisage the world as a
fallen disaster calling out for revolution. The book ends with a final
parody of Genesis as Urizen, setting out to explore the world in
which he finds himself as a demiurge, enslaves his own children
until at last one of them, Fuzon, rises up to lead his siblings to
freedom:

So Fuzon call’d all together

The remaining children of Urizen:

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 A New System of Mythology

And they left the pendulous earth:

They called it Egypt, & left it. (28.19–22, e83)

The [First] Book of Urizen was the most ambitious project of

Blake’s new mythology by 1794; while he would attempt to
supersede it with The Four Zoas, at this stage he provided a com-
plex, often obscure, but also fairly coherent cosmology. The first
stage of understanding his bizarre world is to realize that there are
at times close parallels between Urizen and the Book of Genesis,
particularly as the creation of the world is refracted through
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thus the interactions of Los and Enitharmon
in the fallen globe of Urizen’s world is a parody of the creation of
Eve in the Garden of Eden, while Urizen’s attempts to remove
himself from the Eternals reflect the war in heaven after which
Satan is cast out by Messiah into hell. The work then ends with a
final parody of the closing chapters of Genesis where Joseph leads
his brothers into Egypt, foreshadowing the story of Moses and
the exodus out of bondage. Blake’s telling is often obscure, nearly
always horrific, but unlike some of the other Lambeth Prophecies,
such as Europe a Prophecy or The Song of Los, he anchors his story
in one that is much more familiar to create a highly allegorical
account of the creation and fall of man.
What that story means is considerably more difficult to ascer-
tain: Northrop Frye argued convincingly that the purpose of Urizen
and its companion books, Ahania and Los, was to use imagination
to demonstrate the falsity of a Newtonian view of the universe as
‘a vast collection of particles held together automatically by an
unconscious power’,7 a view of the cosmos he equated with deism.
Mitchell draws attention to the complexity of the work, how it is
designed with ‘many more dividing, compartmentalizing elements
than we find in the earlier Lambeth books’,8 a complexity that is
increased when we consider that readers of Blake’s originals would
have also had to contend with unstable, different copies with

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plates in different orders. It is a revolutionary epic not merely in

its subject matter – a rewrite of Genesis via Milton – but also its
form: the reader is not given the single path of truth but instead
must allow their senses to expand, to be infused with the creative
impulse that will allow them to see the universe in an entirely new
fashion. Blake’s boldness is not to show the cosmos anew, but to
furnish the reader with the tools of creation (rather like Los’s
hammer and forge) by means of which they can make that cosmos
in their imagination. Eron, drawing upon the interpretation that
Urizen deals with the creation of humanity at the moment of the
fall and is thus a radical critique of ‘our standards of both divine
and artistic creation’, describes it as a story of how both god and
man allowed themselves to fall into blindness and obscurity.9
The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los are much shorter works
than The Book of Urizen. Ahania comprises six plates, two of which
are a frontispiece and a title page, while The Book of Los consists
of five plates (again, with a title page and frontispiece). It may
have been that these were always intended as shorter additions to
the first of the Urizen books, but it is also likely that, after the effort
of producing The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake was beginning to
realize that the potential audience for his illuminated prophecies
was very small and so was conserving energies for other tasks.
Ahania tells the story of Fuzon, the son of Urizen introduced in
the previous volume, who has taken on the role of Moses to lead
the other children of Urizen to freedom. In Ahania he now assumes
the characteristics of Orc, rebelling against his father and making
explicit the relationship between Orc and Urizen that has been
at least implicit since the very beginning:

Shall we worship this Demon of smoke,

Said Fuzon, this abstract non-entity
This cloudy God seated on waters
Now seen, now obscur’d; King of sorrow? (2.10–14, e84)

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 A New System of Mythology

These words could easily have been spoken by Orc in America,

and yet the ambivalence of Blake’s attitudes towards Fuzon are
much clearer in this work. When Fuzon thinks he has killed his
father, his first response is: ‘I am God, said he, eldest of things!’
(3.38, e86). Revolution has become repression, and when Urizen
rises from his living death to slay his son with a serpent before
nailing him to a tree in a parody of the crucifixion, Fuzon has
become an object of contempt. This is the point where Blake’s
ambivalence towards Christianity is at its greatest: this may
indeed be the case in the bitter representation of Christ, but it is
just as likely that Blake’s bitterness remains, as it always was,
towards those misrepresentations of the divine that manifested
themselves as much in Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being
as in conventional religion.
Ahania, Fuzon’s mother, wails around the tree of her son, a
repetition of the primal Oedipal scene that will be re-enacted again
and again with Los, Enitharmon and Orc. In The Book of Los, how-
ever, what we are presented with is not this family tragedy that
had been introduced in Urizen but, rather, another recreation
event, this time to fix Los himself into the world:

Then aloft his head rear’d in the Abyss

And his downward-borne fall. chang’d oblique
Many ages of groans: till there grew
Branchy forms. organizing the
Human Into finite inflexible organs. (4.41–5, e92)

In The Book of Los, as in The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake

combines two parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost into one: the creation
of man and the fall of Satan into hell. Unlike most creation myths,
Blake is very clear that there is a world prior to this, that Urizen
first and Los after him are fashioning inferior versions of the
universe, limiting their perceptions and their actions. The book

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ends with Los in this fallen world, creating a sun to illuminate the
day, while Urizen, still prone, cannot awake from this living
nightmare.
With The Book of Los and The Song of Los, Blake concluded
two incredible mythological cycles, one which sought to offer a
visionary history of the world, the other a retelling of the Bible
and Milton as a fall into error. These Lambeth Prophecies as a
whole represent one of the most startling sets of imaginative sto-
rytelling ever created: in the twenty-first century we are used to
writers, artists and film-makers engaging in world making as a
task that all artists do, but when Blake was creating his cosmos of
Urizen and Orc, Los and Enitharmon, he had little in the way of
guidance. In addition to the ambition of his myth-making, Blake
was doing so via a medium that had not been used to present sto-
ries in this way since the medieval ages, creating illuminated
books that challenged readers’ expectations via their form as well
as their words. The lack of an audience was not helped by Blake’s
own struggles to master his material, and it was clear that the
attempt to tell the story of his Eternals was full of dead ends and
false leads. Fuzon who, as a parody of Moses and Christ, offers a
clear satire on Blake’s vision of the ways in which both Old and
New Testaments had been corrupted, does not appear again after
The Book of Ahania. Blake did not abandon his other characters:
they were still important to him in terms of making sense of the
political and religious milieu of his day without succumbing to
the systems and beliefs of others. He would continue to work at
and reshape them over the following years, to try and tell their
story in a more coherent form. In the process of doing so, his
Eternals would take on a new name: the Zoas. Even then he would
struggle to present them in a form that found an easy audience,
but in so naming them he gave them a life that would eventually
give them a readership far beyond the limitations of his day.

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Experiments in Colour Printing

During his time at Lambeth, Blake’s experiments with printing

extended beyond his illuminated books. At the same time that he
was working on The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, he also
produced what the editors of the Blake Archive call some of ‘his
greatest works as a pictorial artist’: the large colour prints. These
images, which include his depiction of Newton looking down at
the abstract drawing he is measuring with a compass, a good and an
evil angel struggling for possession of a child, and Nebuchadnezzar
staring out, wild-eyed, at the viewer, his face and body covered
with bestial hair, easily include some of the most famous that Blake
ever produced. Martin Butlin described them as ‘the first really
mature individual works in the visual arts that Blake produced’
and ‘probably the most accomplished, forceful and effective of
Blake’s works’.10 Along with his illustration of the Ancient of Days,
which formed the preface to Europe a Prophecy, and the print better
known as Glad Day, but now usually referred to by the inscription
on the back, Albion Rose, these form a collection of Blake’s most
famous images that for most people define his status as an artist.
The subjects are drawn from a variety of sources: the Bible, Milton
and Shakespeare, as well as his own personal mythology.
Before considering three of these in greater detail, it is worth
considering the technique that he employed for eleven of the
twelve designs. One of them, God Judging Adam, appears to have
been printed from a copperplate etching in relief, similar to the
means by which he produced his illuminated books, but the others
followed a highly innovative form. Frederick Tatham described
the process of their production to Gilchrist for his biography,
explaining that Blake

took a common thick millboard, and drew in some strong ink

or colour his design upon it strong and thick. He then painted

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upon that in such oil colours and in such a state of fusion that
they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that
no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that
on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours,
re-painting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to
take another print. This plan he had recourse to, because he
could vary slightly each impression; and each having a sort
of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each
one different. The accidental look they had was very enticing.
(Life i.431)

Once the main impression of the image was made on paper,

Blake would then work this up with watercolours and ink, and
there are at least two distinct printing sessions when he made these
large colour prints: one in 1795 and another using the same designs
in 1805 (during which time he may also have returned to some of
the original impressions to rework them). The ‘accidental look’
to which Tatham refers is one of the more astonishing features of
this collection of prints, bearing many similarities to the technique
used by some of the Surrealists in the early twentieth century and
known as ‘decalcomania’. That process, which was only named in
the mid-nineteenth century but was invented in the 1750s, involved
creating a transfer that could be applied to other surfaces such as
porcelain (called decals today). Blake may have been completely
unaware of this process, but his own technique, drawing on mill-
board and then pressing paper across the wet ink or colour, is very
similar to that by means of which Max Ernst or Óscar Domínguez
produced the fluid backgrounds to some of their works.
Joseph Viscomi corrects some of the technical details of
Tatham’s account, observing that gum- and glue-based colours
are used for monotype printing, which creates unusual textured
effects via printing from smooth surfaces such as glass or stone –
or, indeed, Blake’s millboard sealed with glue size or gesso, chalk

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or whiting mixed with size and painted over the board to create
a white surface.11 It was McManus and Townsend, working on
microscopic samples taken from the Tate’s collection of the large
colour prints, who established they had been printed with gum-
based pigments, which although sharing some similarities with
the techniques that Blake employed in some of his watercolours,
were layered so thickly that they created the serendipitous pat-
terning – what Tatham called an ‘accidental look’ and which
Blake considered so enticing.12
It is this mottled effect that so catches the reader’s eye in the
most widely reproduced of all the large colour prints, Newton.
In this image, a highly idealized version of the mathematician
sits naked upon a rock, a robe thrown across one shoulder as he
reaches forwards to measure an abstract pattern drawn upon a
white scroll before him. Isaac Newton had appeared briefly in
Europe, where he had blown the trumpet that announced the mil-
lennial end of the old order, but throughout the late 1790s and into
the nineteenth century Newton would come to take on a more
significant role in Blake’s works. In Milton a Poem he appears a
number of times and the first mention of him provides a signifi-
cant insight into why Blake started to view the astronomer and
mathematician as a troubling figure:

O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the

Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day &
night?
Art thou not Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of
Locke
To Mortals thy Mills seem every thing (4.9–12, e98)

The reference to the pantocrator is an unusual one for most

modern readers. While we tend to know Newton as the man

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who formulated the rules of gravity and separated light into the Newton, 1795–
c. 1805, colour
colours of the spectrum, he was a figure as much concerned with
printing with
theology as he was science. In an appendix to the second edition watercolour
of the Principia mathematica in 1713, Newton addressed how the and pen and
ink on paper.
universe had come into being:

This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets,

could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intel-
ligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers
of other like systems, these, being form’d by the like wise
counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially
since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the
light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all

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the other systems. And lest the systems of the fixed Stars
should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath
placed those Systems at immense distances from one another.13

Newton called this intelligent and powerful being ‘Lord God

Pantokrator, or Universal Ruler’ and stated that, in contrast to the
typical conceptions of a personal god, this perfect deity had com-
plete power and complete knowledge but did not intervene in the
affairs of his creation: rather, he had established those perfect rules
by which the universe could function from ‘Eternity to Eternity’.
This understanding of the divine, an impersonal, all-powerful
deity who set in motion the wheels of the universe, would become
increasingly identified with Blake as deism. That Newton himself,
like Locke, avoided the term – in public at least – was irrelevant
to Blake: these two giants of British intellectual life had defined
the science, politics and philosophy of the country throughout the
eighteenth century. For Blake, they also defined the religious atti-
tudes of the elite: God had set the universe in motion just so, and
thus it was in accordance with his preordained laws of nature that
the world operated according to its apparent injustices. For Blake,
such an attitude became increasingly detestable for a society
caught in the throes of revolution.
Deism is identified by Blake in his later works with Urizen and
with Satan (a very different take from his attitudes towards devils
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Urizen, the ‘mistaken Demon
of Heaven’, is a false creator in The Book of Urizen, and it is evident
that Blake’s developing conflict with Newton is as much to do
with his notions of religion as science. In a letter to Thomas Butts
dated 22 November 1802, Blake includes a poem that ends: ‘May
God us keep / From Single Vision & Newtons sleep’ (e722). The
imposition of a particular way of looking at the world – literally
in the case of Newton’s Opticks, metaphorically in the Principia
– is reflected in his view of divinity. As Richard Westfall observes:

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 divine images

‘The concept of pantocrator caught Newton’s imagination and

held it. The word appeared repeatedly throughout the theologi-
cal papers from his final years. Autocrat over all that is.’14 From
his very first illuminated books to his final poems, Blake rejects
the notion of an all-powerful deity out there, preferring instead the
god of the human imagination, the divine image of mercy, pity,
peace and love rather than the all-powerful pantocrator of deism.
Leo Damrosch is correct to point out that for all Blake ‘criticized
Newton’s assumptions as reductive, he nevertheless had a gener-
ous admiration for Newton’s genius’.15 But then, Blake had a
particular appreciation for Satan – and not as the revolutionary
voice of the Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a paint-
ing for Thomas Butts, executed around 1805, Blake depicts Satan
in his Original Glory with the caption ‘Thou was Perfect till
Iniquity was Found in Thee’. Newton too is perfect – too per-
fect: self-regarding, sure that he has discovered all the secrets of
the universe, what we may see is the moment of his fall into an
entirely self-regarding, Urizenic false creation, ignoring the nat-
ural beauties around him in preference for the closed-in void of
his mathematics.
The fame of Newton makes it one of those images by Blake
truly worthy the epithet of ‘iconic’, but other prints from the 1795
series have attracted considerable attention. His design of The
Good and Evil Angels expands upon a design presented at the
bottom of Plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which a
blue-tinged angel above water holds a child while a red-skinned
devil emerges from the flames of hell. In the earlier illuminated
book, this illustration accompanies the first plate that conveys the
voice of the Devil – in this instance, outlining the errors of con-
ventional religion in separating body and soul and concluding:
‘Energy is Eternal Delight’. This conflict between body and soul
is apparent in the later print, and yet there is something more
ambivalent, even frightening, about it: the Devil, with hair like

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that of Orc in America a Prophecy, seems blind, with staring eyeballs

that appear to terrify the child who flees to the good angel’s arms.
In the aftermath of the Terror, it is tempting to see Blake as draw-
ing back a little from his earlier, eager assertion, but it is perhaps
more accurate to observe that the Revolution arose from a failure
to marry reason and desire, heaven and hell. It was the repression
of the people’s energy under Urizenic reason that resulted in an
explosion of violence in the 1790s.
That Blake has not rejected his earlier revolutionary princi-
ples is clear from the biblical subjects that he treats in the book. In
God Judging Adam, The House of Death and Elohim Creating Adam,
Jehovah appears in all three as a bearded, despotic figure, more
akin to Blake’s critique of ‘One King, One God, One Law’ in The
Book of Urizen. The most sinister of these is that of the creation of
Adam: God floats above Adam with the titanic wings of one of
the Seraphim, his white hair a halo and his face unseeing, almost
as blind as that of the evil angel. His form is framed in a bloody
sun while dark clouds and thunders blacken the horizon: beneath
him lies Adam, groaning in torment as he is pulled unwillingly
from the earth, his body wrapped around with a coiled serpent. A
later print from near the end of Blake’s life makes it clearer how we
are to read this strange, disturbing image: in ‘Job’s Evil Dreams’
from The Book of Job, Job lies tormented in his bed while Satan
takes on the form of God, this false deity being wrapped around
with serpents. The print from 1795, then, shares much with The
Book of Urizen, depicting the God of the Old Testament as a false
demiurge who, like Urizen, forces into existence a fallen world.
The large colour prints are an astonishing series, but they
were not the only works that Blake produced during this time. As
Viscomi observes, 1795 was an annus mirabilis for Blake, seeing
him begin work on the designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts
as well as three illuminated books. The next year he was also com-
missioned by his friend Ozias Humphry to print a selection from

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his books that could be presented without words. This collection Elohim Creating
of 23 prints is now known as A Small Book of Designs and shows Adam, 1795–
c. 1805, colour
some of the innovative ways in which Blake could adapt his work printing with
for an art collector’s market even if, as was becoming quite clear, watercolour and
there was not a large audience for his prophetic works. This Small pen and ink on
paper.
Book is interesting in that it demonstrates Blake’s increasing inter-
est in experimenting with different types of production, in this
case colour printing, but no new illustrations. This was not the
case for A Large Book of Designs, a companion set to the Small
Book, which as well as reproducing plates from Thel, Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, America and Urizen, included prints from
designs originally executed as intaglio engravings, but in this

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 A New System of Mythology

instance colour-printed in a style similar to that used for Newton

and the other large colour prints. Of these two designs, ‘The
Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder’ and ‘Albion Rose’, the latter
is one of the most significant. Blake would print it a number of times
during his lifetime, and it represents his ideal vision of Albion, the
character who will come to dominate his later prophecies. In this
image, Albion appears as a kind of Vitruvian man, an ideal form
of both humanity and the country. It was previously known as
Glad Day, according to a mistaken attribution in Gilchrist, but the
inscription on the back, which was added at a later date, reads:
The Good and Evil
Angels, 1795–c. 1805, Albion rose from where he laboured at the Mill with Slaves
colour printing with
watercolour and pen Giving himself for the Nations he danc’d the dance of
and ink on paper. Eternal Death (e671)

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 divine images

We shall return to this vision of Albion and what it meant

for Blake’s conception of his country in future chapters. What is
clear in 1790 is that Blake’s new system of mythology was recre-
ating politics in ways that many of his contemporaries would have
found increasingly obscure. While the Terror had raged and then
come to a halt across the Channel, leading to greater repression
in London, Blake had begun to work in a more elliptical style,
transferring his thoughts on the events of the day into a bizarre
and strange cosmology. The poor sales of his work indicated at
the very least that he was not a particularly good salesman for
these visions, nor indeed that there was a market for them. Yet
his ambition was astonishing: the Urizen books were nothing less
than an attempt to rewrite the history of Judaeo-Christianity in a
more radical form, and if few of his contemporaries encountered
the prints of Newton or mad Nebuchadnezzar, half-bestial from
his time in the wilderness, these would become some of the most
easily recognizable images of British art.

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 6
Night Thoughts
and The Four Zoas

T he great artistic flourishing of Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies

did not, unfortunately, bring with it the kind of commercial
success that would have supported him and Catherine. From 1793
onwards the continent would be at war – with only one sustained
cessation of violence – for the next two decades, and by the late
1790s William and Catherine were beginning to suffer the kind
of exigency that threw many families into crisis in Britain. Their
personal circumstances may also have been greatly affected by
the possibility that it was Catherine who was the ‘Cathn. Blake’
listed as a patient at the British Lying-in Hospital in Holborn on
26 August 1796 (br 73). Very few particulars are recorded, sug-
gesting that the patient had suffered a miscarriage: as Bentley
observes, it is impossible to know for certain if this was the poet’s
wife, although Tristanne Connolly has suggested that such an
event would provide some insights into Blake’s repeated motif of
nightmarish birth.1
Even without this tragedy, the final years of the eighteenth
century were becoming increasingly grim for the Blakes. Abroad,
the Directory had taken over the role of the Committee of Public
Safety with the fall of Robespierre and sought to establish a period
of stability after the Terror. Although the Jacobin club was closed
and Jacobin armed uprisings quelled, radicals still played a role

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in the Directory. In Britain anti-Jacobin sentiment had become

widespread as news of the Terror had filtered through the coun-
try, and it was during this period that many of those in Britain
who had supported the Revolution turned their backs on it even
as other groups, most notably the United Irishmen, became ever
more radicalized and desperate. This was now an age of war, most
clearly espoused in the remarkable career of Napoleon Bonaparte,
and while that war ultimately profited those groups who had
most to gain from the expansion of a nascent British Empire, many
of those working in the arts suffered greatly. Blake was one of
them, yet in the immediate aftermath of the production of his
Lambeth Prophecies he had great hopes for a new and extremely
ambitious project.

Night Thoughts

In the early spring of 1797 the following prospectus was issued:

edwards’s
magnificent edition
of
young’s night thoughts.
early in june will be published, by subscription, part the
first of a splendid edition of this favorite work, elegantly printed,
and illustrated with forty very spirited engravings from orig-
inal drawings by blake.
These engravings are in a perfectly new style of decoration,
surrounding the text which they are designed to elucidate.
The work is printed in atlas-sized quarto, and the sub-
scription for the whole, making four parts, with one hundred
and fifty engravings, is five guineas; – one to be paid at the Night Thoughts, title
page, 1797, intaglio
time of subscribing, and one on the delivery of each part. – engraving, hand-
The price will be considerably advanced to non-subscribers. coloured, on paper.

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Specimens may be seen at edwards’s, No 142, New Bond-

Street; at Mr. edwards’s, Pall-Mall; and at the historic
gallery, Pall-Mall; where subscriptions are received. (br
78–9)

This advertisement, issued by Richard Edwards, represented

the next stage of a major project that had begun two years earlier,
when he commissioned Blake to produce a series of 537 illus­
trations to a popular book of meditational verse, The Complaint:
or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality. This poem, by
Edward Young, had been regularly in print since its first appear-
ance in the 1740s. Blake had known Richard’s elder brother,
James, for a number of years, having been commissioned by him
and Joseph Johnson to produce engravings for Henry Fuseli’s
Milton Gallery in 1791, an ambitious project that was only com-
pleted in 1799. The Milton Gallery had been envisaged as a
successor to the Shakespeare Gallery, opened by the Alderman
and publisher John Boydell in 1786, which was followed by the
‘Historic Gallery’ (illustrating Hume’s History of England) refer-
enced in Edwards’s advertisement; such projects were intended
both to promote an English school of art and also to make a great
deal of money – in the case of Boydell, ‘to harmonize a commer-
cial discourse with an aesthetic one’.2 By the mid-1790s, however,
such literary galleries had run their course, with contents from the
Boydell gallery selling at auctions for two-thirds of their original
price, so that by the end Fuseli ‘could scarcely expect a commer-
cial success’.3 One of Boydell’s imitators, Thomas Macklin, had
set up two similar ventures, a Poets’ and a Bible Gallery, the latter
of which included a lottery. The scope for such projects was huge:
artists were commissioned at up to £1,000 for a painting, with
engravers gaining fees of up to £800 for a single folio plate – all
of it encouraged by the booming book market of the late 1780s
and early 1790s.4

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Richard Edwards had come to London from Halifax in 1789,

learning the book trade before setting up as a publisher in Bond
Street. He produced ‘Church-and-King’ pamphlets of a very dif-
ferent nature to the more radical publications offered by Johnson,
and sold a modest range of books. His tastes, as Bentley observes,
were ‘strongly conformist’, and the project to illustrate Young must
have seemed reasonable even though the conservative publisher
and radical engraver could not have seemed more different. Both,
however, were artists and craftsmen, and – probably aided by
Fuseli – Blake and Edwards embarked on ‘the most ambitious
commercial work ever undertook’.5 The landscape painter Joseph
Farington, who was no admirer of Blake’s works, recorded an
account of the project in his diary in 1796:

Blake has undertaken to make designs to encircle the letter

press of each page of ‘Young’s night thoughts[’]. Edwards the
Bookseller, of Bond Str. employs him, and has had the letter
press of each page laid down on a large half sheet of paper.
There are abt. 900 pages. – Blake asked 100 guineas for the
whole. Edwards said He could not afford to give more than
20 guineas for which Blake agreed. – Fuseli understands
that Edwards proposes to select about 200 from the whole
and to have that number engraved as decorations for a new
edition.6

Night Thoughts had been composed by the poet and clergyman

Edward Young between 1742 and 1746. Written as a series of nine
‘Nights’ in blank verse, during the late eighteenth century it was
widely seen as the most important religious work since Milton’s
Paradise Regained and was ‘to be found side by side with the Holy
Book in almost every pious household’.7 The so-called ‘graveyard
school’ of poetry to which it belonged was immensely popular
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and included

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 divine images

Night Thoughts,
Plate 25, intaglio
engraving, hand-
coloured, on paper.

Robert Blair’s The Grave, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a

Country Churchyard’ and James Hervey’s ‘Meditations among
the Tombs’: the fact that these writers appear again and again in
Blake’s illustrative work indicates that he, too, considered them
much more highly than later generations of readers. As Rodney
Edgecombe observes, the ‘medieval ars moriendi never really died
as a genre, but rather went underground’ before resurfacing in
secular contexts.8

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Night Thoughts,
Plate 73,
hand-coloured
intaglio engraving
on paper.

Michael Farrell, citing Stephen Cornford, notes that Young’s

poem is full of the self-questioning introspection familiar to such
poetry in the eighteenth century, which although shaped by the
age of Newton and Locke was also a reaction to the dryness of
deism and a reassertion of the ‘religion of the heart’.9 The open-
ing of the poem begins with a somewhat dour and melancholy
invocation:

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 divine images

Tir’d nature’s sweet Restorer, balmy Sleep!

He, like the World, his ready visit pays,
Where Fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes:
Swift on his downy pinion flies from Woe,
And lights on Lids unsully’d with a Tear.
From short, (as usual) and disturb’d Repose,
I wake: How happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if Dreams infest the Grave.
I wake, emerging from a Sea of Dreams
Tumultuous; where my wreck’d, desponding Thought
From wave to wave of fancy’d Misery,
At random drove, her helm of Reason lost;
Though now restor’d, ’tis only Change of pain,
A bitter change; severer for severe:
The Day too short for my Distress! and Night
Even in the Zenith of her dark Domain,
Is Sun-shine, to the colour of my Fate. (i.1–17)

The poet’s gloominess is both aberration (his reason must be

restored) and also, in its own way, a critique of reason – for as the
poem demonstrates again and again, it is only through the cer-
tainty of the Christian faith that man can find purpose for his
existence. Although an unpopular genre now, it is also easy to see
how the verse would have appealed to Blake beyond its Christian
themes. The subject of these opening lines is familiar from Hamlet,
one of those examples of secular ars moriendi referred to by
Edgecombe, in which the uncertainty of whether we dream in
death is a cause for troubled sleep, but it is also expounded in a
highly metaphorical language that proved to be immensely fertile
ground for Blake’s imagination. Working his way through the
pages provided by Edwards, Blake marked on each page the line
or lines that would provide inspiration for his work. In the above
example, the first page is surrounded with an image of a figure

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Night Thoughts,
Plate 12, intaglio
engraving on paper.

lying asleep in clothes while a winged spirit descends, ‘Swift on

his downy pinion[s]’. Perhaps nowhere in Blake’s work is he more
clearly, in the words of W. B. Yeats, ‘a too literal realist of imag-
ination, as others are of nature’:10 where other artists were content
to allude to the personifications and apostrophes of poetry in the
Augustan age, Blake makes them into vivid and literal symbols,

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 divine images

and indeed the illustrations to Night Thoughts include some of the

most startling ever produced by Blake. ‘Night the Second’ begins
with a motif that would be used by Blake again in The Grave, in
which a muscular, naked form descends with trumpet outstretched
above a skeleton that is rising from its rest, a literal envisioning of
the resurrection. Sometimes the illustrations are more allusive,
demonstrating Blake’s visual imagination working alongside
Young’s text, as in the illustration to plate 46, which shows a naked
woman, long hair blowing freely about her body, about to be
covered by some white-haired figure with a shroud, illustrating
the lines:

Where Sense runs savage broke from Reason’s chain,

And sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall. (iii.52–3)

Young’s words are dire and foreboding, yet it is hard not to see in
Blake’s illustration some reference to his personal mythology of
figures such as Oothoon, fleeing a Urizenic demon who wishes
to return her to slavery rather than expand her perceptions. That
he was, inevitably, carrying that personal mythology from the
Lambeth Prophecies with him can be seen in other illustrations,
such as that for plate 95, which depicts the goddess of thunder in
a visual iconography that calls to mind Orc. Alongside such pri-
vate elements, however, are some of Blake’s most powerful
examples of his belief in Christ, such as his image of ‘The Christian
Triumph’, showing Christ, youthful and vigorous, leaping from
the clouds that represent his grave; as Naomi Billingsley observes,
these and many others of the images throughout Night Thoughts
‘endeavour to regenerate Young’s poem through a dynamic of
creative conflict’.11
Blake’s illustrations, then, were complex and little short of
astonishing, befitting such an ambitious project. Unfortunately,
however, Night Thoughts appeared ‘at a most unfortunate juncture’

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Night Thoughts,
Plate 31, intaglio
engraving on paper.

because of the banking crash of 1797 (br 80). A series of downturns

in Atlantic credit markets led to the Bank of England suspending
specie payments on 25 February: following the passing of the Bank
Restriction Act, which would remain in force until 1821, the Bank
was no longer required to convert banknotes into gold. Overprinting
had resulted in too many notes in circulation so that the Bank was
losing its supply of gold; longer-term problems had been evident
in the collapse of banks in the north of England, but the immedi-
ate cause for passing the Act was invasion by French forces at

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 divine images

Night Thoughts,
Plate 43, intaglio
engraving on
paper.

Fishguard on 22–24 February. A run on the bank was feared at

precisely that time when the total face value of notes in circulation
was double that of the gold reserves. As Thora Brylowe observes,
the effects of the Restriction Act, as well as the wars with France,
were widespread and had a negative effect on the economy. Prior
to 1793, when the Bank of England had introduced the £5 note,
the smallest denomination was £20, and even smaller-value notes
were introduced after 1797 when the Bank’s reserves went from

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

£16 million to under £2 million in less than two weeks.12 Forgery

was rife, resulting in the arrest of thousands and, as it remained a
capital offence until the laws began to soften after 1801, a number
of executions. Indeed, Blake was one of nineteen engravers who,
early in 1797, signed a testimonial for an engraving process invented
by Alexander Tilloch designed to prevent bank forgeries (br 78).
Many of those in London, for whom paper money was still a nov-
elty, did not trust the currency. It was into this environment that
Blake and Edwards attempted to launch one of the most ambi-
tious book projects of the eighteenth century. Only four of the
nine nights appeared, a total of 43 of the projected series of 150
engravings.
During this time Blake’s contact with other engravers and
artists had been dwindling, drying up his potential for work and
forcing him to rely on the Night Thoughts project for his income.
He was paid £21 for the 537 watercolour drawings that he pro-
duced, but we do not know how much he received for the final
engravings. Based on other commissions, he could have expected
over £200, but Bentley speculates that he was probably paid in
kind, at least in part, receiving printed copies that he could then
colour and sell on his own. In any case, his ‘investment of time
and reputation in Edwards’s edition of Young’s Night Thoughts
went largely unrewarded’,13 and by the end of the decade he and
Catherine were in increasingly desperate straits.

The End of Revolution

The close of the 1790s saw the end of revolution, both in terms
of the final suppression of revolutionary activities in the British
Isles and the overthrow of the Directory by Napoleon. The assump­­
tion of Napoleon to the role of First Consul had been presaged to
a degree by the replacement of the Convention by the Directory,
a governing executive of five members, and an Assembly of upper

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and lower houses on the British and American models. This model
was an outcome of a new constitution of 1795, which, it was
hoped, would mark an end to the chaos in France that had been
a hallmark of the Terror. But the Directory proved weak and was
easily usurped when Napoleon returned from his expedition in
Egypt.
As Adam Zamoyski remarks, the young Napoleon was ‘by all
accounts a puny child’, yet in the first years of the nineteenth
century he would restore to France ‘a greatness she had not known
since the days of Charlemagne’.14 The role of Emperor suited
Napoleon greatly, and Samuel Palmer told Gilchrist that Blake
himself had once made the eccentric observation that ‘the
Bonaparte of Italy was killed and that another one was some-
how substituted from the exigent want of the name, who was the
Bonaparte of Empire’ (Life i.373). Blake makes two direct refer-
ences to Bonaparte, in a letter to William Hayley in 1804 and in
the draft Public Address to announce the sale of his print of the
Canterbury Pilgrims from 1809–10, where he wrote that it is
empire that follows the arts, not arts that attend upon empire
(e577). Both were fairly hostile to Bonaparte, although this may be
as much due to the fears aroused by his trial in 1804 as to personal
dislike for Napoleon and, if Palmer recollected the conversation
correctly, it is possible that Blake was indulging in a kind of conspir­
acy theory that indicated he showed some support for the early
Napoleon.
Born in Corsica to a modest family of minor nobility, Napoleon
was serving as an artillery officer when the French Revolution
began. Rising rapidly through the ranks due to a mixture of his
own considerable talents and the fact that many higher-ranking
nobles were fleeing France (and their commissions) as the
Revolution progressed, he was finally given command of the army
of Italy by the Directory after suppressing a royalist rebellion in
Paris in October 1795 – the incident where he used cannon and

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ to disperse the rebels. Having married

Joséphine de Beauharnais, the widow of Alexandre de Beauharnais,
a general and political leader who had been guillotined during the
Terror, Napoleon’s campaign in Italy established French control
throughout the peninsula. His successes made him a hero in Paris
and in 1797 he drove the Austrians from Italy; with new repub-
lics in the Italian peninsula and in Switzerland – the latter event
causing Coleridge to finally turn his back on the Revolution as
recorded in his poem ‘France, an Ode’ – this established the
might of France on the Continent. Seeking to weaken British
access to India, he led the invasion force of Egypt in 1798; although
his army was forced to withdraw (the wounded being left to die)
after the Battle of the Nile, in which Horatio Nelson destroyed the
French fleet, Napoleon was able to return to France; on 9 November
1799 – 18 Brumaire in the new calendar established by the revo-
lutionary government – he led the coup d’état that would establish
him eventually as First Consul and truly mark the end of the
Revolution.
In Britain, fears of insurrection, which became manifest as
open rebellion in Ireland against the Crown during 1798, led to
increased repression on the part of the authorities. The success of
Paine’s Rights of Man, as well as the rise of pro-Jacobin support
among radicals in the capital, caused Pitt’s government to pass
the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (which defined as
high treason any conspiracy to overthrow the constitution) and
the Seditious Meetings Act (whereby any meeting of more than
fifty people had to be approved by a magistrate). As noted in
the previous chapter, these ‘Gagging Acts’ were to have a severe
effect on radical activities in Britain during the period of the
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Nor were the effects
of these new laws a distant abstraction to Blake: Joseph Johnson
was among a number of booksellers who were arrested and tried
for selling copies of Gilbert Wakefield’s A Reply to Some Parts of the

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Bishop Llandaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain. Published

in 1798, Wakefield’s impassioned book denounced British minis-
ters as worse than ‘the most merciless tyrants of ancient or modern
times’, and scorned that they treated the death of their fellow
countrymen as ‘no more . . . than the fall of an autumnal leaf in
pathless desert’.15 Although Johnson employed Thomas Erskine,
who had successfully defended Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke
in the treason trials of 1794, the times and laws had changed in
the intervening years and he was fined £50 and sentenced to six
months’ imprisonment, which began in 1799. Such events may
very well have been on Blake’s mind when he wrote in his copy
of An Apology for the Bible that ‘To defend the Bible in this year
1798 would cost a man his life’ (e611). He also felt the effects of
Johnson’s imprisonment in more immediate ways, as when he
wrote in a letter to George Cumberland on 26 August 1799, ‘Even
Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my Graver’ (e704). By this time
Johnson was serving his sentence, while Fuseli was struggling with
the financial difficulties created by fewer visitors than expected
to his newly opened Milton Gallery.
The trial of Johnson indicated some of the ways in which,
from the mid-1790s onwards, London had become a much more
dangerous place for anyone with revolutionary sympathies. The
‘Church-and-King’ mob that had attacked Joseph Priestley in
1791 had similar roots to the anti-Catholic rioters who had been
roused by Lord George Gordon in 1780, but by the middle of the
next decade anti-Jacobinism was being stirred up as part of a
very effective attempt to stifle radicalism in London. The London
Corresponding Society, founded in 1792, had quickly become
the most influential of such societies and a link to provincial soci-
eties in Manchester and Norwich. The Society’s move to create
a Convention in 1793, with all the attendant echoes of the French
National Assembly, stirred the ire of Pitt’s government, which
turned a blind eye to increasing acts of aggression from 1794

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

onwards. The trial of Hardy marked the effective end of the lcs,
but an immediate consequence was to radicalize further many
who were not galled by the atrocities of the Terror but, instead,
inspired to hope for violent revolution in the United Kingdom.
By 1797, groups of United Englishman were forming in the cap-
ital and throughout the country, taking their inspiration from the
United Irishmen and United Scotsmen, underground groups of
radicals with links to the French.16 James Gillray’s Presages of the
Millennium, with a spectral, deathly Pitt riding as Death on a
white horse, may have mocked the prime minister alongside the
swinish multitude represented by Charles James Fox, but his sar-
donic vision also captured the threats of violence at home and
abroad in the final years of the century. If 1789 had been the birth
of hope for many across Europe, 1799 marked the year when that
hope failed.

The Four Zoas

The final years of the 1790s were, then, increasingly dark for
Blake, both because of the changing trajectory of the French
Revolution and the counter-revolution in England, and for per-
sonal reasons following the collapse of the Night Thoughts project.
And yet, out of this time of great crisis, Blake was also stimulated
to write what would become, alongside the great illuminated poem
Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, his most ambitious
work: Vala; or, The Four Zoas. The immediate inspiration for this
project, what one of its recent editors has called ‘one of the richest
and most complex’ in Blake’s career,17 was twofold: the emerging
mythology of the Lambeth Prophecies, which had evolved and
developed during the 1790s, and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts
itself. The influence of Young is immediately evident: first, proofs
of the impressive illustrated volume literally provided the paper
on which most of the 150 pages of the manuscript were written

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 divine images

Vala; or, The Four

Zoas, title page,
c. 1797–1807,
pen and ink,
watercolour,
pencil and
charcoal
on paper.

by Blake; second, Blake decided to write this epic poem as a

series of nine nights. Beyond those two vital sources of inspiration,
however, The Four Zoas bears as much relation to the graveyard
poet as the writings of the Book of Revelation to those of Leviticus.
The manuscript that survives was begun by Blake around
1796, when he was completing the engravings to Young, and
worked on intermittently until 1807, when it appears to have been
put aside. The near 150 pages are complex and messy, with opin-
ions differing as to the order of the unnumbered pages. Northrop

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Frye called it ‘the greatest abortive masterpiece in English liter-

ature’, while also asserting that nothing in English literature rivals
‘the colossal explosion of creative power in the Ninth Night of The
Four Zoas.’18 Some pages exist in a clear copy, easily readable in
Blake’s neat copperplate hand: others are a mess of crossings out,
partial erasures and cross-writings that are extremely difficult to
decipher and have always made the manuscript a difficult one to
edit, not helped by decisions such as that whereby Blake divided
the Seventh Night midway down page 95 and reversed the order
of the parts. Likewise, the title of the work changed at some point
during editing, the careful script of ‘Vala’ having been crossed out
and replaced with ‘The Four Zoas’. For more than sixty years
after his death, the manuscript was neglected: even Gilchrist and
his collaborators on the Life of William Blake did not mention it,
and it was only with the first complete edition of Blake’s poetry
by W. B. Yeats and Edwin John Ellis in 1893 that a version became
available, heavily edited (in some places beyond all recognition)
by them. Yeats and Ellis criticized Gilchrist, the Rossettis and
Swinburne, remarking that ‘the reader who does not know the
relation of the Four Zoas to each other, and to each living man, has
not made even the first step towards understanding the Symbolic
System which is the signature of Blake’s genius.’19 Yeats and Ellis
pushed this systematization of Blake too far in an attempt to recon­
cile him with Swedenborg, but they were certainly correct to see
it as a key to much of Blake’s thinking.
Accepting, then, the chaotic nature of The Four Zoas manu-
script, many editors have nonetheless come to a similar conclusion
to Yeats and Ellis (and later critics such as S. Foster Damon and
Northrop Frye) that the work does have some coherence. Certainly
in comparison to Jerusalem, when read in a reasonably edited ver-
sion such as that included in David Erdman’s Complete Poetry and
Prose, it generally follows a kind of narrative structure – although
one that is often broken by various incomplete editorial decisions

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or deliberate retellings of events from differing perspectives as the

Zoas themselves seek to shape perceptions of the Fall of Albion,
the ancient man. After invoking (with a reference to the Gospel
of John) ‘Four Mighty Ones’ who are ‘in every Man; a Perfect
Unity’ (e300), the epic begins with the figure who had already
started to take pre-eminence in the Lambeth Prophecies:

Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth
Of a bright Universe Empery attended day & night
Days & nights of revolving joy, Urthona was his name
In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human life
Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations propagated
Fairies of Albion afterwards Gods of the Heathen,
Daughter of Beulah Sing
His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity
His fall into the Generation of Decay & Death & his
Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead
(3.9–4.5, e301)

Within these opening lines Blake establishes one influence that

was to be much, much greater on him than the rather anodyne
verse of Edward Young – Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime. (i.1–16)

Milton’s invocation of the holy spirit to supersede the classical

muses indicates just how ambitious his Christian epic was to be.
Blake himself was to attempt something in its own way even more
ambitious, creating his own mythology: if that attempt was, in the
words of Frye, ultimately an ‘abortive masterpiece’, it also opened
the doors for successive generations of writers in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries who wished to create their own worlds
and poetic universes.
The poetry of Milton is complex and difficult to follow for
those unskilled in classical and biblical allusions, but in the late
1790s and early 1800s it must have often seemed to Blake that he
was writing for an audience of one, or at most two if he read his
words to Catherine. The involved and personal myths that had
begun with Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America a Prophecy
had never sold well, and so the appeal to Los, named ‘Urthona’ in
Eden, would have been meaningless to virtually every reader at
the end of the eighteenth century. Yet there is a narrative – some-
times unstructured, often difficult to follow – that runs through
the epic poem, which grew out of the Urizen books in par­t­­icular.
Indeed, The Four Zoas is an attempt to give context to the creation
myth of The Book of Urizen, and to consolidate the ideas and char-
acters that had begun to emerge in the 1790s. G. A. Rosso describes
the poem as ‘Blake’s prophetic workshop’, arising out of Blake’s
extensive reading into religion and antiquarianism, as well as the
political events of the 1790s; even though unfinished, it would also
prove a fertile ground for Blake’s subsequent illuminated books,

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 divine images

both in terms of incidents and figures, and in style. As well as being

largely written in the fourteener, the metre that Blake had been
developing in his earlier prophecies, The Four Zoas also introduces
a disorienting feature common to much of Blake’s poetry, what
Rosso calls a ‘simulacrum of sequence’ in which the causal links
of history are abandoned for a typology that attempts to create the
viewpoint of eternity rather than history: thus Jerusalem is not only
the city of 1000 bc or ad 70, but also the contemporary site of
Blake’s visions at the turn of the nineteenth century.20
Within this disorienting framework, the story revolves around
the aftermath of the fall of the ‘Ancient Man’, later named Albion,
who will become crucial to Blake’s mythology. Of the four Zoas,
who represent mankind’s reason (Urizen), passions (Luvah),
physical senses (Tharmas) and the imagination (Urthona), two
of these – Urizen and Luvah – have conspired to disrupt the bal-
ance between the four. In the ensuing conflict they turn against
each other with Urizen, man’s reason, apparently triumphant.
Urizen’s victory, however, is short-lived: realizing that he must
attempt to rebuild the world – which is at once both the internal
psyche of an individual and the entirety of the cosmos – Urizen
embarks upon a scheme to recreate an ideal, rational heaven. This
incredible scene of creation is worth citing at length:

Then siezd the Lions of Urizen their work, & heated

in the forge
Roar the bright masses, thund’ring beat the hammers,
many a pyramid
Is form’d & thrown down thund’ring into the deeps
of Non Entity
Heated red hot they hizzing rend their way down many
a league
Till resting. each his [center] finds; suspended there they
stand

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Vala; or, the Four Zoas,

Plate 3, pen and ink,
watercolour, pencil
and charcoal on
paper.

Casting their sparkles dire abroad into the dismal deep

For measurd out in orderd spaces the Sons of Urizen
With compasses divide the deep; they the strong scales
erect
That Luvah rent from the faint Heart of the Fallen Man
And weigh the massy Cubes, then fix them in their awful
stations . . .
And all the time in Caverns shut, the golden Looms erected

209
 divine images

First spun, then wove the Atmospheres, there the Spider &
Worm
Plied the wingd shuttle piping shrill thro’ all the list’ning
threads
Beneath the Caverns roll the weights of lead & spindles of
iron
The enormous warp & woof rage direful in the affrighted
deep
While far into the vast unknown, the strong wing’d Eagles
bend
Their venturous flight, in Human forms distinct; thro dark-
ness deep
They bear the woven draperies; on golden hooks they hang
abroad
The universal curtains & spread out from Sun to Sun
The vehicles of light, they separate the furious particles
Into mild currents as the water mingles with the wine.
(ii.28.25–29.13)

Even though Urizen’s work is ultimately doomed to destruc-

tion, this creation is both glorious and terrible: unlike the vast
majority of eighteenth-century poets who aspired to Milton’s
style and failed, Blake’s own visions of Urizen as the Ancient of
Days manage to give the sense both of Paradise Lost and the bib-
lical sources that he and Milton drew upon. What is more, the
intellectual complexity of this scene is utterly astonishing in that
rather than being a mere pastiche of the creation depicted in
Book vii of Milton’s epic, what Blake describes is a critique of
Milton’s notions of creation: the deistic creator of the universe,
the pantocrator envisaged by Newton, has created not Eden
(Blake’s preferred name in his later poetry for the world of the
Eternals) but a closed, fallen world that is more reminiscent of the
accounts of the demiurge provided by Plato in the Timaeus.

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

Blake’s intellectual scope at this point is little short of breathtaking:

in these lines he brings into focus his critique of the creation of a
false and fallen world by a false god that began in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. In addition, not only is this an attack on the false
theology of the deists, but on the false epistemology of John Locke
and his followers, for the universe Urizen creates is entirely within
the body of Albion, the fallen man: the ‘Caverns shut’ are human
skulls in which we constrict our perceptions rather than allowing
them to be cleansed and see the world as it truly is – infinite.
The fall of Urizen’s false heaven leads on to another theme
that has its roots in the earlier Lambeth Prophecies but is greatly
expanded here – what Frye called the Orc cycle. Encountering
Orc, born to Los and Enitharmon in the wreckage of his own
failed heaven, Urizen sees another means to try and control exist-
ence, perverting Orc’s energies to his own ends. The creation of a
body for Urizen is described in Night the Fifth, while Los’s jeal-
ousy towards Orc leads him to create an iron chain to trap his son.
Los repents his folly but it is too late: Orc is now embedded in
the rocks where they had bound him and is found there by Urizen
in Night the Seventh. Having fixed his laws to create erroneous
knowledge, Urizen then transmits this dreadful experience to Orc:

Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread by

soft mild arts
Smile when they frown frown when they smile &
when a man looks pale
With labour & abstinence say he looks healthy
& happy
And when his children Sicken let them die
there are enough
Born even too many & our Earth will be overrun
Without these arts If you would make the poor live
with temper

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 divine images

With pomp give every crust of bread you give with

gracious cunning
Magnify small gifts reduce the man to want a gift
& then give with pomp
Say he smiles if you hear him sigh If pale say he
is ruddy
Preach temperance say he is overgorgd & drowns
his wit
In strong drink tho you know that bread & water
are all
He can afford Flatter his wife pity his children till
we can
Reduce all to our will as spaniels are taught with
art (vii.80.9–21, e355)

The slow poisoning of Orc’s rebellious spirit by Urizen is

alluded to at the start of The Four Zoas when Urizen and Luvah
combine to overthrow Albion. I would argue that the intersection
of Orc and Urizen was implicit from the very beginning of Blake’s
mythological cycle, as evident in the paired postures of both fig-
ures in America a Prophecy, which was written as the early promise
of the Revolution turned into the Terror. Blake makes that con-
nection explicit in The Four Zoas. Orc’s furious energy eventually
becomes the vehicle for Urizen’s desire for power, leading to an
apocalyptic end of the epic poem where chaos and destruction
reign. With the continuing collapse of the French Revolution into
tyranny throughout the 1790s, Blake’s secular hopes for Eden on
earth became ever weaker and more despondent.
Before turning to the final night, it is also important to observe
how Blake’s formulation of the Zoas, in particular their relations
to their emanations, is developed throughout The Four Zoas. The
notion of man falling from individual unity into a divided self had
first been introduced in The Book of Urizen, where the Eternals

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

gasp in horror as they witness Los divide into Enitharmon and

thus give birth to Orc: sexuality as separation and otherness rather
than unity and fulfilment. In the later epic Blake extends this
theme to all his Zoas, providing each of them with an emanation
that represents the psyche’s divided understanding of itself.
Blake’s conception of the self is incredibly complex here: the
eternal Zoas in Eden – Urizen, Luvah, Urthona and Tharmas –
become fallen versions of themselves. Those fallen selves then
further divide into male and female parts, with the emanations
of Ahania, Vala, Enitharmon and Enion breaking away from their
progenitors. The decision by Blake to make the emanations
female leads into some of his most problematic assertions in the
final epics, particularly with regard to the female will: there is
some indication that a yet further development, the appearance
of a ravenously masculine counterpart, the spectre, was intended
as a demonstration that both male and female beings were mon-
strous errors. Nonetheless, the effect of continuous emphasis on
emanations as somehow intrinsically inferior to the male Zoas
introduces an increasingly misogynistic tone to parts of Blake’s
later prophecies.
The complexities that Blake worked upon appeared to be out
of his power to resolve satisfactorily. Later in Jerusalem Blake
would write: ‘Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are aston-
ish’d at me. / Yet they forgive my wanderings’ (e147). Increasingly
he seemed to view his own poetic practice as a kind of divine
inspiration that could not be controlled entirely by the rational
mind – something that is both a strength and a weakness of Blake’s
poetic practice, allowing him to unlock the enormous creative
potential of his subconscious mind, but which also prevents him,
perhaps, from every fully understanding these gigantic visions that
fill his imagination. In one of the first letters we have from Blake,
written to Reverend Dr Trusler in August 1799, Blake described
his artistic technique as follows:

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 divine images

And tho I call them Mine I know that they are not Mine being
of the same opinion with Milton when he says That the Muse
visits his Slumbers & awakes & governs his Song when Morn
purples The East. & being also in the predicament of that
prophet who says I cannot go beyond the command of the
Lord to speak good or bad. (e701)

Labouring at night in London and then in Felpham on his

manuscript, Blake’s constant revisions slowly gave shape to these
figures that were governed not by the poet but by the muse. At
times he accompanied the words with sketches of figures that
were often monstrous, in a way that had not previously appeared
in his art: vaginal and phallic creatures with bat wings cavort in
the fallen reaches left behind by the collapse of Urizen’s heaven.
Perhaps it was being faced by such chaos that led Blake to envis-
age that ‘colossal explosion’ of apocalyptic power described by
Frye, which culminates in Los bringing about the end of the
world:

Los his vegetable hands

Outstretchd his right hand branching out in fibrous
Strength
Siezd the Sun. His left hand like dark roots coverd the
Moon
And tore them down cracking the heavens across from
immense to immense
Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud & shrill
Sound of Loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to
heaven
A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come
To judgment from the four winds Awake & Come away
Folding like scrolls of the Enormous volume of Heaven &
Earth

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

With thunderous noise & dreadful shakings rocking to &

fro
The heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its
place
The foundations of the Eternal hills discoverd
The thrones of Kings are shaken they have lost their robes
& crowns
The poor smite their opressors they awake up to the harvest
The naked warriors rush together down to the sea shore
Trembling before the multitudes of slaves now set at liberty
They are become like wintry flocks like forests stripd of
leaves
The opressed pursue like the wind there is no room for
escape (ix.117.6–23, e386–7)

This is Blake as John of Patmos, writing the final Revelation of

the end of all things. Throughout these and other lines in Book ix,
the violence and bloodshed of the French Revolution is echoed in
sublime terror – and this, perhaps, may be one of the reasons why
Blake could not complete The Four Zoas. The sheer monstrous
complexity of the fallen world he describes, a chaos of political
oppression and sexual alienation, appears impossible to reconcile
other than through the same kind of violence that ends the New
Testament without, yet, a clear vision of the new Jerusalem that
is to replace it. As we shall see in the next chapter, there were also
immediate events that shifted Blake’s ideas in a very different
direction, but it became increasingly apparent that the Dionysian
energies released at the end of The Four Zoas did not match Blake’s
desire for a very different – and, for him, truly Christian – kind of
apocalypse. This Christian revelation, rather than the violence of
earthly revolution, would be Blake’s path through his final epic
poems, Milton and Jerusalem.

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 divine images

Thomas and Elizabeth Butts

Thus far, the final years of the eighteenth century has seemed one
of increasing darkness for William and Catherine Blake, whether
outright failure, as with Night Thoughts, or the beginning of new
projects that would ultimately prove unsuccessful, as with The
Four Zoas. There were, however, flashes of light in that dark-
ness, two of which were particularly important. In May 1799 the
poet William Hayley visited an acquaintance of Blake’s, Charles
Townley, a collector of Greek and Roman statues; Townley had
consulted with Blake and other engravers for commissions, and
may have introduced his work to Hayley. The connection with
Hayley, as we shall see in the next chapter, was to have a pro-
found, if relatively short-term, effect on Blake’s life.
Much longer lasting was another acquaintance, that with
Thomas Butts and his wife, Elizabeth, both of whom became
close to William and Catherine. Butts, described by Bentley as
‘the perfect patron’,21 was a Joint Chief Clerk in the Commissary
General of Musters, the government office responsible for muster-
ing troops by regiment. Unlike many contemporaries, Thomas
Butts immediately saw the imaginative value of Blake’s art and
provided him with a much-needed income in the following decade;
more than this, however, Thomas and Elizabeth, or Betsy, pro-
vided moral support and friendship. Whereas the relationship with
Hayley was always that between artisan and patron, for Thomas
and Betsy it was clear that the two of them viewed both William
and Catherine as true friends. For many years until the 1820s, it was
Butts who was the firmest supporter of Blake, buying many of his
works at a time when few others looked favourably on his art.
The starting commission was a series of 53 paintings illus­
trating the Bible, the majority of which were completed in 1799
although some were painted when the Blakes were in Felpham.
For these works, Butts paid more than £400. Of the series, only

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

thirty remain, of which seven deal with subjects from the Old
Testament and the remainder from the New Testament. The
medium for these paintings was tempera, water-based pigments
bound with gum or glue, and they were intended as ‘cabinet paint-
ings’, smaller pieces that could be hung on the walls of the Butts’
residence. When composing his paintings, Blake applied the pig-
ment in multiple layers, often reinforcing outlines with black ink
and glazing the finished work with glue. The editors of the Blake
Archive say that Blake may have been trying to create ‘jewel-like
paintings’, as he later described them in his Descriptive Catalogue
as ‘enamels’ and ‘precious stones’ (e531). A number of the temperas
were also painted on copper, further enhancing their jewel-like
nature. Unfortunately, the medium was unstable, as the layers
expanded and contracted at different rates, leading to cracking,
while the carpenters’ glue used by Blake frequently dulled and
browned over time.
Despite these problems with Blake’s medium, some of the
paintings in the series that have survived demonstrate his aston-
ishing imagination when dealing with biblical subjects. Naomi
Billingsley is correct to point out that we should be careful of
presenting a rigid schema of interpretation of the series as earlier
critics, such as David Bindman and Mary Lynn Johnson, have
done. While the temptation is to treat these as some kind of nar-
rative journey demonstrating Blake’s understanding of the role of
Christ, we simply no longer have the complete sequence of paint-
ings and such a story ‘may not have been intended by Blake in
the original scheme’.22 Rather, over a period of four years, these
were biblical subjects that appealed to both Blake and Butts,
although the fact that five of the extant paintings are larger than
the rest (around 30 × 50 cm, rather than 27 × 38 cm) and all illus-
trate the life of Christ indicate that these were intended as a series.
The paintings as a whole do not need to be seen as explaining
a consistent Christology, but there are clear innovations that mark

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these out as separate to the work of Blake’s contemporaries. In Christ Appearing

his depiction of The Nativity, for example, Jesus springs from to the Apostles after
the Resurrection,
Mary in an entirely unrealistic but wholly inspirational fashion, c. 1795–1805,
a glowing ideal who leaps towards the outstretched hands of Mary’s colour printing
sister, Elizabeth. Likewise, as Billingsley demonstrates with com- with watercolour
and pen on paper.
parisons to contemporary artworks such as J.M.W. Turner’s Holy
Family (1803), Blake’s images renounce any form of naturalism:
they are intended to inspire the viewer to consider the nature
of Christ rather than to seek out the historical Jesus. Two very
striking images are from Old Testament subjects. The first, Eve
Tempted by the Serpent, is another image painted on copper, and
while it also uses tempera with glue or gum binder as well as pen

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 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

and ink outlines, the use of gold highlights make this image shine.
This would be a technique that Blake would use several times, most
notably with the coloured copy of Jerusalem the Emanation of the
Giant Albion, to make his artworks shine in a literal act of illumi-
nation. Blake’s study of the subject is also unique and one to which
he would return several times throughout his career. Eve, naked,
stands full-frontal to the viewer with no shame, befitting entirely
her status before the Fall: she is an example of the human form
divine that will be lost when mankind seeks to cover up its glori-
Eve Tempted by the ous nakedness. Adam is asleep next to her – the last time that man
Serpent, c. 1799– will sleep in such an innocent state – and the serpent coils along-
1800, water-based side her body, for all the world appearing more like a wingless
tempera, with ink
and highlights in dragon than the typical snake of Christian art. The scene is dark
gold on copper. and foreboding, prefiguring the collapse of the world that will take

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 divine images

Abraham and Isaac,

1799–1800, tempera
and pen on canvas.

place, yet because Blake is deliberately capturing Eve in her

innocence, the overall effect is startling: as she reaches up for the
apple, which we cannot see, she seems fully confident. It would be
tempting to see her as revelling in the act of taking the forbidden
fruit, but I think this is to misinterpret the scene: Eve does not yet
know sin – the expression on her face is calm and peaceful, more
like representations of the Buddha than the accusatory depictions
of the fallen woman who ‘Brought Death into the World, and all
our woe / With loss of Eden’ (Paradise Lost i.3–4). We are pre-
sented with mankind at the final moment before the Fall, and this
picture for me inspires incredible sadness at what will be lost.
Another image in the series continues the theme of the Fall in
an even more disturbing way: Abraham and Isaac shows the two
figures standing between an altar prepared with wood to burn a
sacrifice and a thicket where a ram is caught, illustrating Genesis The Parable of the
22:13: ‘And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold Wise and Foolish
behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham Virgins, c. 1825,
watercolour
went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in with pen and
the stead of his son.’ Blake, however, has done something very ink on paper.

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 divine images

disturbing in his rendition of this line: as Billingsley observes, the

clothed Abraham is a passive figure looking up towards heaven
in sorrow for the act he is about to commit, while it is Isaac, naked
and dynamic, who sees the ram that will substitute for him in an
act of sacrifice.23 Abraham in his long robe with arms outstretched,
a curved knife held in one hand, is reminiscent of Blake’s depic-
tions of the Druids, and his pose makes him similar to Urizen in
America a Prophecy. Rather than passive, he may even be seen to
be impassive, implacable in the face of the demands of human
sacrifice. Isaac, by contrast, is innocent and unafraid: as Billingsley
correctly points out, it is his childlike perception that sees more
clearly the way to reconcile God and man as opposed to the false
religion followed by his father.
Friendship with Thomas and Elizabeth Butts had provided
Blake with both a sympathetic source of inspiration and much
needed income, but London still proved a difficult place for
William and Catherine to live. As such, when the opportunity
arose to leave the city and embark upon more hopeful prospects
in the country, the pair of them began what appeared to be a
promising new life, but which would ultimately be the most
dangerous time for William.

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 7
England’s Pleasant Land

O n 20 September 1800 William and Catherine arrived in the

small Sussex coastal village of Felpham, less than eight miles
from Chichester. The Anglo-Saxon estate of Felpham listed in
the Domesday Book comprised a much larger area than the vil-
lage of Blake’s time, with many of the 67 tenants of the manor
living in other parishes. Over the centuries, houses had begun to
cluster around the Norman church of St Mary’s and, by the time
of the first census in 1801, the population numbered 306 people.
The 1805 ‘Arundel 8’ map of the Sussex coast around Chichester
gives little detail of the village, but the first detailed maps of the
1870s (when the population had roughly trebled) show a location
that would have been familiar to Blake, with wide fields reaching
down to the shore line.

‘Away to Sweet Felpham for Heaven is there’

The Blakes themselves were delighted with the move. In a letter

to Anne Flaxman, sent soon after their arrival, Catherine included
a poem from her husband in which he eulogized the village:

This Song to the flower of Flaxmans joy

To the blossom of hope for a sweet decoy

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 divine images

Do all that you can or all that you may

To entice him to Felpham & far away
Away to Sweet Felpham for Heaven is there
The Ladder of Angels descends thro the air
On the Turret its spiral does softly descend
Thro’ the village then winds at My Cot it does end
(e708–9)

William repeated these sentiments in a letter to Thomas Butts the

following month, writing:

Chichester is a very handsom City Seven miles from us we can

get most Conveniences there. The Country is not so destitute
of accommodations to our wants as I expected it would be
We have had but little time for viewing the Country but what
we have seen is Most Beautiful & the People are Genuine
Saxons handsomer than the people about London. (e712)

The Sussex countryside did indeed seem to be heaven to William

and Catherine after the difficult final years of the 1790s. In her
letter to Anne Flaxman, Catherine described London as ‘the ter-
rible desart’ and spoke of her wish that her friend would join her
in ‘a summer bower at Felpham’.
The pair had ostensibly been encouraged to move to the vil-
lage so that William could work more closely with the poet William
Hayley on a book dedicated to his illegitimate son, Thomas
Alphonso, who had died before his twentieth birthday. William
Hayley had been born at Chichester in 1745 and entered Eton in
the year of Blake’s birth, progressing from there to Cambridge
where he first began to publish his poetry. Leaving Cambridge
without taking a degree, he resided in London and continued
to write poetry as well as plays such as The Afflicted Father (1711),
which contemporaries such as Garrick had enough taste to reject

224
 England’s Pleasant Land

for performance. He was most famous for his 1781 work The
Triumph of Temper, which ran through multiple editions and was
popular enough to lead to the offer of the laureateship in 1790 –
and bad enough to attract the ridicule of Byron in English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers. Although he is not much respected (and
even less read) as a poet today, Hayley himself appears to have
been a liberal and generous-minded man who had better posthu-
mous success as a biographer of Milton, work on which brought
him into contact with William Cowper in the early 1790s. He had
first been introduced to Blake via his friendship with John
Flaxman, when plans were being devised in 1784 to try and send
the young engraver to Rome. Having commissioned Blake to
engrave pieces for his Essay on Sculpture, as well as a frontispiece
illustration of Thomas Alphonso, Hayley invited the artist and
his wife to the small village where he had set up home.
Upon hearing of Blake’s news, Thomas Butts is said to have
‘rejoiced aloud, deeming his protégé’s fortune made’ (br 94),
while Flaxman wrote to Hayley that he was ‘highly pleased with
the exertion of Your usual Benevolence in favour of my friend
Blake’ (br 94–5). Blake himself observed to Butts:

Work will go on here with God speed –. A roller & two har-
rows lie before my window. I met a plow on my first going
out at my gate the first morning after my arrival & the Plowboy
said to the Plowman. ‘Father The Gate is Open’ – I have
begun to Work & find that I can work with greater pleasure
than ever. Hope soon to give you a proof that Felpham is
propitious to the Arts. (e711)

Food was cheaper and the country air much cleaner than that
of the city, the natural beauty of the Sussex coast showing up
the squalor of the capital. The cottage where they lived, and which
still stands today, was a beautiful, if compact, flint and brick

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 divine images

building with a thatched roof on the

southern edge of the village, less than
a mile from the shingle shoreline. The
beauty and simplicity of their new life
would pall sooner than Blake realized:
working so closely with a patron was
not to William’s taste, and although
the cottage was beautiful it was also
damp, affecting Catherine’s health
during the wet winters. It was on the
Sussex coast that Blake first began to
fully understand his true vision of
Albion, the spirit of Britain, but it was
also in that same place that he would
encounter the darkest incident of his
life. For part of their time at Felpham,
the Blakes could enjoy the relative
peace brought by the Treaty of Amiens,
the agreement signed by the warring powers in March 1802 that Thomas Alphonso
Hayley, 1800,
marked the only respite in the French Revolutionary Wars
intaglio engraving
between 1793 and 1814: for some fourteen months, French émi- on paper.
grés and Britons could return to France for the first time in many
years and the wax artist Marie Tussaud brought her exhibition
to London (and, indeed, toured the British Isles with it when she
was unable to return to France). Peace was welcomed by many
across Europe, but when it ended the Blakes would be forced to
leave Felpham and never return.

Hayley’s Patronage

One of the first tasks undertaken by Blake when he arrived in

Felpham was to decorate the library of Hayley’s home, an impres-
sive building that included a Marine Turret, construction of

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 England’s Pleasant Land

which had begun in 1797 to allow Hayley a chance to look out

to sea. Blake’s patron had always intended to decorate it with
portraits of great authors and so Blake was commissioned to
produce a series of paintings during his time in the village, even-
tually producing eighteen that included Chaucer, Milton, Homer,
Shake­­speare, Dante and Spenser. The library was also a source
of considerable pleasure and education to Blake. Hayley’s work
on a biography of William Cowper (which involved delicate nego-
tiations with Cowper’s cousin Lady Hesketh) provided immediate
work for Blake in the form of a commission, while the collection
of materials for the 1796 Life of Milton also furnished Blake with
sources that transformed his understanding of the republican
poet. In a rare letter to his brother James in 1803, Blake also
observed that he was directly benefiting from Hayley’s tutelage
in other ways:

I go on Merrily with my Greek & Latin: am very sorry that

I did not begin to learn languages early in life as I find it very
Easy. am now learning my Hebrew
I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar & the Testa­
ment is my chief master. astonishing indeed is the English
Trans­lation it is almost word for word & if the Hebrew Bible
is as well translated which I do not doubt it is we need not
doubt of its having been translated as well as written by the
Holy Ghost. (e727)

During the early period of their acquaintance in Felpham,

Hayley was enthusiastic about the relationship and promoted
Blake to a number of connections in London as well as the local
gentry. One such connection that would become particularly
significant was that with George O’Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of
Egremont, and his then mistress, later wife, Elizabeth Ilive, Count­­
ess of Egremont. The Egremonts lived at Petworth House, which

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 divine images

A Vision of the Last

Judgement, 1807,
ink and watercolour
on paper.

Blake would later visit under much less auspicious circumstances,

and they were keen collectors of classical and contemporary art.
In 1807, long after the Blakes had returned to London, Ilive com-
missioned him to produce one of his most spectacular works,
A Vision of the Last Judgement. Inspired by Michelangelo’s depic-
tion of the same theme in the Sistine Chapel, which he had seen
in engraved reproductions, it is one of Blake’s most ambitious
works.

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 England’s Pleasant Land

A Vision of the Last Judgement represents a high point of Blake’s

artistic career, one of his paintings in the grand style that, as he
explained in a catalogue entry for 1810, was ‘not Fable or Allegory
but Vision’ (e554). As such, it was not intended to draw upon
memory in ascribing each figure to a particular characteristic or
attribute, but rather to inspire and elevate the mind and soul of the
viewer in the same fashion as Michelangelo’s work. Blake described
fable and allegory as an ‘inferior kind of poetry’ – and unfortu-
nately during his time at Felpham he would too often be involved
in very inferior kinds of poetry in his work for Hayley. Alongside
work on Hayley’s library, one of his first commissions at Felpham
was to illustrate a broadside ballad, Little Tom the Sailor. Hayley
had written this in September 1800 ‘to relieve the necessities of a
meritorious poor Woman on the Kentish coast’ (br 99–100) whose
son had been drowned at sea. Over thirteen days, Blake etched the
text as well as head and tailpiece designs. Hayley’s poetry is very
poor, particularly when compared to the remarkable productions of
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but Blake’s style of engraving
offers a vivid invocation of the rougher, more vigorous approach
that he would return to in his later woodcuts for Robert J. Thornton’s
The Pastorals of Virgil in 1821. These commissions were accompa-
nied by those for a series of ballads on themes relating to animals.
The plan was to produce one a month, with Blake and Catherine
printing intaglio engravings to accompany the letterpress text set
by the Chichester printer Joseph Seagrave. Sales were less than
impressive and only twelve of the ballads were set, although Hayley
later expanded the series in 1805 into an edition that was mock-
ingly reviewed by Robert Southey, who wrote: ‘[Hayley’s] present
volume is so incomprehensibly absurd that no merit within his
reach could have amused us so much’ (br 224).
A significant problem for Blake is that instead of being paid
directly for his work by Hayley, he was expected to sell his en­
gravings himself and so recoup a profit that way. This proved a

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 divine images

difficult task away from London, and

resentment soon began to creep into
Blake’s relations with his patron. The
work on the animal ballads and other
commercial work, such as engravings
for The Triumphs of Temper, frequently
represented drudge work that was
uncertain in terms of its material prof-
its. In addition, Hayley and his more
respectable friends were frequently
less than complimentary about Blake’s
abilities as an artist: the work on The
Life and Posthumous Writings of William
Cowper brought considerable criticism
from Lady Hesketh, who believed that
it drew too much attention to her
cousin’s mental illness.
Not all of Blake’s work for poten-
tial patrons comprised such drudgery.
It was during the latter part of his stay
in Felpham that Blake began com-
posing a series of ballads and one longer poem, ‘Auguries of ‘The Horse’, from
Innocence’, which would be collected together upon his return William Hayley’s
Ballads (1805),
to London in the Pickering Manuscript, so named because it intaglio engraving
was owned by the collector and publisher B. M. Pickering in the on paper.
mid-nineteenth century. In contrast to the dense mythology of
The Four Zoas, the poems of this manuscript represent a return to
the simpler style of the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence
and of Experience. Some of the ballads have achieved some fame
in their own right, such as ‘The Smile’, which begins:

There is a Smile of Love

And there is a Smile of Deceit

230
 England’s Pleasant Land

And there is a Smile of Smiles

In which these two Smiles meet (e482)

By far the best known of all these poems, however, is ‘Auguries of

Innocence’, the opening lines of which have been widely circu-
lated since they were first printed in 1874:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour (e490)

These lines, which Janet Warner maintains are ‘probably among

the most widely quoted of his verses’,1 establish the crystal clarity
that Blake could sometimes achieve in his visionary perception,
the simplicity of the opening quatrain stripping away the diffi-
cult, often obfuscatory qualities of his prophetic works to establish
precisely what Blake sought to do with his art, to cleanse the
doors of perception and allow man to see the world as it really is:
infinite. Throughout the remainder of the poem, which moves
into tetrameter couplets, the tranquillity of these lines is replaced
by a fierce anger:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State (e490)

It was Warner who first drew attention to the sacrificial nature

of the title of the poem: the Augur was the Roman official whose
task it was to predict future events, doing so from omens observed

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 divine images

in such things as the flight, singing and feeding of birds, but also
in the reading of entrails of sacrificial victims.2 Throughout the
entirety of the poem, the innocents that are slaughtered are ani-
mals, and Blake does not need to read their entrails to understand
that a world in which men commit atrocities upon living beings
is one where the doors of perception are closed. David Perkins
points out that there was an increasing body of literature in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries decrying abuses
against animals, but that Blake’s poem is particularly impressive
in the subtlety of its tone: it is the voice of innocence, but also ‘it
is innocence at a moment of crisis, when it beholds the world of
experience’.3
His time at Felpham, then, was clearly a period of intense
inspiration for Blake, yet the work that he undertook for his
patron all too often seemed the antithesis of his creative impulse.
In his letters to friends back in London, such as Thomas Butts, as
well as the correspondence to Hayley that built up once he and
Catherine had returned to the capital, Blake was scrupulously
polite, but in the privacy of his own notebook he was much more
vindictive and scurrilous, taking revenge on a patron who, he
would eventually conclude, had caused his career to go back-
wards rather than progress. As he observed in one pithy couplet,
‘My title as Genius thus is provd / Not Praisd by Hayley nor by
Flaxman lovd’, and similarly mocking his former patron: ‘You
think Fuseli is not a Great Painter Im Glad / This is one of the
best compliments he ever had’ (e505). Such was his animosity
towards Hayley that he also blamed friends such as Flaxman for,
as he saw it, tricking him into leaving London. Blake was increas-
ingly frustrated by his time in Felpham, being forced to engage in
drudge work and having less time for his own poetry, which he
rightly recognized as far superior to the Bard of Felpham. Hayley
was loyal to Blake in many ways and some of Blake’s later asper-
sions, such as that Hayley hired a soldier to cause trouble for Blake

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 England’s Pleasant Land

because the other poet desired his wife, strongly suggest paranoia.
Nonetheless, although Hayley opened Blake’s eyes in many
respects, especially with regard to the great English poets and
aspects of Milton’s life and work, in other areas the self-educated
London engraver had much surer taste when it came to the vir-
tues of poetry. Even before arriving in Felpham, Blake had chafed
against the recommendation to read Friedrich Klopstock, the
German author of Der Messias whom Hayley considered an equal
to Milton. Blake wrote a damning and humorous attack, ‘When
Klopstock England Defied’, which showed the spirit of An Island
in the Moon was alive and well:

When Klopstock England defied

Uprose terrible Blake in his pride
For old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted & Belchd & coughd
Then swore a great oath that made heavn quake
And calld aloud to English Blake
Blake was giving his body ease
At Lambeth beneath the poplar trees
From his seat then started he
And turnd himself round three times three
The Moon at that sight blushd scarlet red
The stars threw down their cups & fled
And all the devils that were in hell
Answered with a ninefold yell
Klopstock felt the intripled turn
And all his bowels began to churn
And his bowels turned round three times three
And lockd in his soul with a ninefold key
That from his body it neer could be parted
Till to the last trumpet it was farted
Then again old nobodaddy swore

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He neer had seen such a thing before

Since Noah was shut in the ark
Since Eve first chose her hell fire spark
Since twas the fashion to go naked
Since the old anything was created
And in pity he begd him to turn again
And ease poor Klopstocks nine fold pain
From pity then he redend round
And the ninefold Spell unwound
If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite
What might he not do if he sat down to write (e500–501)

The poem is crude in every sense, not least the scatological last
lines. Yet the ability to dash off such doggerel is one of Blake’s
defences against the supercilious middle-class aestheticism of
figures such as Hayley: when necessary, Blake will write poetry
the like of which the world has never seen, while at other less aus-
picious times, he could still excrete poesy far more vigorous than
anything Hayley and his ilk could manage. While the period in
Felpham must have appeared to damage his career, as subsequent
critics have observed, it did modify his artistic practice. Naomi
Billingsley observes that his time away from London resulted in
a greater engagement with Christianity, probably because he was
now less intimately engaged in the radical, and increasingly scep-
tical, circle around Joseph Johnson. Not that Blake could ever be
fully de-radicalized: Mark Crosby has discussed in relation to the
artist’s time in Felpham that this is when he came into clearest
conflict with the crown.4 Alongside his worsening relations with
Hayley, the trial for sedition, and eventual acquittal, marked a
bleak ending to a sojourn that had begun with such high hopes.

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 England’s Pleasant Land

Trial for Sedition

On 18 May 1803 the Treaty of Amiens was broken when Britain

declared war on France, irritated by Napoleon’s increasing insist-
ence on the international system on the Continent and the exclusion
of the British from European political affairs and markets. At the
same time, the British government did not abide by all of its
conditions of the treaty, maintaining, for example, a large military
contingent in Malta and Egypt. Both sides engaged in criminal
acts, the British seizing French and Dutch ships without warning
before the declaration of war and Napoleon, as First Consul, order-
ing the arrest of all British males aged between eighteen and sixty
in France and Italy. Once more the south coast of England was
subject to the threat of invasion when Napoleon drew together a
huge army and began to build a flotilla of barges to transport them
across the Channel. In response, the British government began to
build Martello towers along the coast and to recruit replacement
Reserve units that would only fight in Britain alongside the regular
troops. In July 1803 instructions were given to volunteers to harass
and pursue guerilla tactics against any occupying army, with
members of the government agreeing that it was better to train the
populace in the use of arms, even if this brought with it the threat
of insurrection.
As such, the piece of heaven that the Blakes had moved to
became part of one of the most militarized areas in Europe at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the soldiers sent as
part of a troop of dragoons to Felpham, Sergeant John Scolfield,
was invited into the garden of Blake’s cottage, apparently by the
gardener, on Friday 12 August and, four days later, Blake wrote to
Thomas Butts with an account of what happened:

I desired him as politely as was possible to go out of the

Garden, he made me an impertinent answer[.] I insisted on his

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leaving the Garden[;] he refused[.] I still persisted in desiring

his departure[;] he then threatend to knock out my Eyes with
many abominable imprecations & with some contempt for
my Person[;] it affronted my foolish Pride[.] I therefore took
him by the Elbow & pushed him before me till I had got him
out, there I intended to have left him but he turning about
put himself into a Posture of Defiance threatening & swear-
ing at me. I perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at
the Gate & putting aside his blows took him again by the
Elbows & keeping his back to me pushed him forwards down
the road about fifty yards[,] he all the while endeavouring to
turn round & strike me & raging & cursing which drew out
several neighbours, at length when I had got him to where he
was Quarterd, which was very quickly done, we were met at
the Gate by the Master of the house, The Fox Inn, (who is
the proprietor of my Cottage) & his wife & Daughter, & the
Mans Comrade & several other people[.] My Landlord com-
pelld the Soldiers to go in doors after many abusive threats
against me & my wife from the two Soldiers but not one word
of threat on account of Sedition was utterd at that time. This
method of Revenge was Plannd between them after they had
got together into the Stable. This is the whole outline. (e732)

A very different version of events was recorded by Scolfield.

After being forcibly escorted back to the Fox Inn by the engraver,
Scolfield consulted with another soldier, John Cock, and prepared
a deposition that would be delivered to a magistrate on 15 August,
in which he recorded that:

one Blake a Miniature painter & now residing in the said Parish
of Felpham did utter the following seditious expressions viz.
That we (meaning the people of England) were like a parcel of
Children, that the wo.d play with themselves ‘till they wo.d get

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 England’s Pleasant Land

scalded and burnt[,] that the French knew our strength very
well and if Buonapart wo.d come he wo.d be master of Europe
in an hour’s time, that England might depend upon it that
when he sat his Foot on English Ground that every Englishman
wo.d be put to his choice whether to have his throat cut or to
join the French & that he was a strong Man and wo.d certainly
begin to cut throats and the strongest Man must conquer – that
he Damned the King of England – his Country and his Subjects
– that his soldiers were all bound for Slaves & all the poor people
in general – that his Wife then came up & said to him this is
nothing to you at present but that the King of England wo.d
run himself so far into the Fire that he might get himself out
again & altho she was but a Woman she wo.d fight as long as
she had a Drop of Blood in her – to which the said Blake said,
my Dear you wo.d not fight against France – she replied, no,
I wo.d fight for Buonaparte as long as I am able – that the said
Blake then addressing himself to this Informant, said, tho’ you
are one of the King’s Subjects I have told what I have said
before greater people than you – and that this Informant was
sent by his Captain on Esquire Hayley to hear what he had to
say and to go and tell them – that his wife then told her said
Husband to turn this Informant out of the Garden – that this
Informant thereupon turned round to go peacefully out when
the said Blake pushed this Informant out of the Garden into
the Road, down which he followed this Informant & twice
took this Informant by the Collar without this Informant’s
making any resistance and at the same time said Blake damned
the King & said the – Soldiers were all Slaves[.] (br 160–61)

The two accounts varied almost completely, both in substance

and in tone, and scholars such as G. E. Bentley have demonstrated
in detail how Scolfield’s account was fabricated in many par-
ticulars. Nonetheless, it is surprising how the soldier alighted on

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 divine images

the one figure in Felpham who had past involvement with radical
groups that were increasingly unpopular with the threat of inva-
sion in 1803. As John Linnell remarked many years later, ‘it is not
impossible that something of that sort [Damn the King] might
have been uttered by Blake in reply to the Soldiers using the Kings
[sic] name with threats to try and intimidate Blake’ (br 612).
The Blakes were, rightly, shocked and terrified by the event:
towns and villages across the English coast were filled with par-
anoid suspicion that any day the French could invade, and Blake’s
previous radical sympathies were dangerous. He and Catherine
returned to London in September, taking up residence in Broad
Street with James, William’s brother, and his wife Catherine
Eliza­beth. The following month, however, the Michaelmas Quarter
Session took place at Petworth House, and an indictment was
delivered describing Blake as a ‘Wicked Seditious and evil dis-
posed person’ who would ‘bring our said Lord the King into great
hatred contempt and scandal with all his liege Subjects with force
and arms afterwards’ (br 168, 169). As Bentley describes the situ­
ation at Petworth, a number of the figures in session there were
among ‘the most substantial gentlemen in the county’, including
Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, George O’Brien Wyndham,
Earl of Egremont, and Lieutenant-General John Whyte: the
Justices and jurors were keen to make examples of those defying
the military, finding against the men who had rescued one of
their fellows from the press gang.5 Blake denied the charges laid
against him and the trial was set for the following Quarter Sessions
at Chichester, which Blake attended in January 1804. He, Hayley
and the Chichester printer Seagrave were held to bonds for his
appearance the next year.
Upon their return to London, this time the Blakes moved into
a more permanent residence than the shop held by his brother.
South Molton Street is a small street in Mayfair, and for the next
eighteen years they would live at a small flat in number 17; it had

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 England’s Pleasant Land

none of the space of the cottage in Felpham, and instead of fields

running to the sea they were in proximity to Tyburn where crim-
inals were regularly hanged – events that would weigh heavily
on Blake’s poetry over the coming years. Yet the closeness to the
centre of London also provided access to artists and friends who
could furnish opportunities for work. The Blakes would remain
poor for the next decade, but what living they were able to come
by did not depend on the auspices of an individual patron.
Nonetheless, it was during this time that Hayley demonstrated
his true friendship, disproving many of Blake’s earlier resentments.
He hired a lawyer, Samuel Rose, who defended the artist as as
‘loyal a subject as any man in this court’ (br 180) and effectively
set about assassinating the character of Scolfield who, in the inter-
vening months, had been reduced to the rank of private because
of drunkenness. Although Blake felt, perhaps rightly, that at least
two of the magistrates – John Peechey and John Quantock – had
set themselves against him, Blake’s neighbours had been well-
disposed towards him. Gilchrist recorded a story told to him by
Samuel Palmer: ‘Mrs Blake used afterward to tell how, in the
middle of the trial, when the soldier invented something to sup-
port his case, her husband called out “False!” with characteristic
vehemence, and in a tone which electrified the whole court and
carried conviction with it’ (br 186).
In the paranoid atmosphere of 1804, Peechey and Quantock
were right to distrust this engraver who had denounced God,
priest and king in his Lambeth Prophecies. Yet Blake’s sober char-
acter stood him in good stead against the soldier who had clearly
perjured at least parts of his account of the events of August 1803.
For all the calls to patriotism, the billeted troops in Felpham had
not endeared themselves to the villagers. Blake was careful never
to reveal the actual cause of the argument or the words that were
uttered between himself and Scolfield, but in his letter to Thomas
Butts in which he gave his version of events, he included a poem

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 divine images

lamenting the events that destroyed any chance for happiness

in Felpham:

O why was I born with a different face

Why was I not born like the rest of my race
When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend
Then I’m silent & passive & lose every Friend
Then my verse I dishonour. My pictures despise
My person degrade & my temper chastise
And the pen is my terror. the pencil my shame
All my Talents I bury, and Dead is my Fame
I am either too low or too highly prizd
When Elate I am Envy’d, When Meek I’m despisd (e733)

Little did he know it, but when he returned to London for the
final time, Blake would find his verse and pictures dishonoured
and despised more than at any other time in his career. Obscurity
had saved him from severe punishment at Chichester, but it
would condemn him to increasing poverty over the coming
decade. As with his attempt to find fame and fortune with Night
Thoughts, circumstances had conspired against him.

Milton a Poem

In February 1802 the poet Edward Marsh wrote a letter to Hayley

regarding a song performed by Blake in Felpham:

The hymn which inspired our friend, whom I have some idea
I mistitled in my last a poetical sculptor instead of a poetical
engraver, was quite—But if I run on in this strain, I shall find Milton a Poem, title
the letter ended, before I have said one half of the things I page, Copy C,
c. 1804–11, relief and
wish to say . . . I long to hear Mr Blake’s devotional air, though white-line etching,
(I fear) I should have been very aukward in the attempt to hand-coloured.

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give notes to his music. His ingenuity will however (I doubt

not) discover some method of preserving his compositions
upon paper, though he is not very well versed in bars and
crotchets . . . (br 120)

This ‘devotional air’ is perhaps the first version of the poem that
would be written down in a preface to an epic poem that Blake
began upon his permanent return to London. Entitled Milton a
Poem, the epic deals with a visionary tale of John Milton descend-
ing from heaven to recover the female emanation that he has
rejected, called Ololon in the poem, and to confront his own
masculine spectre, Satan. The lines that Edward Marsh probably
heard are now referred to by scholars as the stanzas from Milton,
although they are better known to millions from the title given to
them by Charles Hubert Parry when he set them to music during
the First World War, ‘Jerusalem’. The context of this hymn is
very much worth considering in full:

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato

& Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by arti-
fice against the Sublime of the Bible. but when the New Age
is at leisure to Pronounce; all will be set right: & those Grand
Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly
Inspired Men, will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters
of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shak­
speare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady &
infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.
Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads
against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the
Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could,
for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters!
on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fash[i]on­­
able Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend

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 England’s Pleasant Land

to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing

boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his
Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is
in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models
if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds
of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord.

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets.

Numbers xi. ch 29 v. (Milton plate 1, e95–6)

The opening paragraphs of the Preface to Milton, while striking

and perhaps unusual to a reader who has never seen them before,
are actually very clear when contrasted with the rest of the epic.

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 divine images

In the opening lines, Blake establishes a position that sets him

apart from the mainstream culture of his day: while his espousal
of Judaeo-Christian faith would be shared by nearly all of his coun-
trymen, other than the most ardent supporters of the Jacobins,
his outright rejection of classical culture was extremely unusual at
the time. By blaming the ‘silly Greek & Latin slaves of the sword’
for promoting traditions of hero worship, Blake is very much cas-
tigating them for the prominence of wars across Europe in his day.
What is more obscure is that his reference to classical civilization
as belonging to the ‘Daughters of Memory’ (the nine muses were
daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or ‘memory’) implies that the
Greeks themselves had only recollected – or, indeed, misremem-
bered – the more ancient and inspirational civilizations of the
Orient. In the paragraph that follows, Blake directly attacks the
society of his day, denouncing the politics of the era that elevated
warfare and commercialism above the practice of art. It is against
this corruption that he makes his direct appeal to the ‘Young Men
of the New Age’, a class of painters, poets and sculptors who will
change the hearts and minds of men and promote instead an age
of peace.
It is a deeply idealistic and extremely powerful demand, and
the poem that follows has rightly become one of the most famous
of all of Blake’s works. The stanzas, however, are considerably
more obscure than the paragraphs that precede them. They
appear to tell of the coming of Christ to Britain, or at least that
is the interpretation that is usually given to them today. This
assumption, like that surrounding the ‘dark Satanic mills’, is
incorrect: just as the Industrial Revolution was something that
Blake, like many of his contemporaries, was only vaguely aware
of, so the assertion that Jesus came to Britain some time during
his childhood or adolescence was very much a product of later
nineteenth-century mysticism. Antiquarian writers before Blake
such as Aylett Sammes and Jacob Bryant had suggested that

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 England’s Pleasant Land

Semitic peoples had come to the British Isles to trade, though

none of them mentioned the appearance of Christ in these shores.
William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century had written that
Joseph of Arimathea brought twelve disciples to Britain and estab-
lished a chapel there, a story that was popularized in the Grail
legends and later associated with Glastonbury (although Blake
appears not to have known that particular aspect of the story, as
Glastonbury is not mentioned once in his writings). Blake cer-
tainly knew the myth of Joseph of Arimathea in Britain: it is the
subject of his first solo engraving, while he was still apprenticed
to Basire, and in 1794 he painted Joseph of Arimathea Preaching
to the Britons. Blake’s immediate source for the story was almost
certainly John Milton’s The History of Britain, which included
the following brief allusion to the legend:

Nor yet then first was the Christian Faith heer known, but
eev’n from the later daies of Tiberius, as Gildas confidently
affirms, taught and propagated, and that as som say by Simon
Zelotes, as others by Joseph of Arimathea, Barnabas, Paul,
Peter, and thir prime Disciples. But of these matters, variously
written and believ’d, Ecclesiastic Historians can best deter-
min: as the best of them do, with little credit giv’n to the
particulars of such uncertain relations.6

It is most likely, then, that the feet that Blake refers to in the
opening stanza are those of Joseph of Arimathea who, according
to legend, established Christianity in the British Isles in the first
years after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Giving credence
to this myth, Blake ends his pacifist rejection of a military society
with a call from the Book of Numbers: ‘Would to God that all the
Lords people were Prophets’ (11:29).
Despite the powerful influence the stanzas from Milton were
to have on later generations, particularly after they were set to

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 divine images

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 2,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

music in the twentieth century, Blake omitted the Preface from

his later versions of the epic poem. It is most likely that as it
became clear his original works were being read by fewer and
fewer people, so the presence of an invocation to a new genera-
tion of readers was too painful a reminder of his obscure status.
Certainly, this obscurity was not especially helped by the subject
matter of the main part of the book, which a brief plot summary

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 England’s Pleasant Land

can only partly elucidate: after the Preface, the poem begins with
Milton in heaven, where he is dissatisfied because he can see his
emanation suffering where she is ‘scatter’d thro’ the deep’. Among
the other inhabitants of Eden, Milton listens to a ‘Bards prophetic
Song’ that tells the story of Los and his sons: Rintrah, Palamabron
and Satan. The song begins with a reformulation of the story of
the Zoas first begun in The Book of Urizen, Los and Enitharmon
labouring to create a fixed form for Urizen to prevent him falling
into complete chaos, the human body that restricts the unlimited
potential of our senses but still allows them to operate. It then pro-
ceeds to the struggle between the sons of Los and Enitharmon,
who represent three classes of men: the Elect, the Redeemed and
the Reprobate. In the Bard’s song, Rintrah, Palamabron and Satan
are each allocated their own tasks, to plough the earth and break
it for agriculture (Rintrah), to prepare the ground for seeds with
the harrow (Palamabron), and finally to take the crop and grind
it into flour at the mill (Satan). This is the direct reference to the
‘dark Satanic mills’ in the stanza – Satan’s allotted role is to create
the final form of souls, which while restrictive to the senses is also
important in preventing many from falling into complete error.
Satan, however, wishes for more and usurps the role of Rintrah,
causing chaos among the horses that draw his plough and Los to
break out in anger.
This strange story, unintelligible to those who have no under-
standing of Blake’s personal mythology, serves as a complex satire
on Milton’s theology, in particular its roots in Calvinism. During
his time in Felpham and over the next decade while he worked
on Milton a Poem, Blake’s critique of Christianity that had begun
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and continued through the
Lambeth Prophecies became increasingly sophisticated. According
to Calvinism, the Elect were those chosen by God to join him in
heaven: according to the theory of predestination, God knew
prior to a soul’s incarnation on earth whether it was destined to

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 divine images

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 9,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

heaven or hell, a logical application of the quandary of whether

God could be all-knowing if humans could sin against his will.
Reprobates, by contrast, were doomed to hell regardless of their
actions, while the Redeemed could be saved if they chose to
accept God (a fudge that mitigated the logical simplicity of God
knowing who was saved and who was damned in the first place).
In an act of theological audacity, Blake inverted the traditional

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 England’s Pleasant Land

version of this belief system, establishing the reprobates – sinners

– as the truly saved because they realize that they need God’s
grace, while the Elect are actually followers of Satan, morally rigid
and unable to understand the need for the forgiveness of sin. At
the end of the Bard’s song, Satan creates hell by refusing to open
himself up to his brothers, to admit his mistakes:

Thus Satan rag’d amidst the Assembly! and his bosom grew
Opake against the Divine Vision: the paved terraces of
His bosom inwards shone with fires, but the stones
becoming opake!
Hid him from sight, in an extreme blackness and darkness,
And there a World of deeper Ulro was open’d, in the
midst
Of the Assembly. In Satans bosom a vast unfathomable
Abyss. (9.30–35, e103)

In this dense, astonishing passage, Satan creates hell within his

own body (Ulro in Blake’s cosmology) and closes himself within
it, at which point Los and Enitharmon realize that Satan is Urizen.
This is a culminating moment of Blake’s theology: Satan, first
introduced as the ‘Mistaken Demon of Heaven’ in Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, is here revealed to be the very same as Milton’s
Satan in Paradise Lost and the vision of a false demiurge famous
today as Blake’s Ancient of Days. Blake himself appears to have
undergone a process of revision since The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, where he wrote that Milton ‘was a true poet and of the
devil’s party’: certainly the Satan of Milton a Poem appears very
different to the devils of his earlier work, but in truth outside that
particular pamphlet he had always attributed demonic aspects to
the traditional conception of God.
Realizing that he has projected his very worst aspects as a
figure of Moral Law onto Satan, that he is responsible for this evil

249
 divine images

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 31,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

and also for the torment of his denied sexuality, Milton determines
to leave heaven and descend to earth to reclaim these lost parts
of himself. The book presents some of the most remarkable visions
of Blake’s cosmology. In Plate 36 of the poem the universe is
shown as a cosmic egg surrounded by four spheres of the Zoas
that have given rise to it, with Milton’s track to earth shown as a
curved line that draws upon illustrations to Newton’s Principia

250
 England’s Pleasant Land

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 34,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

mathematica. Likewise, when he arrives on Earth at the end of the

first book, Milton falls as a star into Blake’s foot, creating an aston-
ishing image whereby Blake sees the entire ‘Vegetable world’ as
a ‘bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold’ (21.13,
e115), which he binds to himself, a very immediate and physical
metaphor of Blake combining with Milton and his prophetic alter

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 divine images

ego, Los, to walk through the world as a visionary. As well as

joining with Blake to revive English poetry, Milton must also
reclaim his repressed female self, and there is a very tender scene
in Book Two where Ololon descends before the Blakes’ cottage
in Felpham, whereupon William asks her to tend to his wife who
is sick inside.
The climactic scene of Milton, however, comes at the very
end when Milton must confront Satan, prior to the moment when
the giant Albion, the primeval man, will begin to awaken. In the
scene depicting Milton and Satan, Blake’s writing is at its most
apocalyptic and rivals that of Paradise Lost or biblical books such
as those of Ezekiel or Revelation:

I also stood in Satans bosom & beheld its desolations!

A ruind Man: a ruind building of God not made with
hands;
Its plains of burning sand, its mountains of marble terrible:
Its pits & declivities flowing with molten ore & fountains
Of pitch & nitre: its ruind palaces & cities & mighty
works;
Its furnaces of affliction in which his Angels & Emanations
Labour with blackend visages among its stupendous ruins
Arches & pyramids & porches colonades & domes:
In which dwells Mystery Babylon, here is her secret place
From hence she comes forth on the Churches in delight
Here is her Cup filld with its poisons, in these horrid vales
And here her scarlet Veil woven in pestilence & war:
Here is Jerusalem bound in chains, in the Dens of Babylon
(38.15–27)

In this incredible scene the hell of Paradise Lost is transformed

into a psychological space – a ‘ruind Man’ – drawing attention to
Blake’s incredibly deft psychological understanding of the realities

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 England’s Pleasant Land

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 39,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

of religious experience, hell as a creation of the human imagination.

To this sense of remarkable psychological subtlety, Blake now has
Milton deliver a speech that demonstrates an incredible sense of
moral perspicacity:

In the Eastern porch of Satans Universe Milton stood & said

Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate
And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle

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 divine images

A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes

And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering.
Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of
Eternity
Are not such: know thou: I come to Self Annihilation
Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually
Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee
Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy
Churches
Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach
Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness
Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on
In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn
Thy Laws & terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues as
webs
I come to discover before Heavn & Hell the Self
righteousness
In all its Hypocritic turpitude, opening to every eye
These wonders of Satans holiness shewing to the Earth
The Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, & Satans Seat
Explore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue & put off
In Self annihilation all that is not of God alone:
To put off Self & all I have ever & ever Amen (38.28–49,
e139)

This speech is the culmination of the attitude to ethics and religion

that had been outlined in the Preface to Milton and in the Bard’s
Song. Conventional morality, the morality of the Elite, is to
condemn others and, in the act of destroying them, ‘be a greater
in [their] place’, what throughout the late illuminated books
Blake refers to as the Covering Cherub or a Tabernacle. In this,
Blake understands that by enforcing a rigid sense of morality, the
Moral Law of his later works, we become unable to recognize that

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 England’s Pleasant Land

Milton a Poem,
Copy C, Plate 46,
relief and white-
line etching,
hand-coloured.

we are all sinners and, as such, that mutual forgiveness of such sin
– what Blake refers to here as Self Annihilation, that is, the
destruction of the Self as separate to the other – is the path to
paradise.
Blake worked on Milton a Poem for over a decade, printing
his first copies in 1811 and then issuing further sets with additions
in 1818 and 1821. Originally intending it to be a poem in twelve

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books, as per its epic format, the act of creating such an incredible
illuminated volume, which ran to fifty plates, was a monumental
and time-consuming task. As such, Blake reduced the poem to
two books, although these carry within them – once you overcome
the strangeness of Blake’s personal mythology – a particular sense
of cohesion: in Book One, Milton realizes his error and confronts
the necessary task that he must undertake to reclaim his female
emanation and the destructive masculine reason that he has
rejected as other. This task is not actually completed in Book
Two: the final vision of Milton a Poem is one of apocalypse, but of
apocalypse deferred. Albion begins to rise as the epic poem con-
cludes, but his final restoration will be the subject of another, even
greater, work.

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 8
Creating Systems

A year after Blake’s return to London, a new prospect emerged,

one that promised the fortunes which had so eluded him in
Felpham. In September 1805 Blake was visited by Robert Hartley
Cromek, an engraver who, in the early years of the nineteenth
century, had decided to set out on a more entrepreneurial path
and become a publisher. His first project was to issue a deluxe
edition of a popular poem of the day, Robert Blair’s The Grave.

The Grave and The Canterbury Pilgrims

As with Young’s original Night Thoughts, The Grave was one of

those pieces from the ‘Graveyard School’ that remained widely
read into the nineteenth century: as Essick and Paley write in their
facsimile edition of the poem, such work must deal with themes
of death the leveller and memento mori, as well as frequently envi-
sioning the Last Judgement.1 Robert Blair was a Scottish minister
and poet who published only three poems before his death in 1746
at the age of 46. Written in blank verse, Blair demonstrated some
versatility in his poem that, perhaps as much for its shorter length
as anything, is a more approachable work than Young’s. One of
its most important themes is that ‘all is vanity’, as in the opening
pages when he asks:

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 divine images

Where are the mighty thunderbolts of war,

The Roman Caesars and the Grecian chiefs,
The boast of story? Where the hot-brain’d youth,
Who the tiara at his pleasure tore
From kings of all the then discover’d globe;
And cried, forsooth, because his arm was hamper’d,
And had not room enough to do its work?
Alas, how slim – how dishonourably slim! –
And cramm’d into a space we blush to name –
Proud royalty! How alter’d in thy looks!
How blank thy features, and how wan thy hue!
Son of the morning! whither art thou gone?
(The Grave 123–34)

It is easy to see how such lines would have appealed to the repub-
lican Blake with their invocation of Death as the true leveller,
and by October Flaxman was writing to Hayley that Blake had
been commissioned once more:

Mr. Cromak [sic] has employed Blake to make a set of 40

drawings from Blair’s poem of the Grave 20 of which he
proposes [to] have engraved by the Designer and to pub-
lish them with the hopes of rendering Service to the Artist,
several members of the Royal Academy have been highly
pleased with the specimens and mean to encourage the
work. (br 207)

This letter, as Bentley points out, is extremely significant, for it

reveals that Cromek intended to employ Blake not merely as the
artist but as the engraver, which would earn him a much larger
commission. A prospectus was quickly produced by Cromek,
announcing the plans for the publication ‘of a new and elegant
edition of Blair’s Grave’ in November, notifying the public that

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 Creating Systems

there would now be fifteen prints, ‘from designs invented and to be

engraved by William Blake’ (br 210). Almost immediately, how-
ever, he issued another prospectus, this time indicating that there
would be ‘twelve very spirited engravings by Louis Schiavonetti,
from designs invented by William Blake’ (br 214).
Between September and November 1805, as well as working
on his designs, Blake had begun to prepare an initial plate for the
work, which would become known as ‘Death’s Door’. This
white-line etching printed in relief was a highly innovative and
extremely dramatic rendition, completely unlike anything else
that was being produced at the time – and Cromek was clearly
very nervous: his reputation rested on The Grave being a success
and so he wished for a much more conventional style. As such,
he commissioned Schiavonetti straight away, an engraver who
had worked with Francesco Bartolozzi, another Italian who had
found considerable success in London with a new style of engrav-
ing. Both Bartolozzi and Schiavonetti were experts in the stipple
method of engraving, making tiny cuts in the plate that create a
much wider range of tonal effects than traditional line engraving.
This style of drawing was seen to more closely resemble crayon
or pencil drawings and Bartolozzi helped to popularize it prior to
his departure for Lisbon in 1802. This transfer of the greater part
of the work – and earnings – to another engraver was seen by
Blake as a betrayal. In November 1805 Blake could still refer to
his ‘Friend Cromek’ in a letter to William Hayley, but before
long he began to fill his Notebook with invective against the pub-
lisher, writing doggerel verse such as: ‘Poor Schiavonetti died of
the Cromek, / A thing thats tied round the Examiners neck’
(e505), a reference to the fact that the Italian died not long after
Cromek’s edition of The Grave was released. Blake was very right
in one sense to feel so ill-used: after their relationship crumbled,
Blake would not work on commercial engravings for another
decade.

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 divine images

The Grave by
Robert Blair,
title page, 1808,
intaglio engraving
on paper by Louis
Schiavonetti
after a design
by William Blake.

Yet in another respect Cromek served Blake well in his choice

of Schiavonetti. The relief print that Cromek saw in Blake’s
studio was doubtless in a very early state that would have been
much reworked, but by 1805 the style of line engraving that
Blake had employed on Young’s Night Thoughts was beginning
to look very old-fashioned. Schiavonetti, working in the stipple
style popularized by his former master Bartolozzi, helped greatly
to contribute to the popularity of The Grave, and the designs

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 Creating Systems

were submitted to Queen Charlotte to request permission that

the volume be dedicated to her. When the book was published
in 1808, it quickly became the most renowned of Blake’s work
and was read throughout the first part of the nineteenth century.
Many who had no idea whatsoever of his illuminated printing
would nonetheless have had some sense of William Blake as the
designer of the striking images to The Grave.
And they were striking – although not always pleasantly so
‘Death’s Door’, for the tastes of Georgian readers. James Montgomery, a few lines
in The Grave by
Robert Blair, intaglio of whose Cromek used in an epigraph to the poem, sold his sub-
engraving on paper. scription copy of The Grave because ‘several of the plates were
hardly of such a nature as to render the
book proper to lie on a parlour table.’2
The sheer physicality of the ‘celestial
messenger’ in the opening design, a
powerful muscular body with trumpet
lowered from its lips to call the skele-
ton in the grave to renewed life, was one
such disturbing image. For any reader of
Blake’s prophetic works or large colour
prints, the depiction of angels as potent
naked bodies would have been imme-
diately familiar – but such an audience
was small in 1808. Likewise, although
the feminine soul that reunites with
the body in the last of Blake’s plates is
clothed, the male form that rises whole
from the grave to be embraced by her
is not and their kiss seems much more
than a polite, Platonic peck. Again, the
sexual symbolism of Zoa and emana-
tion would become much more familiar
to readers able to comprehend all of

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 Creating Systems

Blake’s works, but early nineteenth-century readers found their

conventional tastes shocked by such imagery.
By the time The Grave was published, another incident had
occurred that was to sour relations completely between the two
men. Writing to Montgomery in 1807, Cromek could still express
admiration for Blake’s talents, but henceforth each would become
increasingly bitter towards the other. In 1808 Blake commenced
upon a design for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a painting executed
in tempera that showed each of the pilgrims upon horseback. Ever
experimental, Blake created a design that was deliberately at odds
with the naturalistic representational art of his day and instead
hearkened back to the style of medieval art, deliberately flatten-
ing the overall image and accentuating the caricatures of each of
the pilgrims. The Canterbury Pilgrims drew upon Lavater’s theo-
ries of physiognomy that Blake had been working on twenty years
previously, but it also allowed him to develop a detailed account
of each of the characters that he would write up in 1809 in his
Descriptive Catalogue. According to Blake, each of the pilgrims
serves as an archetype rather than natural representation of man,
bearing some affinity to Blake’s own interest in depicting human-
ity via its Zoas rather than more ‘realistic’ personalities:

The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which

compose all ages and nations: as one age falls, another rises,
different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we
see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals,
vegetables, minerals, and in men; nothing new occurs in iden-
tical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer
‘The Day of change nor decay. (e532)
Judgement’,
in The Grave While working on designs for The Grave, Blake claimed to have
by Robert Blair,
intaglio engraving shown Cromek designs for The Canterbury Pilgrims and believed
on paper. himself to have been encouraged to reproduce the work as an

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 divine images

engraving. As he was no longer the engraver for The Grave, he

began to labour at the substantial copper plate that would allow
him to make prints of his Chaucer design. Cromek, meanwhile,
claimed to have come up with the design in 1806, shortly after his
marriage in Wakefield, whereupon he commissioned an artist he
had often worked with when he had been an engraver, Thomas
Stothard, to paint the subject. Stothard was one of Blake’s oldest
friends, but subsequent events would damage that friendship
irrevocably. While Blake was working on producing engravings
of the pilgrims, Stothard painted a rendition of the scene that,
like Blake’s, depicted them upon an elongated canvas. At that
point, all similarity ended: while Blake worked with tempera to
try and revive a medievalist style, Stothard used the more popular

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 Creating Systems

Chaucer’s Canterbury medium of oil, creating natural figures and lively, contemporary
Pilgrims, 1810, renditions of the animals that they rode. While Blake’s image
intaglio engraving
on paper. languished or, at best, was ridiculed, Stothard’s painting toured
the country to great acclaim. Blake would write in his Notebook:

For Fortunes favours you your riches bring

But Fortune says she gave you no such thing
Why should you be ungrateful to your friends
Sneaking & Backbiting & Odds & Ends (e509)

Blake felt betrayed, a feeling that was echoed by Gilchrist.

Later biographers, however, have been a little more circumspect.
It is not at all impossible that Cromek took Blake’s idea, believing

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 divine images

that he could improve upon it, but there is no evidence at all that
he commissioned Blake to engrave the original painting. Whatever
the relations between those two, Bentley is certainly right when
he acquits Stothard from any underhand dealings:

Mr. Cromek gave the commission for painting the subject of

the Canterbury Pilgrims. There had been no previous conver­
sation on the subject, though it must long have occupied the
thoughts of the projector, for, on the matter being first men-
tioned to Mr. Stothard, and before he gave answer to the
proposal, he took from his folio a sketch of the subject, shew-
ing that it had been long contemplated and only wanted the
sanction of a commission to set him to work. (br 228)

Stothard may very well have been contemplating his own designs
independently of Blake (although not necessarily without fur-
ther refinement on the part of Cromek). Nevertheless, as Bentley
observes, Blake’s bitterness at what he saw as mistreatment on
the part of Cromek and Stothard drove him ‘steadily deeper into
obscurity and isolation’ (br 229).

The Exhibition of 1809 and A Descriptive Catalogue

In May 1809 Blake took over the upstairs rooms of his brother’s
hosiery shop in Broad Street to mount a one-man show of his work.
The sixteen paintings on display were discussed at great length in
A Descriptive Catalogue, which Blake wrote to accompany the
exhibition and which remains a fertile ground for understanding
much of his thinking about art. The aim of the show, according
to an advertisement he created, was to represent ‘The grand Style
of Art restored; in fresco’ (e528). Fresco was a term traditionally
applied to the method of painting water-based pigments onto fresh
(affresco) plaster; the paint would then set with the materials of

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 Creating Systems

the wall, making the painting more permanent. It had been popular
during the Renaissance and the works of a number of Italian mas-
ters from Giotto’s depictions of the life of St Francis of Assisi to
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel were created using this technique.
Blake’s own use of the term was somewhat more eccentric, refer-
ring instead to water-based paintings: as Morton Paley observes,
in the Catalogue Blake drew attention to his invention of the ‘port-
able fresco’, using tempera, gum and glue on plaster whiting, a
technique that he had first begun to experiment with in the mid-
1790s. Using watercolours, Blake hoped to avoid what he saw as
the muddiness of oil and also produce paintings that could be
moved from one site to another, while at the same time projecting
his ambition to produce ‘pictures on a scale that is suitable to the
grandeur of a nation’.3
Martin Myrone draws attention to the role of the annual Royal
Academy exhibition in the late eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth. This display, the most prestigious of the exhibitions
that took place each year, ‘was intended as a showcase for the
greatest talents of the contemporary British school’.4 The annual
show was an opportunity for artists to make a name for them-
selves and the walls of the Royal Academy were crowded with a
multitude of works that frequently created a barrage of images
to overwhelm the spectator. By 1805 wealthy connoisseurs had
established the British Institution to support their more elevated
notions of art, and contemporaries such as Fuseli had created their
own one-man exhibitions. Blake’s show, therefore, was not par-
ticularly unusual in itself, although none of his contemporaries
went to such great lengths to explain their works in extensive
catalogues.
The sixteen paintings on show in the 1809 exhibition com-
prised a mixture of historical, literary and biblical subjects and were
all intended to demonstrate ‘the grand style of art’. A Descriptive
Catalogue begins with a direct assault on the tastes of the Academy

267
 divine images

of the day, declaiming: ‘the eye that can prefer the Colouring of
Titian and Rubens to that of Michael Angelo and Rafael, ought
to be modest and to doubt its own powers’ (e529). Ridiculing
the assumption that Titian was superior to Michelangelo simply
because his works may have been created later, Blake contin-
ued a line of attack that had been formed in the 1790s, as when
he wrote in his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds:

Having spent the Vigour of my Youth & Genius under the

Opression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves
Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without The spiritual form
Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks of Nelson guiding
Leviathan, c. 1805,
on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment tempera and gold
(e636) on canvas.

Indignation and resentment were

to be primary themes of Blake’s
writing and letters for the follow-
ing decade, but in 1809 he still
hoped that he would be able to
transform the tastes of the nation.
At this point he was deliberately
misreading Reynolds’s hierarchy
of artists, although the earlier
anno­­­­­tations were probably more
pointed because of stories that
James Barry lived on apples and
bread while producing work com-
parable to Michelangelo, while
Reynolds could charge a fortune
for his commissions.5 In making
these satirical points, however, it
was unfortunate for Blake – and

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 Creating Systems

The spiritual form

of Pitt guiding
Behemoth, c. 1805,
tempera and gold
on canvas.

for later generations – that many of the experiments in tempera

suffered a much greater darkening and blotting than he saw in
Reynolds and Gainsborough, so that those on canvas such as The
Bard from Gray or Satan Calling up His Legions are incredibly
dark. It is the pen and ink compositions, covered with delicate
washes of watercolour, that are the most astonishing today, with
pictures such as Christ in the Sepulchre Guarded by Angels still
illuminated by their divine light.
Although Blake sought an art of suitable grandeur to represent
the nation, it is likely that the few visitors who attended the

269
 divine images

exhibition would have been extremely confused by what that

national message actually was. The first two paintings, The spiritual
form of Nelson guiding Leviathan and The spiritual form of Pitt guid­
ing Behemoth, would have been ambiguous to viewers precisely
because Blake, probably still nervous after his trial in 1804, does
not speak explicitly about the political meanings of the paintings.
Instead, he observes that these pictures ‘are compositions of a
mythological cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo,
and Egyptian Antiquity, which are still preserved on rude monu­
ments, being copies from some stupendous originals now lost’
(e530). Instead of a glorification of Nelson, a national hero because
of his death in victory at Trafalgar, or of Pitt, the leading light of
conservative politics until his demise a year after Nelson, Blake
depicts the idealized forms of these two men with the same ambiv-
alence that he reserves for Newton: there is something potentially
divine about them, but their desire for power reduces them to
slave masters over humanity as they involve the nations of the
earth in the coils of warlike monsters. Blake refers to the sources
of his art as ‘the Cherubim’, the statues of antiquity from north
Africa and Asia Minor that, according to Blake, were copied by
the Greeks:

The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient repub-
lics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen those
wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the
Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of
Temples, Towers, Cities, Palaces, and erected in the highly
cultivated states of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, among the
Rivers of Paradise, being originals from which the Greeks
and Hetrurians copied Hercules, Farnese, Venus of Medicis,
Apollo Belvidere, and all the grand works of ancient art. They
were executed in a very superior style to those justly admired
copies, being with their accompaniments terrific and grand

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 Creating Systems

in the highest degree. The Artist has endeavoured to emulate

the grandeur of those seen in his vision, and to apply it to
modern Heroes, on a smaller scale. No man can believe that
either Homer’s Mythology, or Ovid’s, were the production
of Greece, or of Latium; neither will any one believe, that the
Greek statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek
Artists; perhaps the Torso is the only original work remain-
ing; all the rest are evidently copies, though fine ones, from
greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs. The Greek Muses are
daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory, and not of Inspiration
or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime con-
ceptions. Those wonderful originals seen in my visions, were
some of them one hundred feet in height; some were painted
as pictures, and some carved as basso relievos, and some as
groupes of statues, all containing mythological and recon-
dite meaning, where more is meant than meets the eye. (e531)

Among the historical paintings on display, the most ambitious is

that which has not survived into modern times. The Ancient
Britons was a very large picture by Blake’s standards, and depicted
three figures – the strongest, the most beautiful and the ugliest
men – who, according to a Welsh triad, were meant to have been
the only three men to have escaped from the last battle fought by
King Arthur. Blake’s description of the painting in the Catalogue
must have been among the most bizarre that any visitors to the
exhibition would have read:

The British Antiquities are now in the Artist’s hands; all his
visionary contemplations, relating to his own country and its
ancient glory, when it was as it again shall be, the source of
learning and inspiration. Arthur was a name for the constel-
lation Arcturus, or Bootes, the Keeper of the North Pole. And
all the fables of Arthur and his round table; of the warlike

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naked Britons; of Merlin; of Arthur’s conquest of the whole

world; of his death, or sleep, and promise to return again; of
the Druid monuments, or temples; of the pavement of Watling
street; of London stone; of the caverns in Cornwall, Wales,
Derbyshire, and Scotland; of the Giants of Ireland and Britain;
of the elemental beings, called by us by the general name of
Fairies; and of these three who escaped, namely, Beauty,
Strength, and Ugliness, Mr. B. has in his hands poems of the
highest antiquity. Adam was a Druid, and Noah; also Abraham
was called to succeed the Druidical age. (e542–3)

The ‘poems of the highest antiquity’ almost certainly refers to

Jerusalem, perhaps also to Milton. Considering Blake was etching
these as the exhibition was in progress, to call them ancient poems
seems strange; the comment makes more sense if we understand
it to mean that, as he indicated in his description of the tempera
paintings of Nelson and Pitt, he saw his art as reviving that of the
ancients.
The few visitors who saw the 1809 exhibition tended to be less
forgiving than subsequent admirer’s of Blake’s art. Robert Hunt
wrote the only review in a September edition of The Examiner,
remarking:

But, when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken

for the sallies of genius by those whose works have exhibited
the soundest thinking in art, the malady has indeed attained
a pernicious height, and it becomes a duty to endeavour to
arrest its progress. Such is the case with the productions and
admirers of william blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose
personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and,
consequently, of whom no public notice would have been
taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion
of the examiner. (br 283)

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Hunt’s attempt to arrest Blake’s progress may have had little effect,
as Blake was already suffering from increasing obscurity; however,
on top of the failed attempt to achieve a wider audience with the
engravings to The Grave, the notion that Blake was an artist of bad
taste – one, moreover, who was an ‘unfortunate lunatic’ – at the
very least undermined his confidence. He would only exhibit once
more in his lifetime and, over the years, retreated further and fur-
ther from the public sphere. As Myrone observes: ‘Blake’s stated
ambition was to make this exhibition a launch pad for vast public
pictorial schemes, which would recover the original spiritual power
of art.’6 Even Blake’s friends, however, were confused by both
the images on display and his Descriptive Catalogue. The incident
with Cromek had effectively ended Blake’s career as a commer-
cial engraver, but at least it had brought some wider recognition:
the disaster of the 1809 exhibition reduced even that to obscurity.

Illustrations to Milton

The return to London from Felpham had brought with it some

connections and, in The Grave, a commission that would have
helped Blake find some degree of financial security had he been
able to engrave as well as design the illustrations to Blair’s poem.
Between 1809 and 1820, however, he and Catherine faced greater
struggles as they sank deeper into poverty. While he felt that
former friends were increasingly abandoning them, one couple
remained true: Thomas and Elizabeth Butts. After the fiasco of
the 1809 exhibition, Butts was virtually the only significant buyer
of Blake’s works for a long period. Not only did he provide Blake
with some financial support, however limited, but through his
commissions he encouraged the artist to produce some of his finest
and best-known images as illustrations to Milton.
Illustrating the works of other authors was something of the
stock-in-trade for a jobbing engraver, particularly as they would be

273
 divine images

called upon to provide prints for artists who based their paintings
on popular authors. Blake himself served in this role with engrav-
ings for Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Shakespeare, and he printed
his own designs for Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Young and, of
course, Robert Blair. He was also employed as an artist to provide
illustrations for John Flaxman, painting 116 watercolour illus-
trations to Gray’s Poems, which were intended as a gift for Anne
Flaxman. These include some of Blake’s most charming works,
such as those to Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’,
while also capturing moments of Blakean sublimity, as in his image
of Apollo for ‘The Progress of Poesy’. After his return to London,
Blake also continued to compose his illustrations to the Bible for
Butts, including the astonishing series of watercolours inspired by
the Book of Revelation incorporating his powerful depictions of
evil in the form of the Great Red Dragon, images that would be
made famous in the late twentieth century by Thomas Harris’s
novels featuring the serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
Illustration was a means for Blake to explore fertile dialogues
with those works that inspired him and, in the first decades of
the nineteenth century after his return from Felpham, no author
inspired him more than John Milton. As Lucy Newlyn observes,
one cannot grasp Blake’s visionary project without first under-
standing how much it ‘depended on the massively ambitious
project of rewriting the Bible and Paradise Lost’.7 This task had
begun with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Blake’s own
comprehension of Milton was transformed by his time with Hayley,
whose work on a biography of the epic poet seemed to have deep-
ened Blake’s critical appreciation of his forebear. Much of that
task of rewriting Paradise Lost was, as we have seen, taken up in
Milton a Poem, but throughout the 1800s and 1810s Blake engaged
in a dialogue with many more of Milton’s works via his art.
The first series we have is neither for Paradise Lost nor for
Thomas Butts, but instead is a series of eight illustrations to

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 Creating Systems

Comus, commissioned by Reverend Joseph Thomas. Born in 1765

in Llanerfyl, Monmouthshire, after graduating from Cambridge
Thomas had been ordained a minister in 1790. He married an
heiress, Millicent Parkhurst, and served as a naval chaplain before
residing at the estate of his wife’s family in Epsom. Something of
a connoisseur, he would commission several works from Blake,
including sets for Paradise Lost and ‘On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity’, with Blake producing multiple copies of his works for
both Butts and Thomas during the early 1800s. In his illustrations
to Comus, we see Blake following Milton’s text carefully but also
allowing for his own interpretations. As the editors of the Blake
Archive point out, for example, Milton’s poem ends with a joyous
dance while the faces of the figures in Blake’s final painting are much
more serious. Throughout the illustrations, Blake tells Milton’s fan-
tastical story of how two brothers and their sister (simply referred
to as ‘the Lady’) become separated in woods. The Lady encounters
the debauched figure of Comus, a necromancer born to Circe, who
has travelled across Europe to the woods of Shropshire. Comus traps
her in an enchanted chair and attempts to seduce her among his ret-
inue, people transformed into animal-headed figures by his magic.
The brothers, meanwhile, having discovered a water nymph,
Sabrina, return with her to drive off Comus and free their sister, who
is released by the divine nymph because she has remained stead-
fast in her virtue. Blake repeated the Comus designs for Butts in
1815, and Pamela Dunbar observes that there are two distinct styles
between the two sets, seeing the earlier set for Thomas as more
delicate and supple. She argues that the first set concentrated on
the personal drama of the Lady’s threatened virtue, while the later
version for Butts draws upon a Neoplatonic theme, the Lady rep-
resenting the soul as it descends into the body – signified by the
forest – and threatened with the bondage of earthly passions.8
Before turning to the most influential series produced by
Blake, it is worth considering briefly two other, shorter sets of

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compositions for ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ and for

‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. The first of these sets, as with
Comus, was produced initially for Thomas and later for Butts in
1809 and 1815, respectively. Blake had long been interested in the
poem, making reference to it in Europe a Prophecy, where he also
provides a poetic treatment of the theme of how Christ’s birth
would lead to the overthrow of pagan gods. Upon returning to the
illustrations to Milton once back in London, he emphasized more
rigorously his antipathy to classical civilization in contrast to
his reinvigorated Christology. The series begins with the simple
harmony of Christ being born in a manger in Bethlehem, the
Holy Family at peace. After an image depicting the annuncia-
tion of Christ’s birth to the shepherds, the series continues with
the Old Dragon (Satan) in hell as two pagan deities – Apollo and
Moloch, representatives of classical and eastern paganism – flee
their shrines. The image of Moloch is particularly striking for the
inclusion of a young child leaping triumphant from the flames
into which it had been cast as sacrifice. The series ends with the
Holy Family once more around the manger as part of ‘The Night
of Peace’, their tranquillity protected by angels. While ‘L’Allegro’
(mirth) and ‘Il Penseroso’ (melancholy) were relatively short
poems by Milton, Blake’s treatment of them for Thomas Butts,
sometime between 1816 and 1820, results in some of the finest
designs that he ever produced. Consid­er­ing the dispiriting cir-
cumstances in which the Blakes had lived in the decade preceding
those paintings, the illustrations to ‘L’Allegro’ in particular are
among the most joyous that Blake ever painted, particularly the
title page, ‘Mirth’, and his image of ‘The Sun at His Eastern Gate’.
‘On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity’: Blake may have been hostile to Apollo and Milton’s classicism,
The Annunciation but as Dunbar rightly points out, the abundance of personified
to the Shepherds, forms in his illustrations means that Blake can remain faithful to
1809, pen and
watercolour over Milton’s highly metaphorical text but also provide us with ‘a
pencil on paper. revelation of the nature of his own Divine Vision’.9

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 divine images

Marvellous as these images are, however, it is Blake’s illustra-

tions to Paradise Lost that have been the most influential. Again,
he produced two sets of these – one for Thomas and the other for
Butts, although in this instance they were painted very close to
each other (1807 and 1808, respectively); indeed, at the end of
his life, Blake returned to the series to compose a third set for John
Linnell, but died before it could be completed. There are only
twelve illustrations in each set, but they set before the viewer some
of the most iconic images of Milton’s poetry ever to be committed
to paper or canvas. The opening image of ‘Satan Calling Up His
Legions’ seems to offer us the properly heroic version of the Devil,
returning us to the Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, who
announced that Milton was ‘a true Poet and of the Devils party
without knowing it’ (e35). Yet Blake’s depiction of Satan is much
closer to that in Milton a Poem than The Marriage. The illustration
that immediately follows, one of the most famous to be produced
by Blake, is a true image of horror: ‘Satan, Sin and Death’ shows
Satan at the gates of Hell, muscular and heroic as he confronts
the shadowy figure of Death, his son. Between the two of them,
however, is Sin, drawn from some of the most disturbing lines to
be encountered in Milton’s poem:

The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fould
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb’d thir noyse, into her woomb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d
Within unseen. (ii.650–59)

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 Creating Systems

Milton’s ‘Paradise
Lost’: Satan, Sin, and
Death: Satan Comes
to the Gates of Hell,
1808, pen and ink
and watercolour
on paper.

As with his illustrations of the Great Red Dragon, this is one of

the most powerful depictions of evil in the history of Western art.
The sexual vanity of Satan, who breeds his son, Death, with his
daughter because she seems to reflect back his own beauty, is an
act that condemns her to eternal, incestuous rape. The expression
on her face is one of unrelenting despair and even Satan and Death
appear to stare back in horror at each other, as though realizing
for the first time the enormity of suffering that hell brings with it.
The picture is a parody of his large colour print of the good and
evil angels fighting over a child, no longer even pretending to
strive for the good of the child but instead locked in stasis, their

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 divine images

James Gillray,
Sin, Death and
the Devil, 1792,
intaglio engraving,
hand-coloured
on paper.

postures upright and reflected back at each other: Death, with his
beard and crown, may be a version of Urizen, and Satan, his hair
curled in flames, may be Orc, but now Frye’s notion of the Orc
cycle, the endless succession of rebellion into tyranny is complete.
Energy and reason are frozen at the gates of hell.
This diminution of the role of Satan continues immediately
in the following illustration, ‘Christ Offers to Redeem Man’. In
contrast to many of Blake’s previous images of a Urizenic creator,
God in this picture appears genuinely sorrowful as Christ offers
himself up in a posture that is a graceful precursor to the crucifix-
ion. That event will be foretold by Michael in the eleventh
illustration of the series, but it is also a posture that echoes one
used by Blake regularly to show the resurrected Christ. That God
is sorrowful, however, as Dunbar observes, does not deflect com-
pletely from his hypocrisy: as Blake repeats in Milton a Poem, it
is Satan’s pretence of pity and love that leads to disaster, and
certainly throughout the rest of the illustrations it is Christ, not

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 Creating Systems

God the father, who is the hero. In contrast to the heroic pose of
the Messiah, Satan is recumbent, echoing his pose when he is
watching Adam and Eve make love in jealousy, fully aware of
the horror of his own vile copulations with Sin. At this point
Satan is wrapped about with a serpent and, by the end of the
series, his bodily form will have dissolved completely, replaced
entirely by the snake into which he is now bound, the Old
Dragon who suffers on the morning of Christ’s Nativity.
The centrality of Christ to Blake’s vision is given not only in
the familiar image of Jesus on the cross, as in the eleventh illus-
tration, but in the remarkable depiction of ‘The Rout of the Rebel
Angels’, the seventh image in the series. Taking his cue from
Paradise Lost, it is Christ who leads the war in heaven. The image
echoes two others of Blake’s: The Ancient of Days, with Urizen
reaching out of the sun to circumscribe the heavens, and the
appearance of Los out of a solar disc to stand before Blake in
Milton a Poem. The relation between Christ in ‘The Rout of the
Rebel Angels’ and The Ancient of Days is an ironic one: Christ is
taking up the bow of burning gold invoked in the Preface to Milton,
or indeed the bow that Albion takes up at the end of Jerusalem
the Emanation of the Giant Albion, and is the figure of the sun-god,
as Dunbar points out.10 Satan is not the example of energy, but
rather the Urizenic figure of rational evil who has been cast out
from his false seat at the centre of the universe. This leads us back
to reinterpret the famous line, so often taken out of context, in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that Milton was of the Devil’s party.
Almost immediately preceding these, Blake writes: ‘This [that
Messiah fell and made a heaven out of hell] is shewn in the Gospel,
where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that
Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being
no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire’ (e35). Milton’s mis-
take was to assume that the vainglorious, martial Satan parodied
in Paradise Lost could be a hero – even an antihero. In fact, like the

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 divine images

Milton’s ‘Paradise
Lost’: The Temptation
and Fall of Eve,
1808, pen
and ink and
watercolour
on paper.

false Jehovah whose position he usurps, he is not an energetic

contrary but merely a negation, the ‘bound or outward circum-
ference of energy’. It is Christ who is the figure of energy and
who, in rejecting the values of the god of this world, will be
denounced as being of the Devil’s party.
The centrality of Christ is clear in the final series of illustra-
tions created by Blake, those to Paradise Regained, another set
of watercolours produced for Butts between 1816 and 1820. As

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 Creating Systems

with Milton’s original poem, the images from this set tend to be
less well known than the more dramatic scenes of Paradise Lost,
but what is immediately evident from these illustrations is just
how central Christ’s humanity is: in two-thirds of the images Jesus
is the main figure, drawing attention to what Billingsley has pointed
out is the crucial role of Christology to Blake’s sense of the divine.11
The rejection of more orthodox visions of the divine is perhaps
best indicated by the three illustrations to the temptations of Christ,
in which the Devil tries to lead Christ into worshipping him. To
emphasize the point, Satan appears as a white-bearded, muscular
man, naked but for a loincloth, as though Urizen had stepped
down from the sun in The Ancient of Days: in these images, he is
trying to tempt Jesus into worshipping him as the false god of this
world, the very deity who is depicted – and worshipped – in art
and churches across the world. By contrast, at the same time as
he was working on the illustrations to Paradise Regained Blake
was writing The Everlasting Gospel, in which appear the lines:
‘Thou art a Man [,] God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to
adore’ (e520). To worship a god in heaven is to worship Satan, for
‘Satan is Urizen’.
Blake’s illustrations to Milton are generally extremely faithful
to the text – much more so, in many instances, than the leeway
he took when illustrating the Bible. Yet, as with Milton a Poem,
this should not be taken as simple agreement with the epic poet.
Blake is, rather, engaged in a critical dialogue with his precursor:
throughout the illustrations, particularly those to Paradise Lost,
he de-emphasizes the role of God and consistently raises that of
Jesus. This is the most telling of Blake’s differences with Milton,
but a more subtle change occurs in his depiction of Satan. The
constant degradation of Satan’s role in the illustrations to Milton’s
poetry would suggest, on the face of it, that Blake is coming much
closer to a conventional understanding of the role of the Devil,
one very much in contrast to his earlier, revolutionary stance in

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 divine images

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. But in that text it is clear, when
we place Blake’s most famous statements back in context, that his
devilish messiah is always Christ. What is perhaps most astonish-
ing about the later illustrations, revolutionary even, is that again
and again Satan assumes a role that appears closest to Urizen,
most evidently in the images to Paradise Regained, but also in
those for Paradise Lost where the Devil takes on the form repeat-
edly of an old, bearded man. As Blake writes in Milton, Los and
Enitharmon come to know that ‘Satan is Urizen’, a kind of dia­
bolus est deus inversus. The fight between good and evil angels,
between energy and reason is not Satan versus Death, or Satan
versus God – for both are inverted images of each other: it is,
rather, the Son of Man versus the false image of a deity in heaven.

Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion

Around the same time that he began work on Milton a Poem, Blake
also started to plan an even more extensive piece that would be
the summation of his work in illuminated printing. Jerusalem the
Emanation of the Giant Albion would be the largest of his books
in stereotype: although it did not match the proposed length of
Night Thoughts, at one hundred engraved plates it was twice that
of Milton and far more extensive than anything he had attempted
during his time at Lambeth. To see the hand-coloured Copy E,
with its plates heavily overpainted – in some places with gold – is
not to look at a book as we would normally comprehend it, even
one lavishly illustrated. It is, rather, to see an object that is a work Jerusalem, the
of art on a par with the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval Emanation of the
Giant Albion,
period, closer to works such as the Book of Kells, or the Book of Copy E, Plate 4,
Hours that belonged to Catherine of Cleves. 1803–21, relief
The original plan for Jerusalem had been conceived either and white-line
etching with
at the end of his stay in Felpham or, more likely, upon his and hand colouring
Catherine’s return to London. The title page is engraved ‘1804 on paper.

284
 divine images

Printed by W. Blake Sth Molton St.’ (e144). It is highly unlikely

that Blake completed it before 1818 when he wrote to Dawson
Turner with a list of his prophetic works – a list that included
Milton but not Jerusalem – and the printing of Jerusalem is usu-
ally dated now to 1821. Divided into four parts, the first section
is entitled ‘To the Public’ and certainly begins as though it was
written (and probably engraved) not long after leaving Felpham:

After my three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I

again display my Giant forms to the Public: My former Giants
& Fairies having reciev’d the highest reward possible: the
[love] and [friendship] of those with whom to be connected,
is to be [blessed]: I cannot doubt that this more consolidated
& extended Work, will be as kindly recieved. (e145)

The reference to ‘three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean’

clearly means Felpham, while the comment that his ‘former Giants
& Fairies’ had been met with love and friendship indicates that
Blake intended to return to the matter of his Lambeth Prophecies
as quickly as possible. Yet Jerusalem took more than fifteen years
to etch and print, the work laborious and presumably requiring
resources that, in a state of increasing indigence, were not always
available to Blake. By the time it was printed, it was clear that
Blake received few rewards from his readers, and this is reflected
in this opening address. Words have been gouged from the plate,
anything that would imply a direct relationship to the reader. By
the time of his death, only six copies had been printed and Blake
was increasingly aware – in a decade during which, for the most
part, he received no commercial commissions and had failed to
impress the public with his one-man show – that there was cer-
tainly no wide readership for his work. The original etching of
‘To the Public’ was an act of hope; the gouging out of individual
words was an act of anger and despair. The printing and beautiful

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 Creating Systems

colouring of Copy E, which does not appear to have been sold and
was instead inherited by Catherine on William’s death, was an act
of private faith and love. Jerusalem is a difficult book to describe.
The confusion that is often felt by modern readers was shared by
those few who knew of its existence during Blake’s lifetime.
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a pupil of Fuseli’s who would
later be transported to Van Diemen’s Land for fraud and was sus-
pected of having poisoned his sister-in-law to claim insurance,
wrote in 1820:

my learned friend Dr. Tobias Ruddicombe, m.d. [Waine­

wright’s affectionate pseudonym for Blake] is, at my earnest
entreaty, casting a tremendous piece of ordnance, – an eighty-
eight pounder! which he proposeth to fire off in your next. It
is an account of an ancient, newly discovered, illuminated
manuscript, which has to name ‘Jerusalem the Emanation
of the Giant Albion!!!’ It contains a good deal anent one
‘Los,’ who, it appears, is now, and hath been from the crea-
tion, the sole and fourfold dominator of the celebrated city
of Golgonooza! The doctor assures me that the redemption
of mankind hangs on the universal diffusion of the doctrines
broached in this m.s. (br 370–71)

Blake and Wainewright had become friends (Wainewright

bought a number of Blake’s works) and his account, which
appeared in the London Magazine under the name of Janus
Weathercock, is humorous but also well-intentioned. Both he
and Blake were probably aware at this time that the doctrines
of the manuscript were more likely to be ignored than to lead to
anyone’s salvation.
Jerusalem may be difficult in many ways, but it does operate
with a number of repeating motifs and figures. Most important
among these are the giant Albion, Blake’s vision of Britain that he

287
 divine images

Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the
Giant Albion,
Copy E, Plate 6,
relief and white-
line etching with
hand colouring
on paper.

had first begun to map out in The Four Zoas; Jerusalem, not a place
in this text but a woman, the emanation of Albion as Enitharmon
is the emanation of Los, and Vala, frequently referred to as
Babylon, who represents for much of the work the antithesis of
Jerusalem herself. The prophet Los, with his emanation – Enith­
armon – and his spectre, is the main figure of the book. The other
Zoas are occasionally alluded to, but in this particular text it is the
psychomachia between Albion and his emanation, whom he has

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 Creating Systems

abandoned as he turns his back on Christianity, as well as the

struggle of Los, the prophetic alter ego of Blake, to return him to
salvation, that dominate the text. Fred Dortort observes that Blake
wrote Jerusalem to ‘shatter his readers’ preconceptions about lit-
erature and the perception of literature’ itself.12 As such, the
inconsistencies within the text are not to be absorbed and explained
away but rather considered as a partnership between author and
reader to try and encourage a deeper level of understanding. In
this way, it emulates the prophetic style of figures such as Ezekiel
or John of Patmos in order to encourage the true fulfilment of
imagination. Certainly the poem confounded readers until after
the Second World War, and the best interpreters, such as Morton
Paley in The Continuing City, avoid any simplistic and reductive
reading. Yet its four clearly marked sections invite an attempt at
ordered understanding: there is, after all, some kind of narrative
flow across the whole, which begins with Albion turning his back
on Christ and thus entering into a deathly fall before he returns to
the divine at the end. Between these two events – fall and apoca-
lypse – there is a series of ever-circling images, many hypnagogic
and truly surreal, as Los with Enitharmon and his spectre, his sep-
arated feminine and masculine parts, attempt to create Golgonooza,
the City of Art. Blake’s imagination is describing not the fallen
world of history, but trying to capture in fallen language a sense
of eternity. In many respects, it is a poem that could only hope for
any sense of wider engagement after the phenomenon of Modern­
ism, for readers who have experienced James Joyce’s Ulysses or
The Cantos of Ezra Pound.
While largely abandoning the structure of The Four Zoas,
Blake still maintains elements of the internal war, or psychomachia,
that drove that narrative. In this instance, however, it is focused
on Albion, Blake’s vision of one of the Eternals who is both every-
man and the country of Britain. The clearest image of Albion as
the island of Britain actually appears at the end of Milton, where

289
 divine images

Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the
Giant Albion, Copy
E, Plate 11, relief
and white-line
etching with hand
colouring on paper.

Albion attempts to rise from his couch of death, a precursor to his

activities in Jerusalem:

Then Albion rose up in the Night of Beulah on his Couch

Of dread repose seen by the visionary eye; his face is toward
The east, toward Jerusalems Gates: groaning he sat above
His rocks. London & Bath & Legions & Edinburgh

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 Creating Systems

Are the four pillars of his Throne; his left foot near London
Covers the shades of Tyburn: his instep from Windsor
To Primrose Hill stretching to Highgate & Holloway
London is between his knees: its basements fourfold
His right foot stretches to the sea on Dover cliffs, his heel
On Canterburys ruins; his right hand covers lofty Wales
His left Scotland; his bosom girt with gold involves
York, Edinburgh, Durham & Carlisle & on the front
Bath, Oxford, Cambridge Norwich; his right elbow
Leans on the Rocks of Erins Land, Ireland ancient nation
His head bends over London: he sees his embodied
Spectre
Trembling before him with exceeding great trembling
& fear
He views Jerusalem & Babylon, his tears flow down
He movd his right foot to Cornwall, his left to the Rocks
of Bognor
He strove to rise to walk into the Deep. but strength failing
Forbad & down with dreadful groans he sunk upon his
Couch
In moony Beulah. (39.32–52, e140–41)

In Jerusalem Blake involves this sense of the geography of Albion

with a very strange sense of its history. In the second part of the
book there is a prose section entitled ‘To the Jews’, which begins:

Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion! Can it be? Is

it a Truth that the Learned have explored? Was Britain
the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion? If it is
true: my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was &
is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True, and
cannot be controverted. Ye are united O ye Inhabitants
of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the

291
 divine images

most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel –

The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness, the Righteous to
Righteousness. Amen! Huzza! Selah! ‘All things Begin &
End in Albions Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.’
Your Ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber,
Shem, and Noah, who were Druids: as the Druid
Temples (which are the Patriarchal Pillars & Oak
Groves) over the whole Earth witness to this day.
You have a tradition, that Man anciently containd in his
mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth: this you
recieved from the Druids.
‘But now the Starry Heavens are fled from the mighty limbs
of Albion’ (e171)

This frankly bizarre passage, which seems to identify Druidism

with Judaism, would have actually appeared slightly less strange
to some of Blake’s contemporaries who would have been able to
read works by antiquarians such as William Stukeley or Edward
Davies. These writers did indeed attempt to prove that the patri-
archal religion of the Druids and the Israelites were one and the
same: thus, ‘All things Begin & End in Albions Ancient Druid
Rocky Shore.’ As far back as his first experiments in stereotype
printing, Blake had indicated that he considered national identi-
ties an exertion of the imagination, and Jerusalem is no exercise
in ethnonationalism. As he writes at one point:

What do I see? The Briton Saxon Roman Norman

amalgamating Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the
In my Furnaces into One Nation the English: & taking Giant Albion,
refuge Copy E, Plate 25,
In the Loins of Albion. The Canaanite united with the relief and white-
line etching with
fugitive hand colouring
Hebrew, whom she divided into Twelve, & sold into Egypt on paper.

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 divine images

Then scatterd the Egyptian & Hebrew to the four Winds! Jerusalem, the
This sinful Nation Created in our Furnaces & Looms is Emanation of the
Giant Albion, Copy
Albion (92.1–6, e252) E, Plate 32, relief
and white-line
This strange combination of English and Hebrew peoples, etching with hand
colouring on paper.
what would become known as British-Israelitism in the nineteenth
century, comes from Blake’s visionary view of history: the eye
that is capable of perceiving eternity will realize that all nations,
like all religions, are one. Jerusalem is Blake’s grand attempt to Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the
demonstrate this transformation of perception through an immense Giant Albion,
act of illuminated printing, one which relies not solely on words Copy E, Plate 54,
but on the combined overwhelming of the senses through art. relief and white-
line etching with
As such, the plates of Jerusalem are lavishly illustrated. Some hand colouring on
motifs are strange and defy any simple logical explanation (such paper.
as the swan-headed woman on Plate
11); others, in particular some of the
beautiful full-colour plates, seem to
illustrate events within the text. On
Plate 25, for example, there is an
aston­­ishing depiction of a tattooed
figure (following the style of the
Picts or ancient Britons and their
woad-coloured skin) who is being
sacrificed in a druidic ritual by three
female figures. This is Albion, being
slain according to the very laws of
war and punishment that he had
decreed in his fall from Christianity,
and his murderers are his own daugh-
ters who, like his sons, are ‘Names
anciently rememberd, but now con-
temn’d as fictions!’ (e148). These
sons and daughters have fully given

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 Creating Systems

Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the Giant
Albion, Copy E,
Plate 76, relief and
white-line etching
with hand colouring
on paper.

themselves over to a paganism, which Blake also equates with

deism, the belief in a Urizenic god of laws ‘out there’, and now
engage in the sinful and warlike destruction of their enemies,
rather than engaging in the forgiveness of sins, which is the true
path to redemption. The vision of what Albion can be is given in
the final plate of the book, in which Los, Enitharmon and his
Spectre work to restore Albion to its original form, indicated by
the symbol of Avebury and Stonehenge revived and combined
into an ideal structure.
Jerusalem is a work that defies easy explanations. What Blake
is trying to achieve is perhaps best explained in the following
words of his incarnation, the prophet Los:

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans

Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the Giant I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create
Albion, Copy E, (8.20–21, e153)
Plate 100, relief and
white-line etching
with hand colouring The book is the culmination of Blake’s art and mythology: Urizen,
on paper. Luvah, Vala, Los, Enitharmon and Albion are the system that he

297
 divine images

Jerusalem, the
Emanation of the
Giant Albion,
Copy E,
Plate 57, relief
and white-line
etching with
hand colouring
on paper.

created to lead him to enlightenment, and that enlightenment

was a sure understanding that the wars of England, France and
the continental powers, the subjugation of the arts to military
and economic prowess, were not the fulfilment of Christianity
but its antithesis. By the time he came to print the work, he
despaired of finding a wider audience for his vision – which was
not to indoctrinate the reader into a system of beliefs, which he

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 Creating Systems

considered priestcraft or deism, but rather to inculcate in them

the virtues of imaginative vision by means of which they would
in turn create their own systems. In every respect, that Jerusalem
was not more widely known during Blake’s lifetime is one of
the greatest tragedies of art in the nineteenth century. Yet Blake,
almost penniless, continued to work so lovingly and so painstak-
ingly on an object of art that would be bequeathed in its most
beautiful copy to his wife. This is the golden thread that he refers
to at the beginning of Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion,
that the reading of his great epic will lead to a more profound
understanding of both his art and his faith – to create not for the
god of this world, but for the human form divine.

299
 9
Final Visions

I n the years following the failure of relations with Cromek and

the exhibition of 1809, William and Catherine had lived in
increasing isolation and poverty. Their dependence on each other
was profound, but in the final decade of William’s life they would
also be joined by an ever-wider circle of friends who would trans-
form both the understanding of his work and the couple’s material
circumstances. Crucial to this change was one man, John Linnell,
who was the most significant in creating opportunities for William
to continue working into his last years.

John Linnell, the Shoreham Ancients

and the Visionary Heads

Born in Bloomsbury in 1792, Linnell’s father was an artisan who

brought him into contact with a number of artists and encouraged
him to explore his own creative talents. His early tuition brought
him into contact with the painters Benjamin West and John Varley,
Illustrations of the who provided instruction, and in 1805 he was admitted as a student
Book of Job: When the of the Royal Academy. By the time he was introduced to Blake
Morning Stars Sang in 1818, via George Cumberland Jr, the son of Blake’s old acquaint-
Together, 1821, pen
and ink, watercolour ance, he was already starting to attract considerable attention for
on paper. his landscape paintings. Indeed, so popular was Linnell’s work that

301
 divine images

in 1850 he purchased a substantial property in Redhill, Surrey.

Like Blake, Linnell had been raised sympathetic to Dissenting
beliefs, but unlike Blake he proved himself to be a worldly figure
on the art scene. His success, however, was one that he used to
Blake’s advantage, introducing the older artist to a wider range of
potential patrons and customers and even commissioning Blake
himself: the prices that Linnell paid for the illustrations to the
Book of Job and to Dante, £150 for each set, were the largest that
Blake ever received. His kindness helped William and Catherine
to live in relative security, especially when compared to their
indigence during the previous decade. Of Blake himself, Linnell
later told Alexander Gilchrist:

I soon encountered Blake’s peculiarities and [was] somewhat

taken aback by the boldness of some of his assertions. I never
saw anything the least like madness for I never opposed him
spitefully as many did but being really anxious to fathom if
possible the amount of truth which might be in his most star-
tling assertions I generally met with a sufficiently rational
explanation in the most really friendly & conciliatory tone.1

Among the most important of Blake’s late works, most notably

the illustrations to Job and Dante, came about directly because
of Linnell’s influence, while his introduction of the engraver to
figures such as Dr Robert John Thornton provided him with other
opportunities. Thornton was the family doctor of the Linnells, and
John Linnell convinced him to allow Blake to provide a series of
woodcuts to a new edition of The Pastorals of Virgil that Thornton
was producing. The doctor was disturbed by the unconventional
style of Blake’s art, but these became some of the most influential
pieces that Blake ever made.
At about the same time as he was working on the woodcuts,
William and Catherine moved into their final residence, 3 Fountain

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Court, off the Strand. Their rooms, as described by Henry Crabb

Robinson, the journalist and then lawyer who befriended Blake
in his later years, were very poor and yet, despite this fact, William
and Catherine appeared to live in their last home in considerable
happiness. As well as his friendship with Linnell, Blake befriended
a number of younger artists who referred to themselves as the
Ancients. Meeting once a month in London, as well as less fre-
quently in Shoreham, Kent, where Samuel Palmer had a home,
they included Edward Calvert, George Richmond and Frederick
Tatham, as well as Palmer. This group often referred to Blake’s
home as ‘The House of the Interpreter’, a reference to John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress. Impressed by Blake’s abilities and vision,
they set out to create a more archaic form of art than that which
was fashionable in the early nineteenth century. In this respect they
would become an important influence on the later Pre-Raphaelites,
although their pastoral vision often seemed closer to poets such as
Wordsworth than Blake. Peter Ackroyd may be partially correct
when he remarks: ‘It is not at all clear that they properly under-
stood him.’2 Whether this was the case or not, they provided an
important lifeline to Blake as an intellectual community that
helped to sustain him in his final years.
Samuel Palmer was probably the most talented of this group,
as well as being one of the youngest. Although having little formal

The Man Sweeping

the Interpreter’s
Parlour, c. 1822,
white line
engraving on
paper.

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 divine images

Samuel Palmer,
The Harvest Moon,
c. 1831–2,
oil on paper.

training, Palmer displayed talent as an artist and began to exhibit

at the Royal Academy from the age of fourteen. He met Blake in
1824 through Linnell and, having purchased a run-down cottage
in Shoreham, began work on a series of visionary landscape paint-
ings now housed at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University,
known as the ‘Oxford sepias’. These early works were disliked by
critics; later in life he became a much more conventional land-
scape painter, especially as marriage to Linnell’s daughter in 1837
brought him under the rather domineering influence of his father-
in-law, who was now determined to make as much money as he
could through his protégé.
A very different character was the painter John Varley, who
was considerably older than the Shoreham Ancients. His style of
painting, which included a series of extremely popular landscapes
of North Wales made between 1799 and 1802, was very different
to that of Blake. Varley also had a fascination with occult matters
such as astrology, as well as being a serial debtor who approached

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Samuel Palmer,
The Timber Wain,
c. 1833–4,
watercolour and
gouache on paper.

his debts with a cheerful manner. ‘If it were not for my troubles,’
he is reported to have once said, ‘I should burst with joy!’3 He cast
Blake’s horoscope as an attempt to explain his character, which,
when published in his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy along with
a sketch of The Ghost of a Flea in 1828, became fairly popular with
those who sought a physiological explanation for Blake’s visions.
This was also the approach taken by James Deville, a phrenologist
who, in 1823, made a plaster cast of Blake’s head so that he could
demonstrate the ‘lobes of the imagination’, which he believed
were very pronounced on the artist.
Against Varley’s expectations, Blake was extremely sceptical
about all matters pertaining to the occult. Upon the subject, Linnell
later recorded Blake as telling Varley:

your fortunate nativity I count the worst[;] you reckon that

to be born in August & have the notice & patronage of Kings
to the best of all where as the lives of the Apostles and Martyrs

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of whom it is said the world was not worthy wd. be counted John Linnell,
by you as the worst & their nativities those of men born to be William Blake, 1827,
intaglio engraving
hanged. (br 368) on paper.
George Richmond,
While being thoroughly unconvinced by the virtues of astrology, Catherine Blake,
Blake spent a considerable amount of time with Varley, and during c. 1830, graphite
and black ink
1819 he began to sketch out a series of visions that took place in
on paper.
Varley’s home, recording them in three books provided by the
younger artist. Known as the visionary heads, these became one
of the most popular stories about Blake following his death and
appeared to confirm the various assumptions made by readers
with regard to his sanity. There were dozens of these portraits,
and Blake would see images of Socrates, Voltaire, ‘the man who
built the pyramids’ and King David. Gilchrist notes that at times
‘Blake would have to wait for the Vision’s appearance; some-
times it would come at call,’ and that the visitors would interact

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with Blake, sometimes frowning with

displeasure, sometimes smiling at the
artist’s work (Life i.300), Linnell him-
self was quite clear as to how Blake
considered these apparitions:

The twoattitudes [of Blake and

Varley] are highly character-
istic of the men[,] for Blake by
the side of Varley appeard
decidedly the most sane of the
two . . . It was Varley who
excited Blake to see or fancy
the portraits of historical per-
sonages–asEdward&Wallace,
David, Solomon, the man who
builtthepyramids&c.&c.most
Socrates, a Visionary of which I have. I painted in oil the heads of King Edward &
Head, c. 1820, Wm. Wallace for Varley from these drawings in black lead
graphite on paper.
pencil by Blake, also the Ghost of a Flea. (br 368)

While Varley expected literal apparitions, Blake was clearly

exercising his imagination: seeing, though not with the eye. The
Ghost of a Flea, however, was the most striking of all those images
and, indeed, the one that Blake himself worked up into a tempera
and gold painting on mahogany. Varley wrote upon the back of
the original sketch after Blake’s death that the vision first appeared
to Blake in Varley’s presence and returned until he could com-
plete the portrait. In Zodiacal Physiognomy he gave a much fuller
account of its composition:

This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never

anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most

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 divine images

correct investigation in my power, of the truth of these visions,

on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked if he
could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw; he
instantly said, ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him
paper and a pencil, with which he drew the portrait, of which
a fac-simile is given in this number. I felt convinced by his
mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him, for
he left off, and began on another part of the paper, to make a
separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit
having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the
first sketch, till he had closed it. During the time occupied
in completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas
were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature
blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially
confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he
himself for instance the size of a horse, he would depopulate
a great portion of the country. (br 492–3)

In Blake’s later painting the Flea stands in a room surrounded

by curtains yet simultaneously open to the night sky, staring at
his bowl of blood as a star falls towards his feet. The latter part of
the image calls to mind the dual images of William and Robert
from Milton a Poem, and it is very tempting to see this as a vision-
ary self-portrait of Blake, his spectre, as it were – a projection of
his evil just as Satan in Paradise Lost is a projection of Milton’s.
The Flea has been interpreted as the reincarnation of a serial killer
(most notably in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell), but from
Blake’s conversation with Varley it is more likely that he originally
conceived the Flea as a very different type of murderer, one of
those generals, kings or popes who could depopulate large parts
The Ghost of a
of a country with one signature. Even towards the end of his life,
Flea, c. 1819–20,
Blake did not lose the political radicalism that had motivated him tempera and gold
as a young man. on mahogany.

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Thornton’s Virgil

What would become a significant work by Blake began rather

unpromisingly in 1821 when he was commissioned, via Linnell,
to create a series of prints for a new edition of a school text, The
Pastorals of Virgil. Published by Robert John Thornton, the text
was an English translation by Ambrose Philips, then in its third
edition. Blake first produced four small designs on a copper plate,
although these were rejected by Thornton, probably because of
their unconventional style and depiction of semi-nudity. He then
produced a series of 21 drawings, from which he was asked to
produce a series of wood engravings. This was a new medium for
Blake, but the series of small illustrations that Blake produced
were incredibly vivid and original.
Not that Thornton was impressed. Linnell later recounted
to the author Henry Cole: ‘When Blake had produced his cuts,
which were, however, printed with an apology, a shout of deri-
sion was raised by the wood-engravers. “This will never do,” said
they, “we will show what it ought to be” – that is, what the public
taste would like’ (br 327). Three of the plates were engraved by
another hand – a familiar story from Blake’s later life as a com-
mercial engraver. Thornton did not understand Blake’s bold style,
but he was convinced by a number of artists, not only Linnell but
academicians such as Sir Thomas Lawrence, that these works
were incredibly original and that ‘there must be more in them
than [Thornton] and his publishers could discern’ (br 373). One
of those who recommended Blake’s designs, James Ward, grew
angry at suggestions that Blake was mad, asserting instead that
he was ‘what the world calls a man of genius’, but that ‘his genius
was of a peculiar character’ (br 373).
Virgil’s Eclogues is a series of poems written by the Roman
poet around 39–38 bc, on the estate that had been awarded to
Virgil by the triumvir Octavian. Composed in the bucolic style

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The Pastorals of Virgil,

frontispiece, 1821,
woodcut on paper.

of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, the original ten poems included

a mixture of pastoral, political (in that they dealt with the effects
of land expropriations on rural Italians) and erotic matters.
Thornton, unsurprisingly, omitted many of the more adult themes,
instead offering a version of an Arcadian ideal of the countryside
from the first eclogue, which, on the surface at least, would appear
to be a vision similar to Songs of Innocence. In many respects
Blake’s illustrations do indeed return to the vitality and simplic-
ity of his early illuminated books, with Colinet and Thenot being
shown with their flocks and in countryside settings that invoke
poems such as ‘The Shepherd’ and ‘The Ecchoing Green’. As
Robert Essick observed, however, commentators gradually began
to realize that the nature of these black-and-white engravings was
often much darker and ironic than would appear suitable for a
children’s book – unless, of course, the illustrator of that children’s
book was also the author of Songs of Experience. An image such
as ‘The Blighted Corn’ shows nature not as tender mother, but
closer to Blake’s darker visions of the Natural Law – a bringer of
death and famine.

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For the Shoreham Ancients who saw them, Blake’s woodcuts

were a revelation, in many respects more so than any other work
by the engraver. As Samuel Palmer wrote:

I sat down with Mr. Blake’s Thornton’s Virgil woodcuts

before me, thinking to give their merits my feeble testimony.
I happened first to think of their sentiment. They are visions
of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of
the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light
and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe
it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliancy only coldly
and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and
dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the innermost soul,
and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy
daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist’s
works the drawing aside of the fleshy curtain, and the glimpse
which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed,
of that rest which remaineth to the people of God. (br 377)

This ‘mystic and dreamy glimmer’ was precisely the quality

that Palmer would seek to capture in his works of the 1820s and
’30s, such as his Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep. While Palmer
saw the visionary aspects of landscape, for Blake, however, the
world of Colinet and Thenot was too pagan, so that they must
rely on the material senses and not the human imagination that
could free them from the dull round of the seasons: life, death
and rebirth.
In many respects, Blake found himself intellectually isolated
in the early nineteenth century: the neoclassical traditions of
composition to which he had aspired in his figures from the 1780s,
and which he had described admiringly in a letter to Reverend
The Pastorals of Virgil,
page 16, woodcut Dr Trusler in 1799 as at one with his purpose ‘to renew the lost
on paper. Art of the Greeks’ (e701), became increasingly detached from his

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moral sense of self after the return to London from Felpham. From
the Preface of Milton a Poem onwards, he increasingly associated
such art with the degrading desire for war that had wrecked Europe
for 25 years. His invective was strongest in a small, late engraving,
a single copper plate containing two short works: On Homers Poetry
and On Virgil. Printed a year after he had completed the woodcuts
for Thornton, Blake would write in On Homers Poetry, ‘The Classics,
it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe
with Wars’, adding to this critique in On Virgil: ‘Rome & Greece
swept Art into their maw & destroyd it a Warlike State never can
produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place,
& Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make’
(e270).

Heresies and The Everlasting Gospel

Although the woodcuts for the Thornton Virgil demonstrated

Blake’s ability to challenge aesthetic standards of his day, while
his tract on Homer and Virgil indicated a dislike of classical values
that had been developing since his return from Felpham, a number
of later works indicated that the Bible and Christianity remained
the locus of his religious radicalism.
One such text should have been an uncontroversial contribu-
tion in the neoclassical style that informed much of Blake’s art, if
not his ethics and politics. In 1815 Blake had been commissioned
by Abraham Rees to engrave a representation of Laocoön and His
Sons, the astonishing group of figures sculpted in the first century
ad, currently housed in the Vatican Museums. The statue shows
Laocoön, a priest of Poseidon in the city of Troy, and his two sons,
as they are killed by serpents sent from the gods as punishment
for the priest’s attempt to disturb the Trojan horse, as recounted
by Virgil in the Aeneid. It is now widely assumed to be a copy of
an earlier Hellenistic sculpture, and was to be included in Rees’s

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The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and

Literature, the complete edition of which was issued in 1820. A
stipple version of the group was included in the volume published
in 1816, printed alongside Flaxman’s essay on sculpture, but the
line engraving was not included.
Blake took this plate in the final year of his life and seemed to
have worked upon it in a kind of religious fury, transforming the
page by inscribing a wall of graffiti around it. Although still often
referred to as The Laocoön, scholars such as Morton Paley now call
it ‫( יה‬Yah) and His two Sons Satan and Adam, after the title given
beneath the group of figures. By covering the plate with a variety
of proverbs and aphorisms, Blake attacks both the mores of clas-
sical civilization and the militaristic and commercial society of
his day: ‘Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried
on, but War only’ (e275). While fragmentary, there are several
themes that run throughout the plate; Irene Taylor, for example,
draws attention to how, by claiming that he is depicting the
‘Cherubim of Solomon’s Temple’, Blake is returning to his notion
expressed in A Descriptive Catalogue that the Greeks copied more
ancient styles of art.4 Likewise, he attacks this imitative classical
culture as having subsumed art to the cause of war: that bondage
has resulted in the degradation of art into something that is only
valued according to its price and which is viewed as inferior to
science. By contrast, Blake asserts that ‘Jesus & his Apostles &
Disciples were all Artists’ and that ‘A Poet a Painter a Musician
an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not
a Christian’ (e274). As Morton Paley observes, ‘Blake sees noth-
ing to choose from between the Greek and Trojan or the British
and French empires.’5 But by transferring the ‘Rhodian’ copy of
the statue of Laocoön into one of God and his sons Adam and
Satan, Blake is very far from orthodox Christianity. Rather, as in
the Bard’s Song of Milton a Poem, he is pursuing an idiosyncratic
vision of Christianity that also attacks the self-righteous, Calvinistic

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view of God as pantocrator, what Blake refers to again and again

in the plate as Deism.
Blake’s Christianity as outlined in ‫ יה‬and His two Sons Satan
and Adam is unusual and esoteric, but just how far his heresy con-
tinued until his death was evident from some unfinished later
works. In 1827 Blake appeared to have been inspired to return
to his earlier project outlined decades earlier in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, his so-called ‘Bible of Hell’. It coincided with
– and may have even been stimulated by – a new translation of
the Lord’s Prayer issued by Robert Thornton (for whom Blake
had made the Virgil woodcuts). Although Thornton’s book was a
slender one, as Paley points out, it also contained a 14,000-word
treatise that sought to posit the Bible as a book that cannot be
understood by ‘unlearned’ men.6 This ‘Tory’ text, then, led Blake
to denounce it as ‘a Most Malignant & Artful attack upon the
Kingdom of Jesus By the Classical Learned thro the Instrumentality
of Dr Thornton’ (e667). Blake’s own version of the Lord’s Prayer
is hard to decipher, but a recent version transcribed for the Blake
Archive offers this blasphemous rendition:

Jesus our Father who art in thy Heavin calld by thy Name
this Holy Ghost thy Kingdom on Earth is Not worthy
Well done but his Satans Will who is the father God of
the World
Give us This Eternal day our own right [illegible] Bread
[illegible] by away Money & Value of Price or Debt or
Tax as thy [illegible] have all thy Comon [illegible]
Comon among us
Leave us not in [illegible] mon [illegible deleted] [illegible]
but liberate us from the Natural Man [illegible] kingdom
for thine is the kingdom & the Power & the Glory & not
Caesars or Satans Amen

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It is difficult to read, but establishes three principal elements about

Blake’s religious thought at the end of his life: he seemed firmly
committed to some kind of communitarian view of society; he
opposed what he called the ‘Natural Man’, or a materialistic view
of the universe; and he remained convinced that the figure wor-
shipped as God, depicted by him most often as Urizen, was not
the true father spoken of by Christ, but the ‘God of the World’.
This rejection of the ‘Natural Man’ continues in what would
have been one of the most remarkable works by Blake, had he lived
to complete it. The fragment of the Genesis manuscript comprises
eleven pages of unfinished drawings that would have provided an
astonishing illuminated first book of the Bible had he been able
to etch and colour them. While Blake (loosely) follows the King
James Bible, his introduction to the story of the Creation is remark-
able, in that he describes it as ‘The Creation of the Natural Man’.
Almost certainly he is influenced by his knowledge of the orig­
inal Hebrew, which in Genesis 1.1–2.4a describes God as ‘Elohim’,
the plural of El. Throughout his own personal mythology, Blake
had consistently presented Urizen as merely one of the Eternals,
one of the gods, who had sought to impose a vision of ‘One King,
One God, One Law’ (e72) and, in doing so, had caused the fall of
man as part of the creation of a ‘natural’ imposed order. Even less
complete were his sketches towards a version of the Book of Enoch,
one of the Jewish apocryphal books that explained how angels,
or ‘Watchers’, had come to earth to seduce the daughters of men,
giving birth to giants, the Nephilim. The rough sketches that
remain are reminiscent of those for The Four Zoas, indicating a
fallen world of sexuality that matched the fallen Creation outlined
in Genesis, and, with the illustrations to the Book of Job, indicate
that Blake desired to continue the work he had begun in The
Marriage of Heaven of Hell even as he drew ever closer to death.
This heretical view – that the God of Christianity and Blake’s
God of the World were one and the same – was approached with

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considerable subtlety in one of his final completed illuminated

books, The Ghost of Abel. A brief drama merely two plates long,
this work was etched by Blake in 1822 in response to Byron’s much
longer work Cain, in which the figure of Cain becomes a Byronic
hero, an outsider whose murder of his brother is a tragic mistake.
Blake begins the work with an address to ‘lord byron in the
wilderness’ (e270), calling him a prophet, and while respecting the
exiled lord as a figure who sees more deeply into the truth of faith
than the anodyne likes of Reverend Thorton, with his Tory prayer,
also seeks to correct what Blake sees as his theological mistake.
The Ghost of Abel is interesting because it is one of the few entirely
positive depictions of God the father in Blake’s work. God as
Jehovah appears to Adam and Eve as they mourn the dead Abel,
and confronts them when Abel’s ghost – possessed by Satan –
rises from the grave and demands justice:

I will have Human Blood & not the blood of Bulls or

Goats
And no Atonement O Jehovah the Elohim live on
Sacrifice
Of Men: hence I am God of Men: Thou Human O
Jehovah. (e272)

The Ghost of Abel is a condensed version of the intellectual attack

on religion as retributive justice that Blake had written about in his
great epics of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Satan’s demands
of an eye for an eye, called again and again the ‘Natural Law’ and
the ‘Moral Law’ by Blake in his poetry, Jehovah tells him that
killing one human in revenge must in turn lead to the person
taking revenge being sacrificed. Against this martial and blood-
thirsty practice, Jehovah preaches the forgiveness of sins, and the
drama ends with a chorus of angels singing:

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The Elohim of the Heathen Swore Vengeance for Sin!

Then Thou stoodst
Forth O Elohim Jehovah! in the midst of the darkness of
the Oath! All Clothed
In Thy Covenant of the Forgiveness of Sins: Death O
Holy! Is this Brotherhood
The Elohim saw their Oath Eternal Fire; they rolled apart
trembling over The
Mercy Seat: each in his station fixt in the Firmament by
Peace Brotherhood and Love. (e272)

The forgiveness of sins: this was the covenant that Blake saw
as the exceptional gift of Christianity, a rejection of the natural
law of paganism and instead the revelation of what he would call
the ‘Everlasting Gospel’. In the poem of that name, a title given
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to a series of fragments that were com-
posed by Blake in his notebook, Blake offers a vision of Christ
that echoes once again the ideas and notions of The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell:

Was Jesus Humble or did he

Give any Proofs of Humility
Boast of high Things with Humble tone
And give with Charity a Stone
When but a Child he ran away
And left his Parents in Dismay
When they had wanderd three days long
These were the words upon his tongue
No Earthly Parents I confess
I am doing my Fathers business (e519)

The Jesus of The Everlasting Gospel is extremely reminiscent of the

figure described by a devil to a moralistic angel in The Marriage:

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bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall not his folly be
beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you
ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he
has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did
he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God?
murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away
the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of
others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted
making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for
his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of
their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you,
no virtue can exist without breaking these ten command-
ments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from
rules. (e43)

The Jesus of this later work is proud and resistant to the civil
mores of his day, rejecting moral codes: as Blake wrote in his anno-
tations to Thornton, ‘If Morality was Christianity Socrates was
The Savior’ (e667). Instead, Christ is divine because he does not
act from moral laws but rather from impulse – from energy. The
Everlasting Gospel also contains one of the most openly heretical
statements made by Blake:

Thou art a Man God is no more

Thy own humanity learn to adore (e520)

Such a bold statement seems at odds with Blake’s profoundly

Christian beliefs, yet it was a message he pursued consistently
throughout his life. From the very beginning in All Religions are
One he claims that religion was the product of ‘Poetic Genius’,
while in The Marriage he outlines how poets animated man’s reli-
gious sensibilities long before priestcraft reduced it to a system. At
times, it seems almost as though Blake is a Christian atheist (‘God

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is no more’), but it may be better to describe him as a profoundly

Christian theist, one who believes that God is entirely internal,
created by us as evidence of the divinity of our imagination. The
common misconception of a god out there was denounced by
Blake as deism, and the implications of that external god were
explored in the two greatest works made by Blake at the end of
his life – the illustrations to Job and to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Job and Dante

The final decade of Blake’s life, as we have seen, was a period of

great inspiration, motivated by the security provided by Linnell
and the various friendships he had made. Those friendships were,
in many respects, odd ones: Blake was much more radical both
politically and religiously than most of the young men who gath-
ered around him, although Linnell appears to have viewed some of
his more outrageous views with humour and sometimes appro-
bation. Certainly, Linnell did all that he could to support the older
artist, which in the last few years led to the creation of two of
Blake’s greatest works: the Illustrations of the Book of Job and his
engravings for Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Blake had been fascinated by the Book of Job throughout his
professional life, first creating wash drawings in the mid-1780s of
Job in misery with his wife and friends, a theme that seems to have
influenced the writing of Tiriel, and he illustrated a series of water-
colours with pen and ink drawings for Thomas Butts in 1805–6.
This set was repeated, with somewhat darker colours and two
new pictures, for Linnell in 1821 and, in March 1823, Linnell drew
up a contract for Blake to produce a series of twenty-one designs
based on his drawings. Unlike his typical mixed method of pre-
liminary etching followed by engraving, Blake decided to stick to
a pure form of line engraving. After creating a series of drawings
from the Butts-Linnell watercolours, these were then transferred

321
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directly to the copper plates and used as the guides to create his
fine, intaglio lines. According to the Blake Archive, this may have
been to evoke the art of master Renaissance engravers such as
Albrecht Dürer: Samuel Palmer recounted to Gilchrist many
years later that ‘no man more admired Albert Dürer’ than Blake
(br 391). The Job engravings are widely, and rightly, considered
his own masterpieces in this medium. Intaglio engraving was a
long and painstaking process: Blake began work on the plates in
1823 and it took him two years to complete the twenty-one plates
with an additional title page and cover label, the first proofs being
pulled in March 1825. While the pictures drew considerable inter-
est from a number of clients, it is also clear that during the remaining
years of Blake’s lifetime they did not make Linnell much of a
return on his investment, but they did allow him to engage the
older artist’s burin and furnish him with some income during a
period of great poverty for William and Catherine.
The engravings are, quite simply, astonishing, and rank with-
out question among the greatest of Blake’s works. As well as the
technique, with detailed intaglio lines shaded with carefully con-
trolled cross hatching – the way he had first been taught to engrave
by Basire but which had increasingly been replaced by stippled
techniques more suited to mezzotint and lithography – the power
of these images comes also from their subject matter. The Book
of Job is one of the strangest and most affecting in the Bible, and
it is hardly surprising that it should have attracted the author of
the Bible of Hell, dealing as it does with the appearance of Satan
in heaven. At the beginning of the story that bears his name, Job
is described as a man who ‘was perfect and upright, and one that
feared God’ (1:1). Having prospered, a day comes when the sons
of God present themselves to the Lord; among them is Satan, who
tells him that Job is only worshipful because of all that God has
given him. Goading God, Satan says: ‘But put forth thine hand
now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face’

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(1:11). Rather than rebuking Satan, God tells him that henceforth
Job is in his power, whereupon Satan destroys all that Job owned.
Upon hearing of his misfortunes, Job’s response is one of the most
noble and stoic in the entirety of the Bible: ‘Naked came I out of
my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord
gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the
Lord’ (1:24).
Having given a lie to Satan’s accusation – and that fact is
pertinent, bearing in mind the original meaning of the name in
Hebrew as adversary or accuser – Job maintains his silence until
seven days after being struck with a plague of boils, in which he
launches into a powerful diatribe against God. It is after this that
his friends turn up and try to convince him that he must have
committed crimes, that a just God would not punish an innocent
man, but Job maintains that he is a man more sinned against than
sinning, and it is not until God appears that his challenge is taken
up. Even then, God does not so much answer his moral assault as
overwhelm him with divine power:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue

with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw
through with a thorn?
Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak
soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for
a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind
him for thy maidens? (41:1–5)

Against this power, this overwhelming might – this energy –

there is no opposition and Job simply submits to the one who
‘answered Job out of the whirlwind’ (38:1). For his integrity, for

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his faithfulness to himself, Job is eventually restored, and yet the

moral questions and platitudes of his false friends are not given
succour in this complex book.
To believe that the Book of Job is a reflection on Blake’s own
life is to ignore the inconvenient truth that the earliest versions of
the drawings were produced at a time when Blake was still hope-
ful that his career would progress and his art find favour with a
wider public. As such, the illustrations are a more abstract med-
itation on the nature of evil, power and faith in the universe, all
depicted with an incredible energy of line that makes the series
of twenty-one designs one of the most important contributions
to British art ever made. According to Linnell, the elegant borders
were a late addition to the copper plates, adding to the beauty and
strangeness of the images. Blake largely keeps to the biblical story,
but also makes a number of embellishments. It was S. Foster Damon
who drew attention to the significance of the musical instruments
in the opening and closing plates: at the beginning of the poem
they are silent, hanging in the trees, as befits a man who fears God
rather than loves him, but at the end of the series Job and his family
have taken up the instruments and give praise to God joyfully.7
In the second and third illustrations, in which Satan appears before
God in his court and then destroys the sons and daughters of Job,
it is significant that Satan – the accuser – usurps and takes over
the place of God, appearing in the same position in the plate. It
is important to note that the scene of Satan before God is framed
as a story that Job is telling his family: it is Job who has devised a
religion in which God the judge sends his accuser to find out the
sins of men. The superimposition of god and devil is made explicit
in one of the most remarkable of the entire images from the series,
number eleven, or Job’s evil dream. This has a very tangential
connection to the text, a paraphrase of Job 7:14: ‘With dreams
upon my bed thou scarest me & affrightest me with Visions.’
Blake recasts this as a vision that parallels his earlier Elohim

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Creating Adam, with it now being God who is wound about with
the serpent; along with Elohim’s cloven feet, it is clear that Blake
indicates that this form of the divine is satanic, God and the Devil
being one. This plate is a crux of the series: at this moment, either
Satan is deceiving Job or Job is allowing himself to be deceived.
In any case, it is Job’s false perception of God that is critical at this
point. By seeing Elohim as a god of vengeance and fear, Job is
willing to consider that external misfortunes in the universe arise
as punishments of his sins, precisely the accusation made by Job’s
friends in the previous plate. At this point the doors of perception
have been closed up, but henceforth we will be presented with
some remarkable depictions of the divine, which will open up
those doors once more.
In the thirteenth plate, God answers Job directly from the
whirlwind, an exhibition of power that is utterly overwhelming.
It is followed by two very different demonstrations of divine
energy: the second of these illustrates the appearance of Behemoth

Illustrations of the
Book of Job: Job’s
Evil Dream, 1823–6,
intaglio engraving
on paper.

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 divine images

Illustrations of the
Book of Job: Satan
Before the Throne
of God, intaglio
engraving on
paper.

and Leviathan, a design that is both terrifying and strangely

placid. While these are creatures that man cannot control, cannot
draw up with a hook, yet they are also indicated as part of God’s
creation, their terrifying monstrosity ‘portions of eternity too
great for the eye of man’, as Blake had written in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (e36). The face of the Creator is remarkably
benevolent in this image, calmly gesturing towards his creations,
but he is even more peacefully sublime in the preceding plate, one
of the most beautiful ever produced by Blake. Titled ‘When the

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 Final Visions

Morning Stars Sang Together’, and taking its source from 38:6–7
– ‘Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid
the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ – this design shows God
in the centre of his creation, arms outstretched rather like Urizen
in America a Prophecy. Here, however, he is at the crux of a peace-
ful vision of judgement, Job, his wife and his friends staring up in
wonder as the sun and the moon flank God on either side, while
the sons of God appear as starry angels in the heavens. This literal
transliteration of the text of Job does the impossible, transferring
into visual imagery poetry that a lesser artist would find impossi-
ble to translate. Blake’s series then follows with two designs not
found in the biblical original: ‘The Fall of Satan’ and ‘The Vision
of Christ’. The first image, of Satan, was included from the very
first series created for Butts, and is an addition that degrades Satan
in a fashion similar to that in the illustrations to Milton’s Paradise
Lost. ‘The Vision of Christ’, however, was a later addition made
when Blake created his series of paintings for Linnell and places
Jesus at the centre of his religion. This – which, of course, has no
place in the original Book of Job – is the moment of transforma-
tion of Job’s perceptions: God is no longer a figure out there, a
deistic figure to be feared as pantocrator, but as the Son of Man
in the human imagination. When God appears to Job out of the
whirlwind, no man can compare with such power, just as no man
can draw up Leviathan from the deeps; and yet, of course, it is
precisely man’s imagination that creates God speaking from the
whirlwind, which summons up Leviathan. At the end of the series,
Job playing musical instruments is an artist and, as such, has found
the true meaning of faith.
Blake’s final work was another commission by Linnell, this
time a series of illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, for which
Blake was paid from the end of 1825 onwards at the rate of £1
per week. The 102 designs at the time of his death range from

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 divine images

pencil sketches to highly finished pieces in watercolour over ink

drawings. In the following year he began to engrave seven large
plates based on the designs, and presumably would have created
more. Blake had long been interested in Dante: at some point
around 1800 he had annotated Henry Boyd’s Historical Notes on
a translation of Inferno, making critical comments about both
Dante’s politics (‘Dante was an Emperors Man’, e634) and Boyd’s
approbation towards the Florentine poet’s classical sources. As
Sebastian Schütze remarks, ‘Blake admired Dante as a poet

Illustrations of
the Book of Job:
Behemoth and
Leviathan,
intaglio
engraving
on paper.

Illustrations of the
Book of Job: Behemoth
and Leviathan,
intaglio engraving
on paper.

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 divine images

unreservedly, but he was at the same time keen to dissociate

himself from certain political and theological notions embraced
by his hero.’8 Interest in Dante had been stimulated in the final
decades of the 1700s, and he had been taken up in particular by
aficionados of the cult of the Gothic, with painters such as Fuseli
dedicating paintings to scenes from his writings. Flaxman also
found a new audience for the Italian poet through his drawings
for the Divine Comedy, the first of which were published in Rome
in 1794. Blake likewise had made a drawing of Ugolino and his
sons in Prison in the early 1780s, referencing the story of Ugolino
della Gherardesca, who was falsely imprisoned for treason in the
thirteenth century when he became caught in the conflicts of the
Ghibellines and the Guelphs.
Blake was faithful to Dante’s text in terms of the scenes he
depicted, but his interpretation was often at variance with that of
the earlier poet, in particular when dealing with themes of guilt,
punishment and sin. In one very important sense, Dante’s vision
of hell stands at the very other end of the poetic cosmos to that
of Blake: while the former’s is ultimately governed by a deity who
permits the sadistic punishment of sin in order to enforce divine
law, Blake’s (at least in the version outlined in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell) is a place of the enjoyments of genius. Yet Blake
was also sensitive to the intellectual trials that faced Dante, and
one of the best examples of this is the illustration to ‘The Circle
of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini’, also known as ‘The Whirlwind
of Lovers’. In this image, which was also engraved by Blake, the
moment is caught when Dante and Virgil meet Francesca and her
lover, Paolo Malatesta. Francesca had been married to Paolo’s
brother, Giovanni, by her father to cement a political alliance
between the two families and end their previous conflict. While
at her husband’s home, she fell in love with the younger brother
and, when they were discovered by Giovanni, he killed them both
with his bare hands. When they are encountered by Dante it is

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 Final Visions

The Circle of the in the second level of inferno, reserved for those guilty of lust who
Lustful, 1827, are trapped in an eternal whirlwind, which pauses briefly for the
intaglio engraving
on paper. poet to learn their fate. After Francesca tells her story, Dante faints
and it is this scene that is captured by Blake as the two lovers, still
clasping each other, are swept back into the endless torment of
hell. This pathos is accentuated by a second depiction of the lovers,
embracing each other in the solar sphere above Virgil’s head: they
are lost in the sensuous bliss of the moment, unaware of a vicious
moral code that will condemn them to eternal damnation for fol-
lowing these energies. Yet even in hell the pair of them, as they are
swept away, can only stare at each other with a compassion that
itself condemns the hell this false vision of God and religion has
created for them.
Elsewhere, Blake seems to take especial care in his depictions
of Inferno to draw attention to the false idols of paganism. It is

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 Final Visions

The Circle of Traitors, Minos who guards the entrance to the second circle of hell, while
1827, intaglio Cerberus stands at the third; the Goddess of Fortune governs
engraving on
paper. misers and squanderers in the fourth, while the Minotaur is the
custodian of the seventh circle. The message is particularly clear
Ciampolo Tormented
by the Devils, 1827, for Blake: as with his accusations against Milton and Shakespeare
intaglio engraving in the Preface to Milton a Poem, Blake believes that Dante has
on paper. been infected with the false doctrines of paganism, emphasizing a
cult of cruelty and punishment rather than the Christian message
of the forgiveness of sins.
More than seventy plates deal with the subject of Inferno,
leaving only some thirty for Purgatorio and Paradiso (and, in this,
Blake may have been reflecting the interests of a significant number
of readers before and since). Towards the end of Purgatorio appear
some of the most fascinating images in the entire series, particu-
larly Plate 91, which depicts ‘Beatrice addressing Dante from the
chariot’. In canto 30 of the second book, Beatrice appears in a
chariot of whirling eyes, surrounded by mighty griffins who pull
it, their blue wings also strewn with eyes. She is accompanied by
the virtues of Hope, Love and Faith, and she speaks to Dante who

Beatrice Addressing
Dante from the Car,
1824–7, pen and
ink, watercolour
on paper.

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 divine images

is afraid of her – as well he might be. In her speech, she reminds

him that he strayed from her and admonishes him to repent. After
he does so, they at last can ascend the spiral stairway to heaven:
while Blake clearly feels much affinity to the circles of light that
describe Paradiso, it is also the case that many of the plates are
sketchy and incomplete. Of course, the ultimate reason for this
was his failing health, and yet one also senses that, as Blake drew
towards the end of his own life, the ethereal promise of Dante’s
paradise was one too lacking in the energies of divine vision that
had always driven Blake’s art.

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 10
Death and Resurrection:
The Legacy of William Blake

W hen Blake died on 12 August 1827 he did not end his life
in complete obscurity. As G. E. Bentley observes, in the
first few years following his death ‘there was more printed praise
of him than might have been expected,’ including an obituary in
the Literary Gazette the day after his funeral, which noted him as
the illustrator of The Grave and included the following remarkable
assessment of his life:

When it is stated, that the pure-minded Flaxman pointed

out to an eminent literary man the obscurity of Blake as a
melancholy proof of English apathy towards the grand, the
philosophic, or the enthusiastically devotional painter; and
that he, Blake, has been several times employed for that truly
admirable judge of art Sir T. Lawrence, any further testimony
to his extraordinary powers is unnecessary. Yet has Blake been
allowed to exist in a penury which most artists, – beings nec-
essarily of a sensitive temperament, – would deem intolerable.
(br 465–6)

Relatively extensive accounts of Blake’s life appeared in John

Thomas Smith’s Nollekens and his Times (1823) and Allan
Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculp­tors

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 divine images

and Architects (1830), indicating a minor – but generally well-

known and, in some circumstances, even respected – artist on the
fringes of the London art scene. Over the next few years John
Linnell and Frederick Tatham in particular sought to provide for
Catherine until her death in 1831, selling copies of Blake’s books
and prints as one means to support her. As such, Blake’s work was
still in circulation for a period of time, but once Catherine passed
away the memory of him began to fade more completely.

Gilchrist and the Pre-Raphaelites

Although the memory of Blake declined rapidly throughout the

1830s and ’40s, the slender thread that ultimately proved to be the
salvation of his reputation came from a biographer and a group
of artists who, by the middle of the century, rose to fame at the
same time that the revolutions of 1848 were sweeping Europe.
Those important figures involved in the recuperation of Blake in
the Victorian period were Alexander Gilchrist, Dante Gabriel and
William Michael Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne. Years before
Gilchrist produced his remarkable Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor
ignotus’, Rossetti had first learned about Blake in Cunningham’s
Lives, and purchased Blake’s Notebook from Samuel Palmer in
1847 for ten shillings. This began a lifelong obsession with Blake
for the Rossettis, one in which they recast the painter-poet as
a precursor of their own struggles against the artistic establish-
ment and one who, for Dante in particular, epitomized the tension
between art and poetry. The fact that Blake was almost com-
pletely unknown by the 1840s also meant that the brothers had
greater freedom to shape his reception for an early audience. Their
enthusiasm was considerable: as Elizabeth Helsinger points out,
William compiled a bibliography of Blake’s designs, while Dante
wrote on his art and provided the descriptions accompanying
Gilchrist’s Life. Indeed, when Alexander Gilchrist suddenly died

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 Death and Resurrection

before he had completely finished his biography, the Rossetti

brothers helped his widow, Anne, complete the text.1
While the Rossettis were part of a rediscovery of Blake that
was taking place in the 1840s, for the wider public at large one
figure more than any other was responsible for the rehabilitation
of the Romantic poet and artist. As Bentley points out, it was
Gilchrist who ‘revived interest in Blake with his Life’ (br 287).
Born in 1828, the year after Blake’s death, Gilchrist had trained
as a barrister before turning to art criticism, publishing his Life
of William Etty in 1855, a work of the Victorian artist that was
very well received at the time. In 1856 he and Anne, whom he
had married in 1851, moved into a residence in Chelsea next door
to Jane and Thomas Carlyle, the famous author who had approved
of the Life of Etty and so sealed Gilchrist’s reputation as a biog-
rapher. Gilchrist had already begun to develop his interest in Blake,
having encountered a copy of the illustrations to Job, which led
him to write to Samuel Palmer in 1855. Palmer replied with an
effusive letter in which the painter, now aged sixty, told him:

Blake, once known, could never be forgotten . . . He was

energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an
atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the
country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms
of matter . . . He was a man without a mask; his aim single,
his path straightforward, and his wants few; so he was free,
noble, and happy. (Life i.344)

Having begun work, Gilchrist contacted Rossetti, who wrote

to William Allingham in 1860 that: ‘A man (one Gilchrist, who
lives next door to Carlyle, and is as near him in other respects as
he can manage) wrote to me the other day, saying he was writing
a life of Blake, and wanted to see my manuscript by that genius.’2
It was Gilchrist who tracked down the remaining members of the

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 divine images

Ancients who had gathered around Blake, recording their stories

and by 1861, spurred on by Rossetti, he agreed to add a companion
volume of Blake’s works to his biography. Understandably daunted
by the task, Anne wrote to her husband’s publisher, Macmillan,
that: ‘Many things were to have been inserted – anecdotes etc.
collected during the last year, which he used to say “would be
the best things in the book”. Whether I shall be able to rightly
use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fittest places
I cannot yet tell.’3 When the Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor ignotus’
appeared in two volumes in 1863, it was soon clear that the biog-
raphy was to be a triumph, admired by the Pre-Raphaelites and
leading aesthetic figures such as Robert Browning. The book was
an important contribution to dismissing the posthumous legend
that Blake was mad, instead depicting him as a prophet and vision-
ary, a complete artist deserving the respect of a wider Victorian
audience. Although Gilchrist was not alive to see its success, his
work was championed in particular by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
For Rossetti, Blake was ‘a poet-artist of a particularly visual-
ising imagination such as he felt himself to be’.4 Although Rossetti
felt a strong connection to his namesake, Dante, whose Vita Nuova
he was translating in the 1840s, it was Blake who was closer to
much of the Pre-Raphaelite’s own work, providing a model for the
paintings he produced as part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
the group of painters, poets and critics that he, along with John
Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, founded in 1848. The
objections of the Pre-Raphaelites to the style of Joshua Reynolds
almost certainly found emphasis in Blake’s Notebook, which con-
tained plenty of references to the Romantic’s artistic nemesis. The
inspiration of Blake’s work was most notable on Rossetti’s paint-
ings, particularly those visionary subjects such as Dante Drawing
an Angel on the First Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death. Rossetti’s
appreciation was enhanced by his friendship with John Ruskin
in the 1850s, who had himself come to know Blake’s work via

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 Death and Resurrection

George Richmond: that awareness of the late artist led Ruskin to

express an admiration for Rossetti’s work that helped to establish
the younger man on the national art scene, providing him with
praise and encouragement.
Not that everyone was enamoured of the Gilchrist-Rossetti
depiction of Blake as a divine craftsman. Algernon Charles Swin­
burne, a friend of the Rossettis, had become involved in Gilchrist’s
Life, but after its appearance became so aggrieved with the final
result that he began work on his own version of Blake’s life and
art. This was published in 1868 as William Blake: A Critical Essay;
originally intended as a commentary on the prophetic books that
would serve as a supplement to Gilchrist’s work, it was greatly
extended after 1863 to become an important reflection on Swin­
burne’s own aesthetic theory, beginning with the astonishing
declaration that Blake was ‘born and baptized into the church of
rebels’.5 Divided into three parts dealing with Blake’s life and
designs, the lyrical poems and the prophetic works, William Blake:
A Critical Essay established Blake as very much one who was
knowingly of the Devil’s party:

In a time of critical reason and definite division, he was pos-

sessed by a fervour and fury of belief; among sane men who
had disproved most things and proved the rest, here was an
evident madman who believed a thing, one may say, only
insomuch as it was incapable of proof. He lived and worked
out of all rule, and yet by law. He had a devil, and its name
was Faith. No materialist has such belief in bread and meat
as Blake had in the substance underlying appearance which
he christened god or spectre, devil or angel as the fit took
him: or rather as he saw it one or the other side. His faith was
absolute and like a pure fanatic’s: there was no speculation
in him.6

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 divine images

With the exception of his illuminated books, much of the work

on Blake’s reception has tended to concentrate on his poetry
rather than his art. Yet it was as a fine artist that Blake was often
best known during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. Colin Trodd has referred to the early reception of the artist
as ‘Blakeland’, a shifting horizon of attitudes towards Blake that
changed with the landscape of popular taste. Thus, for example,
in the immediate aftermath of the Pre-Raphaelite revival of
Blake he was seen as a primal artist ripe for recuperation whereas,
by the time of the First World War, in the visual arts at least he
was starting to be viewed as somewhat old-fashioned because
many of his pictures had been over-exposed to the public. This
was the time that his poetic reception was beginning to take off,
precisely because so many of his difficult prophetic books were
only now being rediscovered. For Trodd, Blake’s followers in the
mid-Victorian period, such as the Pre-Raphaelites and G. F. Watts,
held him up as an antidote to the entire world of academic art
and rationality: ‘Blake, more than any other artist in the putative
British School, was regenerated by Victorian discourses on art as
a set of problems requiring critical solutions.’7 Not that Blake was
held up uncritically as some kind of Romantic ideal: various critics
such as Oswald Crawfurd, H. G. Hewlett and Alan Cunningham
formed part of a critical resistance that saw Blake as not so much
the prodigal creator, more a powerfully destructive chaos that
threatened any notion of communal standards of taste. The com-
plexity of this ‘shadow public’ for Blake is indicated by the fact
that aficionados of Blake’s work such as Henry Crabb-Robinson
and Edward Bulwer-Lytton were both fascinated and repulsed by
the excesses of the Blakean body, while his most ardent support-
ers, such as the Rossettis, were more than happy to rewrite his
work to fit with their notions of good taste. By the 1920s Blakeland
in the visual arts had been overindulged and the reaction set in
for a generation: Laurence Binyon noted in an essay from 1927

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 Death and Resurrection

that Blake had become more widely known as a poet than an

artist, although the slow path towards recuperation began with
the establishment of a collection of Blake’s work at the Tate in
the 1940s. It was, after all, as a painter for whom ‘the Eye altering
alters all’ (e485) that Blake had been first known.

Blake and Modernism

With regard to Blake’s acceptance as a poet, one person was more

important than any other in the early twentieth century. The first
collection of poetry by William Butler Yeats, Crossways, published
in 1889, opened with a quotation by Blake: ‘The stars are threshed,
and the souls are threshed from their husks’ (later transcribed by
Erdman as ‘And all Nations were threshed out & the stars threshd
from their husks’ in The Four Zoas, e402). That Yeats included a
quote, however interpreted, from Blake’s epic poem Vala; or The
Four Zoas, was incredibly significant. In the decades since he had
been rediscovered, Blake’s most ambitious, but unfinished, work
had been largely neglected by his Victorian followers. In 1893, how-
ever, Yeats, along with Edwin John Ellis, embarked on an ambitious
project to publish the first complete edition of the Romantic’s
poetry. The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical
was in many ways a poor text by which to apprehend Blake, in
that in their attempt to create a system the two editors frequently
rewrote their precursor in order to make him fit with their own
ideas. Nonetheless, the publisher Bernard Quaritch intended to
offer a handsomely illustrated facsimile of Blake’s works, the like
of which had never been seen before, bringing together engraved
copies of the Romantic’s plates in a more comprehensive form than
previously, and for the first time a version of The Four Zoas was
made available to the reading public.
As Arianna Antonelli points out, Yeats considered The Four
Zoas the key to understanding Blake’s work: without it, his

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 divine images

mythical characters and situations in the later prophetic books

simply did not make sense. Connecting the complex system of
the Zoas and their emanations to Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg,
as well as his own occult practices as a member of the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, editing the Works greatly influenced
Yeats’s own system, ‘partly determining its subsequent develop-
ment up to its codification in the volume of A Vision’.8 For much
of the nineteenth century the idea that Blake was in any way a
systematic thinker would have been considered absurd. Yet for
all the distortions that Yeats and Ellis imposed on Blake, their
ideas would gradually become the orthodoxy, helped greatly by
vastly improved critical editions of Blake’s works, such as those
produced by John Sampson in 1905 and, most important of all in
the early twentieth century, the complete edition by Geoffrey
Keynes published by the Nonesuch Press in 1925.
The edition by Yeats, which stimulated Keynes to complete
his own work, which was the first comprehensive and truly crit-
ical collection, produced nearly a century after the poet’s death,
in many respects occurred at the best moment for Blake’s
burgeoning reputation. Even sympathetic Victorians, such as
Swin­­burne, had been sceptical about his poetic abilities in the
later prophetic books, but texts such as The Four Zoas began to
be more widely read at the very moment when the literary scene
itself had been transformed by High Modernism. Writers such as
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot – as well as Yeats himself
– were changing utterly the expectations of what it meant to
write literature in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Many of these figures were directly influenced by Blake. Joyce,
for example, knew of the Yeats-Ellis edition at least as early as
1902, when he quoted from the version of Milton a Poem that
they had published and, in 1912, taught on both Daniel Defoe
and William Blake while at Trieste. The Romantic is also quoted
in his great novel Ulysses, clearly being an important influence

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 Death and Resurrection

on Joyce’s complex style. The poet T. S. Eliot was in many ways

less impressed by Blake’s convoluted system, but at the same time
respectful of the Romantic’s abilities as a poet. In his essay on Blake
in The Sacred Wood, Eliot dismisses the notion that Blake is merely
‘a wild pet for the supercultivated’ but also criticizes the fact that
Blake invented his own system – one that only made sense to the
poet himself. Eliot appears to have ‘regarded Blake as constitut-
ing an esoteric tradition all of his own’,9 a fact that disturbed him
yet also stimulated his own poetic endeavours in works such as
The Waste Land and East Coker. Throughout the first decades of
the twentieth century, then, Blake’s influence – in poetry if not
the visual arts necessarily (although he was often appealed to by
the Surrealists) – continued to spread. The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell and the mythology of Orc and Urizen shaped W. H.
Auden’s early poetry such as The Orators, while in 1933 the young
Dylan Thomas told Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘I am in the path
of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are
in sight.’10 The most significant contribution made by Blake’s
poetry to the modern era was not through the medium of Modernist
writings, important as those were, but by the setting of his words
from the Preface to Mllton a Poem to music in a hymn that would
later become known as ‘Jerusalem’.
As we saw in Chapter Seven, Blake first composed the stanzas
beginning ‘And did those feet’ sometime before 1804, when he
began work in earnest on his prophetic book Milton a Poem. By
the time of his death, the lyrics that were later to become among
his most famous lines were more or less forgotten – not least
because Blake himself removed the Preface containing them from
later editions of the poem, perhaps ashamed or angry that his
appeal to a new audience, the ‘Young Men of the New Age’, had
failed to materialize until his final meetings with the Shoreham
Ancients. The poem was included in Gilchrist’s Life and Swinburne
also alluded to it, but no one really attempted to interpret what

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the words meant until Yeats, who rather bizarrely saw the lines
as symbolic of sexual energy rather than reflecting upon national
identity. As the poem was slowly circulated throughout the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it started to take
on some of the connotations for which it would later become
famous. In H. C. Beeching’s A Paradise of English Poetry, for exam-
ple, published in 1893, it was included in the section on ‘Patriotism’.
The lines were also set to music for the first time in 1908 by Henry
Walford Davies, a composer most famous today for his setting of
‘The Holly and the Ivy’, and who would later become Master of
the King’s Music and an early music adviser to the bbc. More
significantly, in his collection from 1915, The Spirit of Man, Robert
Bridges, then Poet Laureate, added Blake’s poem as an example
of poetry that celebrated the spirit of England and Englishness
during the darkest hours of the First World War.
It was Bridges who, along with Walford Davies, decided that
their friend Charles Hubert Parry would be an excellent choice to
set Blake’s words to music, to create a rousing song to inspire the
troops fighting on the continent and civilians at home. Parry had
been serving since the end of 1914 on a Committee for Music in
War-time, and the immediate cause of his writing what would
later become known as ‘Jerusalem’ was to provide a musical set-
ting for a meeting of the organization Fight for Right. This group
was formed by Francis Younghusband, a former army officer and
explorer who believed that the war against Germany was not
merely a political and economic one, but also a spiritual conflict.
Younghusband himself was a highly unusual individual: while
the archetypal Victorian and Edwardian adventurer – he had
led the British expedition to Tibet in 1904 – he was also friends
with Gandhi and later with Bertrand Russell. Following his
return to Britain he experienced a spiritual crisis that saw him
experiment with atheism and theosophy. At the outbreak of the
war, the Bishop of Winchester had suggested that the words to

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the national anthem be changed to make them more inspiring,

and Bridges himself disliked intensely the tune of ‘God Save the
King’. Originally the Poet Laureate had hoped that George Butter­
worth would compose something, but Butterworth was serving
at the front and would be killed in August 1916 at the Battle of the
Somme. It was somewhat ironic that Parry, who had displayed
something of a bias against Toryism and, with his wife, was a great
believer in women’s suffrage, a composer who was inspired most
by German music, should be called upon to write a patriotic
English hymn. Yet Parry was also a great patriot and saw it as his
duty to contribute what he could to the war effort. He delivered
a manuscript to Walford Davies on 11 March 1916 with the words:
‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.’11 Many
years later, Walford Davies recalled his experience of receiving
that manuscript:

Sir Hubert Parry gave me the manuscript of this setting of

Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ one memorable morning in 1916 . . . We
looked at it long together in his room at the Royal College of
Music, and I recall vividly his unwonted happiness over it.
One momentary act of his should perhaps be told here. He
ceased to speak, and put his finger on the note D in the second
stanza where the words ‘O clouds unfold’ break the rhythm.
I do not think any word passed about it, yet he made it per-
fectly clear that this was the one note and one moment of his
song which he treasured . . . I copyrighted it in the composer’s
name and published it in 1916. We needed it for the men at
that time . . . I know Dr Bridges specifically wanted every one
of us to sing it, and this is happily coming true.12

The hymn was first sung on 28 March 1916 at the Queen’s Hall
by a choir of three hundred volunteers. It was immediately issued
as a single sheet to be sung at rallies, although Parry was deeply

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unhappy with the jingoism of Fight for Right and withdrew his
permission for its use by them in 1917. Instead, through his friend-
ship with the suffragette Millicent Fawcett, he offered it to her
cause and it was performed at the Albert Hall as part of a Suffrage
Demonstration meeting. Parry himself suggested the following
year that ‘Jerusalem’, as it was now known, should become the
‘Women Voter’s hymn’ and passed copyright to the movement
before his death in 1918.
After Parry’s death ‘Jerusalem’ became a highly contested
hymn of the English establishment. While part of imperial cele-
brations such as the British Empire Exhibition of 1923, it was also
invoked by the Labour Party during the 1951 election as a clarion
call to continue the work of building the New Jerusalem in Britain.
By the 1960s it was very much identified with the Establishment
– an Establishment that, following the loss of empire and the
humiliation of Suez in 1956, looked increasingly embarrassing.
Even that did not mark the end of the hymn’s afterlife, however:
from the early 1980s onwards, when it was invoked in the film
Chariots of Fire, based on the lives of the 1924 Olympics athletes
Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, it was used as either a symbol
of resurgent nationalism or as a left-wing critique of that very
notion of nationalism. Billy Bragg, for example, recorded it in
1990 as a protest song against the Poll Tax. By the end of the
century it had become, if anything, more popular, propelled
along by its adoption by cricket teams, the Euro 2000 England
football team, and then as the official anthem of the England team
in the Commonwealth Games in 2010. In the twenty-first century,
perhaps no other song encapsulates what it means to be English
than one written by a poet who was tried for sedition by the
authorities and set to music by a composer whose sympathies
with German culture led to him withdrawing it from use as a
jingoistic hymn.

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Blake and America

One part of the world where Blake’s influence on later generations

of writers and artists was to be felt most profoundly was America.
We have already seen how Blake was fascinated by the events
that had led to independence in America, and he was taken up by
various figures on the continent at a very early stage. As Linda
Freedman has pointed out, aside from a small group of friends
who kept his memory alive in his home country after 1827, Blake
was actually better known in America than he was in early Victor­
ian England. Blake’s writings, for example, appealed much more
directly to the Transcendentalism of Emerson, who first encoun-
tered Blake’s writings through James John Garth Wilkinson, a
Swedenborgian who produced an edition of the Songs of Innocence
and of Experience in 1839. Although Emerson was to draw back
from Swedenborgianism, its revival in nineteenth-century America
helped establish Blake’s reputation there two decades before the
publication of Gilchrist’s Life. Freedman notes that another point
of entry into the United States was via the Abolitionist movement,
particularly Lydia Maria Child, who published a number of Blake’s
poems during her tenure as editor of the National Anti-slavery
Standard in the 1840s in her search ‘for ways to recapture a sense
of spiritual liberty’.13
One of the most important connections between Blake and
early American literature, although a contentious one, was the
relationship between the English Romantic and Walt Whitman.
Freedman and various other critics have observed that there is
little to no evidence that Whitman had read any of Blake’s works
before composing Leaves of Grass in 1855, nor did Whitman appre-
ciate the suggestion. In his biography of Whitman, Horace
Traubel recorded that the American poet remarked that ‘Blake
began and ended in Blake,’14 a somewhat caustic remark from
the end of his life considering how much a number of writers and

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reviewers had linked the two. We should perhaps not make too
much of Traubel’s observation, upon visiting Walt Whitman in the
1880s, that the poet used a volume of Blake for a footstool. More
significantly, writing privately in 1868 on the publication of
Algernon Swinburne’s William Blake: A Critical Essay, Whitman
noted that while both he and Blake were mystics and ‘extatics’,
the differences between them were vast – that the author of the
Song of Myself ‘never once lost control, or even equilibrium’.15
Regarding Blake’s influence on Whitman, as Ryan Davidson
observes, most of the supposed ‘points of contact’ between the
two were not available to Whitman when he began writing Leaves
of Grass. Instead, contemporaries such as Swinburne, William
Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist saw clear resemblances between
Blake and Whitman, and Davidson suggests that we consider
that the two shared an affinity of feelings and interests rather
than being adversaries.16 While it is certainly the case Whitman
may not have known about Blake while writing his poetry, he
clearly became aware of him after contemporaries began to make
compar­isons, in part because the transatlantic book trade made
Gilchrist’s Life a collectable item in America as well as England.
Indeed, such was the affinity between the two that Whitman,
who at first only grudgingly came to appreciate Blake, eventually
commissioned his tomb to be built in the shape of the Romantic’s
engraving of ‘Death’s Door’. To readers in England, in particu-
lar, it seemed that Blake and Whitman must have had ideas in
common – as Whitman remarked somewhat sardonically to
Traubel, ‘A number of the fellows in England are off after Blake.’
Other Americans in London, such as Moncure Conway and John
Swinton, linked the two artists, as did Anne Gilchrist, who engaged
in a platonic affair with the American poet (even if she wished for
more). As Freedman observes, although the two were linked by
many, for Whitman himself the legacy of the earlier artist was
always a troubled one.17

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In the early twentieth century Blake’s influence on a number

of American writers, such as Waldo Frank, Hart Crane and
Marianne Moore, continued to gain ground. The most important
– indeed, the most explosive – connection would originate in the
immediate post-war period with the rise of the Beats, in particu-
lar through the poetry and advocacy of Allen Ginsberg. It was in
Ginsberg that Blake’s particular combination of prophecy, spirit­
ual seeking and demand for political and social justice were taken
up most explicitly, although Ginsberg could also differ greatly in
some of his attitudes to hedonism and religion. Ginsberg saw
Blake as a prophetic guru and the literal source of inspiration for
his poetry, as he recounted in an experience from 1948. Having
masturbated in his room, his eyes fell on the poem ‘Ah! Sun-flower’,
which he also experienced as a series of ‘auditory hallucinations’,
feeling that the voice of Blake was reading his poems aloud in his
room.18 Blake was an explicit influence on poems such as Howl,
famously performed at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955, a seminal
moment in the emergence of the Beats as a movement that would
transform American literature. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote
in a telegram shortly after the performance, deliberately invoking
Emerson’s response to reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, ‘I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manu-
script?’19 While Blake is name-checked throughout Howl and
also provides a primary influence on the rhythm and imagery of
that poem, with its invocations of Moloch ‘whose mind is pure
machinery!’ and ‘starry dynamos’ connecting to ‘angelheaded hip-
sters’, an even more direct indication of Blake’s importance came
in the poem ‘Sunflower Sutra’. Sitting with Jack Kerouac in a dis-
used rail yard in San Francisco, the two of them see a sunflower
growing through the dereliction, causing Ginsberg to exclaim:

–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower, memories

of Blake–my visions–Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers,

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bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages,

black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of
the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stain-
less, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing
into the past–20

The sunflower, grey and dusty against the sky, is an emblem of the
visionary experience exemplified for Ginsberg in Blake’s work,
although as Freedman observes, following his trip to Japan in the
1960s the Beat poet felt increasingly trapped by the version of
himself that he had constructed after his experiences in Harlem
in 1948. In particular, the later Ginsberg sought to escape the
cycle of hedonistic drug culture that had come to dominate his
thinking (and where he was, perhaps, furthest from the original
ideals of Blake). His reading of ‘I saw a Monk of Charlemagne’
outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was, accord-
ing to Freedman, an important turning point in his understanding
of Blake as ‘a disillusioned radical, who struggled with the same
conflicts as people in modern America’.21 The ending of that
poem indicates the failure of Enlightenment as enforced rational-
ism, which for Ginsberg made Urizen as relevant as the threat of
the neutron bomb:

Titus! Constantine! Charlemaine!

O Voltaire! Rousseau! Gibbon! Vain
Your Grecian Mocks & Roman Sword
Against this image of his Lord!

For a Tear is an Intellectual thing;

And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of a Martyrs woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow! (e202)

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What Ginsberg took most from Blake was this sense of the long
history of Western civilization as a celebration of martial might
and heroism, making his verse and art as important to the coun-
terculture of the 1960s as it had been steeped in revolutionary
culture of the 1790s.
Ginsberg was the most significant of the Beat writers to
express an interest in Blake, but far from the only one to do so. In
an article for Esquire magazine in 1958, Kerouac described the
meaning of Beat as follows:

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John

Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder
way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated
hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious,
bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beau-
tiful in an ugly graceful new way – a vision gleaned from the
way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on street corners
on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the
downtown city night of postwar America.22

Many of the Beats and fellow travellers shared an interest in

Blake’s works, particularly poets. Robert Duncan, for example,
came from a family with a long interest in theosophy and Sweden­
borgianism. His complex politics (tending towards an anarchistic
approach that opposed the war in Vietnam but was sceptical of
the authoritarianism inherent in collective action) led him to con-
sider Blake’s work in a variety of ways, spiritual as well as political.
He wrote extensively about Blake, invoking him directly in poems
such as ‘Variations on Two Dicta by William Blake’ and more
indirectly in ‘My Mother Would Be a Falconress’, which takes
as its inspiration Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Duncan said of
the Romantic that, ‘To take Blake or Dante as gospels of Poetry,
as I do, is to testify to and to enter into the reality of a divine

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history within what men call history.’23 Freedman observes that

Duncan treated Blake as a difficult and ethical writer, invoking
him as a complex spiritual force as two other writers – Michael
McClure and Gary Snyder – drew upon him as a prophet of eco-
logical and countercultural views. The work of McClure in
particular could be naive and uncritical, as in Meat Science Essays,
which posits a form of Blakean energy in ranting, anti-intellectual
poetry. Snyder, by contrast, was more concerned with a reflection
on man’s relation with the environment that drew upon Buddhist
teaching and the anarchism of American libertarian traditions and
Chinese Taoism. Snyder, who originally read with Ginsberg in
San Francisco, gradually distanced himself from the Beats, but
in essays such as his introduction to Pharmako-poeia, by Dale
Pendell, argued that all poets were ‘of the devil’s party’, willing
to risk their imaginations to explore the true potential of poetry.
Yet the appropriation of Blake was not without its problems:
Stephen Eisenman draws attention to what Luke Walker has called
Ginsberg’s ‘Americanization of Blake’, and to the fact that there
are nationalist tensions inherent in the engagement of the Beats
with the Romantic poet as they claim him as one of their own.24
Although the counterculture has come to be seen as the
dominant exchange between American writers and Blake, other
currents exist. In science fiction, for example, Blake’s fantastical
writings have been a great source of inspiration, such as in the
work of Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, particularly the lat-
ter’s invocation of ‘The Tyger’ in Fahrenheit 451. Blake has also
been an important source for popular music and film, as well
as the Hannibal Lecter novels of Thomas Harris. There are also
direct challenges to the countercultural appropriation of Blake.
Saul Bellow offered a critique of what he saw as ‘the sham Roman­
ticism of the counterculture’ in Herzog, which includes serious
intellectual discussion of Blake’s role in shaping the modern
world.25 In Humboldt’s Gift the Romantic is invoked as the

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antithesis of the counterculture, refusing the ecstatic tradition of

Blake as inspired prophet that had been espoused by Ginsberg
and, instead, invoking a gloomy, complex reflection on post-war
American society:

There are a few things I have to get off my chest about

Humboldt. Why should Humboldt have bothered himself so
much? A poet is what he is in himself. Gertrude Stein used
to distinguish between ‘a person who is an “entity”’ and one
who has an ‘identity’. A significant man is an entity. Identity
is what they give you socially. Your little dog recognizes you
and therefore you have an identity. An entity by contrast, an
impersonal power, can be a frightening thing. It’s as T. S. Eliot
said of William Blake. A man like Tennyson was merged into
his environment or encrusted with parasitic opinion, but Blake
was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own
crystal. There was nothing of the ‘superior person’ about him,
and this made him terrifying. That is an entity. An identity is
easier on itself. An identity pours a drink, lights a cigarette,
seeks its human pleasure, and shuns rigorous conditions. The
temptation to lie down is very great. Humboldt was a weaken­
ing entity. Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is
no cinch. God ‘giveth songs in the night’, the Book of Job says.26

Blake in Post-war Culture

As Blake was adopted by fine artists and literary writers, so fol-

lowing the end of the Second World War he also came to be a
significant part of the booming popular and mass-market culture
that grew up as part of post-war consumerism. With regard to his
adoption by the counterculture, Blake was often portrayed as the
prophet of (self) liberation, the poet who preached that everyone
must create a system lest they be enslaved by another man’s. As

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well as the works of the Beats, Blake was taken up enthusiastically

by the pop music scene of the 1960s: Bob Dylan was turned on to
Blake by Allen Ginsberg and, according to Steve Clark and James
Keery, knew Blake ‘better than some of his critics’.27 ‘Every Grain
of Sand’ is usually assumed to take its title from the opening lines
of ‘Auguries of Innocence’, but as they point out it in fact comes
from Jerusalem, where Blake writes:

the Gate of Los . . . cannot be found

By Satans Watch-fiends tho’ they search numbering
every grain
Of sand on Earth every night, they never find this Gate.
(34.59–35.2, e181)

Jerusalem also provides the inspiration for Dylan’s song ‘Golden

Loom’, drawing its name from ‘the golden Looms of Cathedron’,
and his understanding of Blake appears to have been subtly
drawn upon as a source of visionary opposition to war and power
throughout his musical career, rather than being overtly name-
checked again and again. One songwriter who had no problem
namechecking Blake was Jim Morrison: The Doors famously
took their name from the line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is: infinite’ (e39). The appropriation was not
necessarily a direct one: Morrison, drawing upon Aldous Huxley’s
account of his experiences with mescaline, which used the prov-
erb from Blake to provide its title, The Doors of Perception, had
paraphrased Blake’s words, saying, ‘There are things known and
unknown, and in between there are doors.’28 The link to Blake
was, however, made explicit on the track ‘End of the Night’ on
their eponymous debut album, where Morrison interweaves lines
of Blake from ‘Auguries of Innocence’ among his own lyrics:

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Realms of bliss, realms of light

Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to the endless night
End of the night, end of the night

While Dylan and Morrison tower over the countercultural pop

music scene of the 1960s (and, in Dylan’s case, long afterwards),
others such as The Fugs also produced wonderful tributes to
the earlier Romantic, as when they set his early ‘How Sweet I
Roamed from Field to Field’ to music in 1965.
The appropriation of Blake to the counterculture did not
appear from nowhere in the 1960s. In the preceding decades, for
example, the art historian, literary critic and anarchist Herbert
Read frequently referred to Blake as a political as well as artistic
outsider. Like Huxley, he was an important connection between
the influences of High Modernism and the later forms of pop
art and culture: as co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, Read did a great deal to promote new forms of art, as he
explained in his 1963 biography The Contrary Experience.
Likewise, in 1944 Joyce Cary had published one of the most
profoundly Blakean novels ever to be written, The Horse’s Mouth,
in which the artist Gulley Jimson constantly refers back to Blake
as his means of resisting authoritarianism and (by implication)
the forces of fascism. Edward Larrissy sees Cary as ‘a plausible
point of entry into the postmodern’ as the book deals with the
chaos of experience that undermines the possibility of art pro-
ducing an ideal vision of the world.29 Read and Cary seemed
to be operating very much in isolation during the period of the
Second World War and its immediate aftermath, but it was only
a few years after The Horse’s Mouth that Ginsberg experienced
the auditory hallucination that began his own lifelong journey
as a poet.

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It was the adoption of Blake as prophet of the counterculture

that seemed to do most to revive his reputation in his homeland,
particularly with the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965,
when Ginsberg joined Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell at
the Royal Albert Hall, a poetry event attended by some 7,000
people. The spirit of Blake was invoked as a presiding angel, most
notably by Horovitz, whose collection Children of Albion: Poetry
of the ‘Underground’ in Britain was published in 1969 with the
cover image of Blake’s Albion Rose. James Keery suggests that
Horovitz’s view of Blake presented ‘a sentimental image’ of the
artist, and that it was other poets from the time – most notably
Iain Sinclair – who better reflected the more sinister aspects of
Blake’s later prophecies.30 Works such as Lud Heat (1975) and
Suicide Bridge (1979) invoke Blake’s motifs of the Sons and
Daughters of Albion as running amok in London, contributing to
its mythical psychogeography as he explores the occult associa-
tions of the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor. While taking on
a darker tone, however, Sinclair’s work was generally a continu-
ation of the countercultural idealization of Blake. Adrian Mitchell,
for example, produced the extremely influential play Tyger: A
Celebration Based on the Life and Works of William Blake in 1971,
and Theodore Roszak invoked the earlier artist as a visionary light
in Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in
Postindustrial Society (1972).
By the end of the decade, however, punk marked a backlash
against the hippie movement, and when Blake was invoked in
England in the final years of the 1970s he tended to be called upon
much more critically, as in Derek Jarman’s parody of the hymn
‘Jerusalem’ in his 1977 film Jubilee, or Angela Carter’s 1978 arti-
cle for New Statesman titled ‘Little Lamb Get Lost’. Both Jarman
and Carter had much more positive things to say about Blake, but
their approach was not to blithely invoke the earlier poet as simple
visionary or prophet. As Christopher Ranger points out, Carter

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in particular was engaged in a dialogue with Blake as a ‘friendly

enemy’, offering contrary readings of Blake in stories such as ‘The
Tiger’s Bride’ and, more extensively, in her 1977 novel The Passion
of New Eve.31 In this story, which deliberately parodies and rec-
reates Blake’s Milton a Poem, Blake’s alter ego, the Prophet Los,
comes in for most criticism, recreated as a Charles Mansonesque
cult leader, Zero the Poet: yet if Carter is laying into Blake as, in
the end, one more patriarchal poet, her method of doing so is red-
olent of the technique of opposition that Blake had first deployed
in The Marriage: ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ (e34).
This notion, also expressed pithily by Blake as ‘Opposition is
true Friendship’ (e42), was key to one of the most important
novels of the late 1980s, a book which also indicated a postcolo-
nial appreciation of Blake beyond traditional Anglo-American
audiences. Although Salman Rushdie had been educated at
King’s College, Cambridge, and was living and working in
England when he published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses,
in 1988, his work owed as much to India – the subject of his second
novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – and the life of Muhammed,
called Mahound, or ‘the Messenger’ in the novel. It was the scenes
with Mahound in particular, dealing with the so-called satanic
verses in which the Prophet proclaimed in favour of polytheism
(later renounced as an error inspired by the Devil), which caused
uproar in the Islamic world, leading to a fatwa issued by Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, which called for the death of Rushdie
and his publishers. That the author should have been deliber-
ately invoking the voice of the Devil is made explicit through the
novel’s references to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The
two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are
recast as angel and devil when their hijacked plane explodes over
the English Channel, and, as Edward Larrissy points out, their
wandering of the chartered streets of the capital of the uk also
invokes Blake’s poem ‘London’.32 Throughout the novel, Rushdie

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plays with Blakean notions of contraries and draws upon The

Marriage repeatedly, as when Gibreel comes face to face with
God (who could, it seems, also be the Devil):

For Blake’s Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an

incorporeal indignation; but Gibreel’s vision of the Supreme
Being was not an abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the
bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height,
fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close
to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the
apparition was balding, seemed to suffer dandruff and wore
glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected.33

The figure on the bed introduces himself as ‘Ooparvala’, or the

‘Fellow upstairs’, to which Gibreel replies: ‘How do I know you’re
not the other One . . . Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?’
Both god and devil in The Satanic Verses are buffoons, parodies
of the divine image. While this might appear to be the opposite
of Blake’s own vision of the divine image, there is some sense
that the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell would have
approved.
Rushdie was immensely influential in terms of demonstrating
that Blake went much further than Anglo-American literature,
something that was also evident in the work of Ben Okri: some-
what tangentially in his novel The Famished Road (1991), which
explored a visionary world of magical realism not dissimilar to
that of Rushdie and, indeed, Carter, and more directly in his 1999
collection of poetry, Mental Fight. As well as a greater diversity
of writers being influenced by Blake from the early 1990s onwards,
the Romantic was also increasingly invoked as a source in the visual
arts. Antony Gormley, for example, drew upon Blake’s life mask
as a source for a wide range of sculptures he produced between
Field (1991) and Iron Man (1993), and Event Horizon (2007), works

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that sought to express the human form divine as compressed

energy. Likewise, a number of the so-called ybas (Young British
Artists) of the 1990s drew direct inspiration from Blake. The most
overt at the time was Chris Ofili, whose canvases such as Satan
and 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies Before the Divine Dung (both
from 1995) took their inspiration from Satan in His Original Glory
and The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the
Divine Throne. More recently, Tracey Emin drew comparisons
between her early works, such as the installation My Bed (1998),
and Blake’s drawings at an exhibition that was held at Tate
Liverpool in 2017. Between two large exhibitions of Blake’s work
at Tate Britain in 2001 and that of 2019, during which his original
exhibition of 1809 was recreated, the Romantic artist had embed-
ded himself even further in the cultural life of Britain. In a 2002
poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, conducted by the bbc, he was
the only Romantic poet to make the list and the only visual artist
to be included. The unveiling of Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture of
Newton, designed after Blake’s famous print of that name, in
1995 had indicated that his was a vision that had, nearly two hun-
dred years after his death, become integral to notions of English
identity – even more so when Parry’s setting of ‘Jerusalem’ was
taken up at sporting events involving the national cricket team
or the Commonwealth Games. A high point for ‘Jerusalem’ was
the inclusion of the hymn as part of the opening ceremony for
the London Olympics in 2012: the man who was almost forgot-
ten in the decades after his death had now become one of the most
emblematic of all Englishmen – a fact that, as a fervent supporter
of many of the ideals of the French Revolution, he would have
perhaps considered ironically.
Blake’s influence on popular culture was another important
factor in his increasing recognition. While many people would
have sung the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ without realizing its origins, the
same could not be said of his appearance in one of the most

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successful franchises of the 1990s and early 2000s. Thomas Harris

wrote the first Hannibal Lecter novel, Red Dragon, in 1981, but it
was in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs that Blake as a motif of
the intellectual serial killer really gained worldwide notice. While
some of the references in Silence were fairly oblique, the role played
by Blake in the earlier novel (made into a film, Manhunter, in 1986
and remade as Red Dragon in 2002) could not be missed: it is Blake’s
series of the Great Red Dragon paintings, made for Thomas Butts
between 1805 and 1810, that provide the visual inspiration for the
transformation of Francis Dolarhyde into a monstrous murderer.
In a very different setting, another important invocation of Blake
appears in the trilogy written by Philip Pullman, and one of the
few competitors to J. K. Rowling in terms of popularity. His Dark
Materials, published as Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife
(1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000), was essentially a retelling of
Milton’s Paradise Lost and an attack on established religion, but one
that very much took its inspiration from Blake. In Daemon Voices,
a collection of essays published by Pullman in 2017, the author
spoke about how he had discovered Blake’s poetry in the 1960s:

That was fifty years ago. My opinions about many things

have come and gone, changed and changed about, since then;
I have believed in God, and then disbelieved; I have thought
that certain writers and poets were incomparably great, and
gradually found them less and less interesting, and finally
commonplace . . . But those first impulses of certainty about
William Blake have never forsaken me, though I may have
been untrue to them from time to time. Indeed, they have
been joined by others, and I expect to go on reading Blake,
and learning more, for as long as I live.34

In the twenty-first century Blake appears to have become

even more popular, rather than less. While he had been something

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of a cult figure during the counterculture, today he is invoked by

an ever-wider circle of creators. In terms of musical influence,
Blake has long been one of the poets whose work has been most
widely set to music, with recent examples including settings of
‘A Poison Tree’ by the space-folk duo Astralingua (Safe Passage,
2019), Colvin Shaw’s version of ‘Cradle Song’ (Starlighter, 2018),
Jóhann Jóhannsson’s beautiful rendition of ‘Holy Thursday’
(Englabörn and Variations, 2018) and classical pianist Harriet
Stubbs’s arrangement of ‘Phrygian Gates’ by John Adams, featur-
ing Marianne Faithfull reciting extracts from Blake’s The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell (Heaven and Hell: Doors of Perception, 2018).
Blake is often an inspiration for new works as well as settings of his
poetry, with recent classical composers who have created compo-
sitions drawing on his art and poetry including Graham Treacher’s
Divine Madness: The Visions of Albion (2016) and Daniel Kidane’s
Songs of Illumination (2018). The most far-reaching use of Blake
for musical inspiration, however, came in the form of two albums
by u2: Songs of Innocence (2014) and Songs of Experience (2017) did
not directly use any of Blake’s poetry, but drew upon a number
of parallels between their respective practice to demonstrate a
deep affinity for the Romantic’s work.
One indication of the esteem in which Blake is held nearly two
centuries after his death is that, along with Turner and Constable,
he is one of the pre-eminent examples of British Romantic artists
held in the collection at Tate Britain. As Martin Myrone observes,
the acquisition of the W. Graham Robertson collection in the
1940s allowed for more varied representations of the artist in the
Blake room and a fuller understanding, as Herbert Read had
pointed out, of the Romantic’s role as a precursor to Modern art.35
Nor has Blake’s reputation waned in the time since the Tate first
acquired the Robertson collection: the exhibition that opened
in 2019 was hailed as the largest to bring together the artist’s
work in twenty years, one which would both show his work as

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he intended it to be seen (with a recreation of his failed one-man

show of 1809) as well as demonstrate the importance of Catherine,
his lifelong companion, to the practice of his art. When he died
in 1827, Blake existed in a state of penury that most artists would
have found intolerable, but nearly two centuries on he is held up
as one of the greatest creators of his day, one of the very few whose
work is widely appreciated beyond a small circle of aficionados
of eighteenth-century and Romantic art. Blake may have died in
obscurity, but he has since been resurrected as one of the greatest
poets and artists ever to have lived in the British Isles.

362
 References

Introduction: This World Is a World of Imagination and

Vision
1 G. E. Bentley, Jr, Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven, ct, and
London, 2004), p. 655. Henceforth referred to as br followed
by page number.
2 Anthony Blunt, ‘Blake’s “Ancient of Days”: The Symbolism
of the Compasses’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, ii/1 (1938),
pp. 53–63.
3 Morris Eaves, The Counter-arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry
in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1992), p. 27.
4 W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the
Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, nj, 1978), p. 4.
5 Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake:
Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination
(London and New York, 2018), pp. 127, 131.
6 Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell: New Century Edition,
trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, pa, 2000), p. 75.
7 Isaac Watts, Divine Songs, Attempted in the Easy Language for
Children (London, 1715), song 6.
8 Keri Davies, ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’,
Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxxiii/2 (1999), p. 49.
9 Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard, ‘Recovering
the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family’,
Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxxviii/1 (2004), pp. 36–43.
10 Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, revd edn (London,
1883), vol. i, p. 93. Henceforth referred to as Life followed by
volume and page number.

365
 divine images

1 Early Life and Work

1 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and
the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 17–18.
2 See Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried: William
Blake and the Erotic Imagination (London, 2006), and Keri
Davies, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William
Blake’s Family’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxxviii/1
(2004), pp. 36–43.
3 Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760
(Oxford, 1998), p. 7.
4 Davies, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William
Blake‘s Family’, p. 38.
5 G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of
William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001), p. 33.
6 Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart
(Madison, nj, 1998), p. 7.
7 Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, nj,
1994), p. 42.
8 Michael Snodin and Maurice Howard, Ornament: A Social
History since 1450 (New Haven, ct, and London, 1996), p. 42.
9 Mei-Ying Sung, William Blake and the Art of Engraving
(London, 2009), p. 7.
10 See Jenijoy La Belle, ‘Michelangelo’s Sistine Frescoes and
Blake’s 1795 Color-printed Drawings: A Study in Structural
Relationships’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xiv/2 (1980),
pp. 66–83.
11 Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts
(Oxford, 2005), pp. 54–5.
12 My particular thanks to Elizabeth Potter for her advice on the
Royal Academy and Joshua Reynolds in this section.
13 Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart, p. 26.
14 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, pp. 63–4.
15 Ibid., p. 46.
16 William Doxey, ‘William Blake and the Lunar Society’, Notes
and Queries, n.s., xviii (1971), p. 343.
17 Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart, p. 54.
18 Michael Phillips, The Creation of the Songs (London, 2000), p. 15.
19 John Jones, ‘Blake’s Relief Etching Method’, Blake, An
Illustrated Quarterly, ix/4 (1976), pp. 94–114.
20 Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 64.
21 Sibylle Erle, Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy (Abingdon, 2010),
pp. 4–5.
22 Ibid., pp. 25–6.

366
 References

23 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, to which are prefixed

a preliminary discourse and dissertation on the aera and poems of
Ossian, single volume edn (Leipzig, 1834), p. 113.

2 Visions of Innocence
1 John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-century
England, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008), p. 2.
2 Joseph Byrne, ‘Blake, Joseph Johnson, and The Gates of
Paradise’, The Wordsworth Circle, xliv/2 (2013), pp. 131–6.
3 Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s
Literature and Childhood in the Eighteenth Century (London,
2012), p. 27.
4 Ibid., pp. 128–9.
5 Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience from Manuscript to Illuminated
Printing (London, 2000), pp. 10–30.
6 Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, nj,
1994), pp. 248–9.
7 Ibid., pp. 274–5.
8 Ibid., p. 374.
9 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York, 1981),
cited in Keri Davies, ‘Rebekah Bliss: Collector of Blake and
Oriental Books’, in Blake in the Orient (London, 2006), pp. 40, 46.
10 Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More (New York, 1835),
p. 323; Andrew Lincoln, ed., Songs of Innocence and of
Experience (London, 1991), p. 14.
11 Nelson Hilton, ‘Blake’s Early Works’, in The Cambridge
Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge,
2003), pp. 191–209.
12 Stephen Power, Decomposing Blake’s Songs of Innocence
(Gainseville, fl, 1992), p. 6.
13 Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental
Poetics (Montreal, 2003), pp. 4–5.
14 Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart
(Madison, nj, 1998), p. 43.
15 Nicholas Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (Basingstoke, 2001),
pp. 15–16.
16 Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart, p. 226.
17 David Fairer, ‘Experience Reading Innocence: Contextualizing
Blake’s Holy Thursday’, Eighteenth-century Studies, xxxv/4
(2002), p. 535; Lincoln, ed., Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, p. 161.
18 Cited by Lincoln, ed., Songs of Innocence and of Experience, p. 159.

367
 divine images

19 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of

William Blake, rev. Morris Eaves (Hanover, nh, 1988), p. 282.
20 Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives
of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (London, 2016), p. 114.
21 Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real LIfe, 2nd edn
(London, 1791), p. xix.
22 Ibid., p. 7.
23 Ibid., p. 85.
24 Dennis M. Welch, ‘Blake’s Response to Wollstonecraft’s Original
Stories’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xiii/1 (1979), p. 8.
25 Joseph Salemi, ‘Emblematic Tradition in Blake’s The Gates of
Paradise’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xv/3 (1982), p. 108.

3 A New Heaven Is Begun

1 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby: or, The New Generation
(Paris, 1844), p. 176.
2 William Wordsworth, ‘French Revolution, as It Appeared to
Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’, The Friend, 11 (26 October
1809), repr. in Poems (London, 1815), vol. ii, pp. 44–5.
3 Edmund Burke, The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston, ma,
1839), vol. iii, p. 280.
4 David Duner, The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg
(New York, 2012), p. 375.
5 Cited in George Trobridge, A Life of Emanuel Swedenborg,
5th edn (London, 1992), p. 236.
6 George Trobridge, Swedenborg, Life and Teaching, 4th edn
(London, 1944), p. 244.
7 Anonymous, ‘Maternity of Swedenborgianism’,
New Churchman, i/1 (1841), pp. 52–5.
8 Trobridge, Swedenborg, Life and Teaching, pp. 250–52.
9 Cited in G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise:
A Biography of William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001), p. 50.
10 Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical
Christianity (London, 2016), p. 47.
11 Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, nj,
1994), p. 259.
12 Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, eds,
‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in Blake’s Illuminated
Books, vol. iii: The Early Illuminated Books (Princeton, nj,
1993), pp. 116–17.
13 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of
William Blake, rev. Morris Eaves (Hanover, nh, 1988), p. 88;
Michael Ferber, The Poetry of William Blake (London, 1990),

368
 References

p. 90; Martin Nurmi, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

A Critical Study (New York, 1972), p. 51.
14 John Howard, ‘An Audience for The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell ’, Blake Studies, 3 (Fall 1970), p. 61.
15 David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 2nd edn
(New York, 1969), p. 192.
16 Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader
(Oxford, 1992), p. 260.
17 Cited in Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, p. 431.
18 Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay
(London, 1868), p. 204.
19 Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
(New Haven, ct, 2016), p. 102.
20 Cited in Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas
Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (New York, 2014), p. 35.
21 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other
Political Writings (Oxford, 2009), pp. 87–8.
22 John Bugg, ed., The Joseph Johnson Letterbook (Oxford, 2016),
p. lii.
23 William Richey, ‘The French Revolution: Blake’s Epic Dialogue
with Edmund Burke’, elh, lix/4 (1992), pp. 817–37.

4 Lambeth and Experience

1 Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart
(Madison, nj, 1998), p. 127.
2 Ibid., p. 128.
3 Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary
Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (London, 2016),
p. 174.
4 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(London, 1792), p. 10.
5 Elizabeth Bernath, ‘“Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her”: Queer
Botany in Blake’s Visions, Darwin’s Loves and Wollstonecraft’s
Rights of Women’, in Blake, Gender and Culture, ed. Helen
P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (London, 2012), p. 118.
6 Gordon, Romantic Outlaws, p. 175.
7 R. M. Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Journal of the History
of Ideas, xxxix/2 (1978), pp. 293–302.
8 James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas
of Marginality’, Studies in Romanticism, xxx/1 (1991), p. 3.
9 Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion
(Houndmills, 1997), p. 78.

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 divine images

10 David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 2nd edn

(New York, 1969), p. 22.
11 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed
Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(London, 2002), p. 347.
12 Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism and the Politics of Alienation
(Athens, oh, 2004), p. xiii.
13 Ibid., p. 92.
14 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake,
2nd edn (Toronto, 1969), p. 211.
15 Ibid., Fearful Symmetry, p. 4.
16 Nicholas Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (Basingstoke, 2001),
p. 81.
17 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820
(New Haven, ct, 1983).
18 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England
1783–1846 (Oxford, 2008); Edward Royle, Modern Britain:
A Social History 1750–2011, revd edn (London, 2012).
19 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and
the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), p. 174.
20 Martin K. Nurmi, ‘Fact and Symbol in “The Chimney
Sweeper” of Blake’s Songs of Experience’, Bulletin of the New
York Public Library, lxviii/4 (1964), pp. 249–56.
21 Jon Mee, ‘The “insidious poison of secret influence”:
A New Historical Context for Blake’s “The Sick Rose”’,
Eighteenth-century Life, xx/1 (1998), pp. 111–22.
22 Michael Srigley, ‘The Sickness of Blake’s Rose’, Blake,
An Illustrated Quarterly, xxvi/1 (1992), pp. 4–8; Elizabeth
Langland, ‘Blake’s Feminist Revision of Literary Tradition
in “The Sick Rose”’, in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument
of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher and Donald Ault
(Durham, nc, 1987), pp. 225–43.

5 A New System of Mythology

1 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1824–9), in The Poems
of William Wordsworth: Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell
Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, ny, 2009), vol. iii,
p. 303.
2 Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution,
revd edn (London, 2007), pp. 326–7.
3 Robert M. Maniquis, ‘Transfiguring God: Religion,
Revolution, Romanticism’, in A Concise Companion to the
Romantic Age, ed. Jon Klancher (London, 2009), p. 22.

370
 References

4 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and

the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), p. 19.
5 Nicholas O. Warner, ‘Blake’s Moon-ark Symbolism’, Blake,
An Illustrated Quarterly, xiv/2 (1980), pp. 44–59.
6 Paul Mann, ‘The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book’,
in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and
Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley, ca, 1986), pp. 49–68; Jason Allen
Snart, The Torn Book: UnReading William Blake’s Marginalia
(Selinsgrove, pa, 2006).
7 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake,
2nd edn (Toronto, 1969), p. 255.
8 W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, nj, 1968),
p. 110.
9 Sarah Eron, ‘“Bound . . . by their narrowing perceptions”:
Sympathetic Bondage and Perverse Pity in Blake’s The Book
of Urizen’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxxvi/3 (2012–13),
pp. 25–49.
10 Martin Butlin, ‘The Physicality of William Blake: The Large
Colour Prints of 1795’, Huntington Library Quarterly, lii/1
(1989), p. 2.
11 Joseph Viscomi, ‘Blake’s “Annus Mirabilis”: The Productions
of 1795’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxxxi/2 (2007),
pp. 52–82.
12 Joyce Townsend, William Blake: The Painter at Work
(London, 2003).
13 Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy, vol. ii, 3rd edn repr. (London, 1729),
pp. 388–9.
14 Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
(Cambridge, 1983), p. 828.
15 Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World
of William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2015), p. 125.

6 Night Thoughts and The Four Zoas

1 Tristanne Connolly, Blake and the Body (Basingstoke, 2002),
p. 118.
2 Morris Eaves, The Counter-arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry
in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, ny, 1993), p. 42.
3 Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Turning Readers into
Spectators (Oxford, 2007), p. 46.
4 G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography
of William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001), p. 163.
5 Ibid., p. 164.

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 divine images

6 John E. Grant, Edward J. Rose, Michael J. Tolley and

David V. Erdman, William Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s
‘Night Thoughts’ (Oxford, 1980), p. 4.
7 Louise Guerber, ‘Water-colors by William Blake’,
Metro-politan Museum of Art Bulletin, xxiii/4 (April 1928),
pp. 103–7.
8 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, ‘Thomas Parnell’s “Night-piece
on Death” and Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts”,
anq: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews,
xx/4 (2007), p. 6.
9 Michael Farrell, ‘Night Thoughts’, in Blake and the Methodists
(Basingstoke, 2014), p. 112.
10 W. B. Yeats, ‘William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine
Comedy’, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. iv: Early
Essays (London, 2007), p. 90.
11 Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake:
Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination
(London, 2018), p. 34.
12 Thora Brylowe, ‘Paper and the Poor: Romantic Media
Ecologies and the Bank Restriction Act of 1797’, Literature
Compass, xvi/2 (2019), p. 6.
13 G. E. Bentley, Jr, William Blake in the Desolate Market
(Toronto, 2014), p. 49.
14 Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (London,
2018), pp. 22, 281.
15 Gilbert Wakefield, A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop Llandaff’s
Address to the People of Great Britain (London, 1798), pp. 22–3.
16 Ian McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries
and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford, 1993), p. 11.
17 Justin Van Kleeck, ‘Editioning William Blake’s vala/The Four
Zoas’, in Editing and Reading Blake, ed. Wayne C. Ripley and
Justin Van Kleeck, September 2010, https://romantic-circles.
org, accessed 9 February 2020.
18 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake,
2nd edn (Toronto, 1969), p. 305.
19 W. B. Yeats and Edwin John Ellis, The Works of William Blake,
Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (London, 1893), vol. i, p. viii.
20 George Anthony Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study
of The Four Zoas (Lewisburg, pa, 1994).
21 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, p. 185.
22 Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake, p. 65.
23 Ibid., p. 87.

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 References

7 England’s Pleasant Land

1 Janet Warner, ‘Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”’, Colby
Quarterly, xii/3 (1976), pp. 126–38.
2 Ibid., p. 127.
3 David Perkins, ‘Animal Rights and “Auguries of Innocence”’,
Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, xxx/1 (1999), pp. 4–11 (p. 8).
4 Mark Crosby, ‘Blake’s Sussex Experience’, in William Blake in
Sussex: Visions of Albion, ed. Andrew Loukes (London, 2018),
pp. 23–5.
5 G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography
of William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001), p. 258.
6 John Milton, The History of Britain, that part especially now
call’d England (London, 1670), pp. 79–80.

8 Creating Systems
1 Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, Robert Blair’s
‘The Grave’, illustrated by William Blake: A Study with
a Facsimile (London, 1982), p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 25.
3 Morton Paley, ‘William Blake’s “Portable Fresco”’, European
Romantic Review, xxiv/3 (2013), pp. 271–7.
4 Martin Myrone, Seen in my Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue
of Pictures (London, 2009), p. 13.
5 My thanks to Elizabeth Potter for the observations on Reynolds
in this section.
6 Myrone, Seen in my Visions, p. 31.
7 Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader
(Oxford, 1992), p. 2.
8 Pamela Dunbar, William Blake‘s Illustrations to the Poetry
of Milton (Oxford, 1980), pp. 12–13.
9 Ibid., p. 120.
10 Ibid., p. 64.
11 Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake:
Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination
(London, 2018), p. 153.
12 Fred Dortort, The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading
of William Blake’s Jerusalem (Barrytown, ny, 1998), p. 26.

9 Final Visions
1 G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography
of William Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001), p. 367.

373
 divine images

2 Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1992), p. 339.

3 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, p. 369.
4 Irene Taylor, ‘Blake’s Laocoön’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly,
x/3 (1976–7), p. 75.
5 Morton Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works
of William Blake (Oxford, 2008), p. 100.
6 Ibid., p. 281.
7 S. Foster Damon, William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book
of Job (New York, 1966), p. 12.
8 Sebastian Schütze, ‘Two Masters of “visibile parlare”:
Dante and Blake’, in Schütze and Maria Antoinetta Terzoli,
William Blake: The Drawings for Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’
(Cologne, 2014), p. 41.

10 Death and Resurrection: The Legacy of William Blake

1 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes’, in
William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Hegarty (Cambridge,
2019), p. 211.
2 Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies: Essays on His Life and Work,
2nd edn (Oxford, 1971), p. 17.
3 Marion Walker Alcaro, Walt Whitman’s Mrs. G: A Biography
of Anne Gilchrist (Madison, nj, 1991), p. 98.
4 Helsinger, ‘Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes’, p. 212.
5 Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay
(London, 1868), p. 8.
6 Ibid., p. 4.
7 Colin Trodd, Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World,
1830–1930 (Liverpool, 2012), p. 20.
8 Arianna Antonielli, ‘William Butler Yeats’s “The Symbolic
System” of William Blake’, Estudios Irlandeses, 3 (2008),
pp. 10–11.
9 Edward Larrissy, Blake and Modern Literature (Basingstoke,
2006), p. 32.
10 Cited ibid., p. 51.
11 Charles L. Graves, Hubert Parry, His Life and Works, 2 vols
(London, 1926), vol. ii, p. 174.
12 Cited in Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 483–4.
13 Linda Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America: From
the Abolitionists to the Counterculture (Oxford, 2018), p. 26.
14 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (New York,
1915), vol. ii, p. 99.
15 Walt Whitman, Faint Clews and Indirections: Manuscripts of

374
 References

Walt Whitman and His Family (Durham, nc, 1949), p. 53.

16 Ryan Davidson, ‘Affinities of Influence: Exploring the
Relationship between Walt Whitman and William Blake’,
PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014.
17 Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America, p. 61.
18 Cited ibid., p. 89.
19 Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: A Biography, 2nd edn (London,
2012), p. 194.
20 Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems (London,
2009), p. 19.
21 Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America, p. 116.
22 Jack Kerouac, ‘The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’,
Esquire (1 March 1958).
23 Cited in Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America, p. 121.
24 Stephen E. Eisenman, ed., William Blake and Age of Aquarius
(Princeton, nj, 2017), p. 234.
25 Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America, p. 215.
26 Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York, 1976), p. 390.
27 Steve Clark and James Keery, ‘“Only the wings on his heels”:
Blake and Dylan’, in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-
century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne
Connolly and Jason Whittaker (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 224.
28 Cited in Tristanne Connolly, ‘“He Took a Face from the
Ancient Gallery”: Blake and Jim Morrison’, in Blake 2.0, ed.
Clark, Connolly and Whittaker, p. 230.
29 Larrissy, Blake and Modern Literature, p. 85.
30 James Keery, ‘Children of Albion: Blake and Contemporary
English Poetry’, in Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture, ed.
Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 100.
31 Christopher Ranger, ‘Friendly Enemies: A Dialogical
Encounter between William Blake and Angela Carter’, in
Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture, ed. Clark and Whittaker,
pp. 140–41.
32 Larrissy, Blake and Modern Literature, p. 154.
33 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London, 1988), p. 318.
34 Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling, ed. Simon
Mason (Oxford, 2017), pp. 342–3.
35 Martin Myrone, ‘Blake in Exhibition and on Display,
1904–2014’, in William Blake: The Man from the Future?,
ed. Colin Trodd and Jason Whittaker, special issue of
Visual Culture in Britain, xix/3 (2009), pp. 368–9.

375
 Select Bibliography

The most comprehensive collection of Blake’s works is available on The

William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org), which includes multiple
facsimiles of all the illuminated books, the majority of his paintings and
commercial prints, and many other works as well as an electronic edition
of David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. In
addition, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly (http://bq.blakearchive.org) is
the journal of record dedicated to recent scholarship and discoveries
about William Blake.

Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (London, 1995)

Beer, John, Blake’s Humanism (Manchester, 1968)
—
—, Blake’s Visionary Universe (Manchester, 1969)
Behrendt, Stephen C., Reading William Blake (London, 1992)
Bentley, Jr, G. E., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William
Blake (New Haven, ct, 2001)
—
—, Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven, ct, 2004)
—
—, ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London, 1975)
Bindman, David, Blake as an Artist (Oxford, 1977)
—
—, assisted by Deirdre Toomey, The Complete Graphic Works
of William Blake (London, 1978)
—
—, ed., Blake’s Illuminated Books, 6 vols (Princeton, nj, and London,
1991–5)
Bloom, Harold, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument
(Garden City, ny, 1963)
Blunt, Anthony, The Art of William Blake (New York, 1959)
Bronowski, Jacob, William Blake: A Man Without a Mask
(London, 1943)
Bruder, Helen, and Tristanne Connolly, eds, Sexy Blake
(Basingstoke, 2014)

377
 divine images

Bundock, Chris, and Elizabeth Effinger, eds, William Blake’s Gothic

Imagination: Bodies of Horror (Manchester, 2018)
Butlin, Martin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols
(New Haven, ct, 1981)
Clark, Steve, and David Worrall, eds, Historicizing Blake
(Basingstoke, 1994)
—
—, Tristanne Connolly and Jason Whittaker, eds, Blake 2.0: William
Blake in Twentieth-century Art, Music and Culture (Basingstoke,
2012)
Damon, S. Foster, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of
William Blake, rev. Morris Eaves (Hanover, nh, 1988)
Damrosch, Jr, Leopold, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton,
nj, 1980)
—
—, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (New
Haven, ct, 2016)
De Luca, Vincent Arthur, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics
of the Sublime (Princeton, nj, 1991)
Dent, Shirley, and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake: Influence and
Afterlife from 1827 (Basingstoke, 2002)
Dorfman, Deborah, Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation
as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats (New Haven, ct, 1969)
Eaves, Morris, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, nj, 1982)
—
—, The Counter-arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake
(Ithaca, ny, 1993)
Erdman, David V., and John E. Grant, eds, Blake’s Visionary Forms
Dramatic (Princeton, nj, 1970)
—
—, The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, ny, 1974)
—
—, Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History
of His Own Times, 3rd edn (Princeton, nj, 1977)
—
—, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revd edn
(Berkeley, ca, 1988)
Essick, Robert N., William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, nj, 1980)
—
—, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton, nj,
1983)
—
—, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford, 1989)
—
—, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue
and Study of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other
Artists (Oxford, 1991)
—
—, and Donald Pearce, eds, Blake in His Time (Bloomington,
in, 1978)
Ferber, Michael, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton,
nj, 1985)
Freedman, Linda, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the
Abolitionists to the Counterculture (Oxford, 2018)

378
 Select Bibliography

Freeman, Kathryn S., A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake

(London, 2017)
Frye, Northrop, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
(Princeton, nj, 1947)
Fuller, David, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London, 1988)
—
—, William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose, Longman Annotated
Texts, revd edn (London, 2008)
Gallant, Christine, Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos (Princeton,
nj, 1978)
Gardner, Stanley, The Tyger, The Lamb and The Terrible Desart
(London, 1998)
Gilchrist, Alexander, Life of William Blake, 2 vols (1863, revd 1880)
(Cambridge, 2010)
Hagstrum, Jean H., William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction
to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago, il, 1964)
Heppner, Christopher, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge, 1995)
Hilton, Nelson, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words
(Berkeley, ca, 1983)
—
—, and Thomas A. Vogler, eds, Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality
(Berkeley, ca, 1986)
Hirst, Desiree, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the
Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964)
Hoock, Holger, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the
Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford, 2005)
Johnson, Mary Lynn, and John E. Grant, eds, Blake’s Poetry and
Designs, Norton Critical Edition, revd edn (New York, 2008)
Jones, John H., Blake on Language, Power, and Self-annihilation
(Basingstoke, 2010)
Keynes, Geoffrey, Blake Studies [1949], 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971)
—
—, ed., Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings, revd edn
(Oxford, 1979)
Larrissy, Edward, William Blake. Rereading Literature
(Oxford, 1985)
—
—, Blake and Modern Literature (Basingstoke, 2006)
Lindsay, Jack, William Blake: His Life and Work (London, 1978)
Mee, Jon, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture
of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992)
Mellor, Anne K., Blake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley,
ca, 1974)
Mitchell, W.J.T., Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, nj, 1978)
Moskal, Jeanne, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa,
al, and London, 1994)
Myrone, Martin, The Blake Book (London, 2007)
—
—, William Blake (London, 2019)

379
 divine images

Nurmi, Martin K., William Blake (London, 1975)

Ostriker, Alicia, Vision and Verse in William Blake (Madison, nj, 1965)
—
—, ed., William Blake: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1977)
Otto, Peter, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Loss,
Eternity and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William
Blake (Oxford, 1991)
Paley, Morton D., Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the
Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford, 1970)
—
—, William Blake (Oxford, 1978)
—
—, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake
(Oxford, 2008)
—
—, and Michael Phillips, eds, William Blake: Essays in Honour
of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1973)
Phillips, Michael, ed., Interpreting Blake (Cambridge, 1978)
—
—, William Blake: The Creation of the ‘Songs’ from Manuscript
to Illuminated Printing (Princeton, nj, 2001)
—
—, William Blake: Apprentice and Master (Oxford, 2014)
Raine, Kathleen, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols (Princeton, nj, 1968)
—
—, Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake
(Hudson, ny, 1991)
Rothenberg, Molly Anne, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality
(Columbia, mo, and London, 1993)
Rowland, Christopher, Blake and the Bible (New Haven, ct, 2011)
Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the
Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993)
Trodd, Colin, Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World,
1830–1930 (Liverpool, 2012)
Viscomi, Joseph, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, nj, 1993)
Warner, Janet, Blake and the Language of Art (Kingston, on,
and Montreal, 1984)
Wilson, Mona, The Life of William Blake, revd edn (London, 1971)

380
 Acknowledgements

This book represents a longstanding fascination on my part in the life

and work of William Blake and, as such, it has evolved from many
conversations over many years with a variety of fellow travellers. Early
figures who stimulated my intellectual interest in Blake include Mark
Storey and David Worrall, my first guides, and to these must be added
Shirley Dent, Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, Colin Trodd and Roger
Whitson, who prompted the next stage of my understanding of Blake,
both in his time and the subsequent reception of his work. Those who
have more recently supported me or provided advice for this project
include Morton Paley, Morris Eaves, Sibylle Erle, Martin Myrone, Sarah
Jones, Annise Rogers, Cecilia Marchetto, Naomi Billingsley, Harriet
Stubbs, Gareth Sturdy, Tim Heath and Elizabeth Potter, who have
endured my musings or requests for enlightenment with good grace.
I would also like to thank Joseph Viscomi who first suggested my
name as a potential author for this book to Vivian Constantinopoulos
at Reaktion Books. Most of all, however, as always, my deepest gratitude
goes to my wife, Sam, who has shared my love for Blake for all these years.

381
 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.

© The Trustees of The British Museum, London: pp. 26, 36; © British
Library Board: pp. 204 and 209 (Add ms 39764); Maksymovych
Scientific Library: p. 32; New York Public Library: pp. 69, 241, 246,
248, 250, 251, 253, 255; v&a Museum: pp. 134, 219; Whitworth Art
Gallery: p. 6; Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection: pp.
13, 22, 33, 50 left and right, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 63 left and right, 76, 77,
80, 81, 83, 88 left and right, 94 above and below, 96 left and right, 120,
128, 131, 133, 135, 136, 140, 143, 145, 149, 165, 168, 169, 170, 189, 192, 193,
195, 197, 198, 218, 220, 221, 226, 230, 260, 261, 262, 264–5, 280, 285,
288, 290, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 303, 304, 305, 306 left and
right, 307, 311, 312, 325, 326, 328, 329, 332 above and below.

383
 Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations
18th-century book trade
57–60
Abraham and Isaac 220, 220,
222
Ackroyd, Peter 303
Adam 171–2, 272
Aesop 89
Age of Reason, The 161–2
Ahania 163, 175, 213
Albion 168, 185–6, 208, 211,
226, 256, 287–94, 297
Albion Rose 35, 177, 185
Albion’s Angel 137–8, 144
All Religions are One 47–8,
61, 78, 106
Allingham, William 337
America a Prophecy 20, 42,
118, 123, 134, 135–41, 135,
136, 143, 166, 183, 184,
212, 222, 327
American War of
Independence 37–8, 92,
115, 132, 137–41
Ancient Britons, The 271–2
Ancient of Days, The 6, 7,
9–12, 177, 281
Antonelli, Arianna 341–2
Arthur, King 271–2
Astralingua 361
Auden, W. H. 23, 343
Auguries of Innocence 15, 24,
126, 231–2, 354–5
Bacon, Sir Francis 68
Bank of England, the
197–9
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia
59, 64
Barry, James 268
Bartolozzi, Francesco
259–60
Basire, James 31–4, 55, 162,
322
Bastille, the 95, 152
Bayle, Pierre 111
Beckford, William 151
Beeching, H. C. 344
Beggar’s Opera, The, Act iii
59, 274
Bellow, Saul 352–3
Bentley, Jr, G. E. 29, 43,
100, 187, 191, 199, 237,
238, 265, 335, 337
Bernath, Elizabeth 126
Billingsley, Naomi 196, 218,
222, 234
Binyon, Laurence 340–41
Blair, Robert 192, 257–8,
274
Blake, Catherine 7, 38–9,
44, 61, 62, 67, 99, 122,
158, 199, 207, 216, 222,
223–4, 226, 229, 232,
237, 238, 273, 284, 287,
301, 302, 322, 336, 362
portrait of 306
possible miscarriage
187
Blake (née Wright),
Catherine (mother)
27–8
Blake, James (brother)
228, 238
Blake, James (father) 27,
38–9
Blake, Robert 35–6, 46,
308
Blake, William
and American culture
347–53
and antiquarianism
162–3
and contemporary
poetic tastes 40, 42
and Dissent 18–19, 28–9,
302
385
divine images

and Modernism 341–3 personal mythology Burns, Robert 24

and Moravianism 19, 83–4, 162–76, 186, Butlin, Martin 177
28–9 207–15 Butterworth, George 345
and music 24, 354–5, 361 poetic metre 67, 73, Butts, Elizabeth 216, 222,
and nature 68–9 82–4, 117, 151, 208 273
and Swedenborgianism printmaking techniques Butts, Thomas 62, 216–17,
100–103 14–15, 32–3, 46–8, 51, 222, 232, 235, 239, 273,
and the Beats 349–52 177–9, 322 274–5, 277, 278, 282,
and the Bible of Hell solo exhibition 201, 321, 356
158, 162, 164–76, 316, 266–73 Byrne, Joseph 60
322 Bliss, Rebekah 62 Byron, Lord 16, 22, 225
and the counterculture Bloom, Harold 158
354–6 Blunt, Anthony 10 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre
and the gothic 33–4, Boehme, Jacob 342 de 92–3
330 Bonaparte, Napoleon 188, Calvert, Edward 303
and the trial for sedition 199–201, 235 Calvinism 247–9
235–40 Book of Ahania, The 162, 166, Canterbury Pilgrims, The
attitudes towards Christ 174–5, 176, 177 200, 263–6, 264–5
66–7, 70, 174–6, Book of Job, The see Carlyle, Thomas 337
196–7, 217–21, 282–4, illustrations to The Book Carter, Angela 356–7
319–21 of Job Cary, Joyce 355
attitudes towards God Book of Los, The 162, 175–6, Chapman, John 100
71, 183–5, 281–2, 177 Chatterton, Thomas 40,
317–20 Book of Thel, The 16, 41, 55, 43, 55
attitudes towards 60, 78–84, 80–81, 83, Chaucer, Geoffrey 14, 57,
politics 19–21, 95–6, 184 227, 263–5
116–19, 122–3, 135–45, Boyd, Henry 328 Chichester 223–4, 229,
151–3 Boydell, John 190 238–9
attitudes towards Bradbury, Ray 352 Child, Lydia Mary 347
religion 16–19, 47–51, Bragg, Billy 346 children’s literature 60–61,
70–78, 104–5, 109–12, Bridges, Robert 344–5 63–5, 84–9
148–52, 161–2 Britten, Benjamin 8 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’
attitudes towards Bromion 127–32 (Experience) 155
sexuality 63, 82, Browning, Robert 338 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’
127–32, 155–8 Bruder, Helen 129, 130 (Innocence) 71
birthplace 27 Bryant, Jacob 163, 244 Christ Appearing to the
death 7, 335 Brylowe, Thora 198 Apostles after the
early arrest on suspicion Bugg, John 116 Resurrection 218
of being a spy 38 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Clark, Steve 354
education and 340 Cock, John 236
apprenticeship 29–36 Bunhill Fields 19, 28 Coleridge, S. T. 15–16,
marriage to Catherine 38 Bunyan, John 303 17, 55, 62, 67, 118,
painting techniques Burke, Edmund 95–7, 109, 161, 201
13–14, 217–19, 266–73 115–17, 125, 161 Collins, William 40, 43

386
 Index

Committee of Public Safety Directory, the 187, 199–200 Essick, Robert 108
142, 153, 159 Disraeli, Benjamin 93 Europe a Prophecy 10, 123,
Comus 274–5 ‘The Divine Image’ 18, 74–5, 134, 142–5, 143, 145, 162,
Connolly, Tristanne 158, 187 77 177, 179, 277
Constable, John 15 Domínguez, Óscar 178 ‘Europe Supported by Africa
Conway, Moncure 348 Doors, The 354–5 and America’ 134
Cowper, William 225, 227, Dortort, Fred 289 Eve 171–2, 218–20
230 Doxey, William 44 Eve Tempted by the Serpent
‘A Cradle Song’ 72 druids 162, 222, 272, 292 218–19, 219
Crabb-Robinson, Henry 151, Dunbar, Pamela 275, 277, Everlasting Gospel, The 283,
303, 340 280 319–21
Crane, Hart 349 Duncan, Robert 351–2 Ezekiel 53, 106, 252
Crawfurd, Oswald 340 Dürer, Albrecht 322
creation myth 169–72, Dylan, Bob 8, 354, 355 Faderman, Lillian 62
208–11 Fairer, David 73
Cromek, Robert Hartley Eaves, Morris 14, 108 Farrell, Michael 193
257–66, 301 ‘The Ecchoing Green’ 20, Fawcett, Millicent 346
Crosby, Mark 234 311 Feather, John 58
Cult of the Supreme Being, Edgecombe, Rodney 192, Felpham 67, 113, 214, 223–6,
the 160–61, 175 194 229–30, 232–9, 252, 257,
Cumberland, George 36, 62, Edwards, James 190 284, 286, 314
202, 301 Edwards, Richard 188, Ferber, Michael 104
Cumberland Jr, George 301 190–91, 194, 199 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 349
Cunningham, Allan 7, 43, Eisenman, Stephen 352 Flaxman, Anne 223–4
151, 335, 336, 340 Eliot, T. S. 8, 23, 342, 343, Flaxman, John 36, 39, 99,
353 225, 232, 257, 314, 330
Damon, S. Foster 84, 104, Ellis, John Edwin 205, 341, First Book of Urizen, The
205, 324 342 123, 158, 162, 164–73,
Damrosch, Leo 10–11 Elohim Creating Adam 183–4, 165, 168–70, 183, 184,
Dante Alighieri 327–8, 184, 324–5 207, 212–13
330, 352 emblem books 89 First World War 242
David, Jacques-Louis 160 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 347, Fish, Stanley 152
David, King 306 349 For Children: The Gates of
Davidson, Ryan 348 Emin, Tracey 359 Paradise 62, 87–9, 88
Davies, Edward 292 Enion 213 For the Sexes see For Children
Davies, Keri 18, 28, 62 Enitharmon 135, 138, 142–4, Fountain Court 7, 302–3
Death of Earl Goodwin, The 162, 163, 171–2, 175, 176, Four Zoas, The 16, 84, 138,
34 211, 213, 249, 284, 288, 203–15, 204, 209, 216,
deism 11, 29, 50–51, 98, 289, 297 230, 288, 317, 341–2
160–61, 181, 210, 316, 321 Erdman, David V. 19, 108, Fox, Charles 96, 203
Deville, James 305 137, 205 Frank, Waldo 349
Descriptive Catalogue, Erle, Sibylle 51 Franklin, Benjamin 11, 137
A 12–13, 57, 263, 266–73, Ernst, Max 178 Freedman, Linda 347–8,
315 Erskine, Thomas 202 350

387
 divine images

French Revolution 19–20, God Judging Adam 177, 183 ‘How sweet I roam’d from
36, 92–7, 108–9, 122, Godwin, William 17, 60, 85, field to field’ 42–3, 355
124, 139–40, 142–5, 147, 127 Howard, John 104
152–3, 159–61, 183, 188, Golgonooza 289 Hume, David 50, 111, 190
199–201, 215 Good and Evil Angels, The Humphry, Ozias 183
French Revolution, The 20, 183–4, 185 Hunt, Holman 338
42, 83, 95, 116–19, 123, Gordon, Charlotte 125 Hunt, Robert 272–3
137 Gordon Riots 36–7 Hutchings, Kevin 68
Frye, Northrop 49, 139, 147, Gormley, Anthony 358–9 Huxley, Aldous 354, 355
157, 173, 204–5, 207, 211, Grave, The 13, 192, 196,
280 257–63, 260, 261, 262, Ilive, Elizabeth, Countess of
Fugs, The 355 273, 335 Egremont 227–8
Fuseli, Henry 34, 36, 85, 191, Gray, Thomas 40, 43, 55, illustrations
232, 267, 287, 330 192, 274 to the Bible 216–22
and the Milton Gallery to the Book of Enoch 317
190, 202 Hannibal Lecter 274, 352, to the Book of Job 15, 33,
Fuzon 172, 174–5 356 183, 302, 321–7, 325,
Hardy, Thomas 202–3 326, 328–9, 328, 329,
Gainsborough, Thomas Harris, Thomas 274, 352, 337
269 360 to Dante 302, 321, 327–8,
‘The Garden of Love’ Hayley, Thomas Alphonso 330–34, 331, 332, 333
156–7 224, 225 to Genesis 317
Gardner, Stanley 29, 36–7, Hayley, William 200, 216, to Milton 273–84, 276,
45, 73, 122 224–7, 229–30, 232–4, 279, 282
Garrick, David 224–5 238–9, 257, 259, 274 to Thornton’s Virgil 229,
Genesis, Book of 158, 164, Hays, Mary 127 302, 310–14, 311, 312
167, 171–4, 220 Heffernan, James 129 to the Vetusta
George iii 30, 137, 154 Helsinger, Elizabeth 336 Monumenta 33
Ghost of a Flea, The 14, 305, Hermetic Order of the ‘Infant Joy’ 63
307–8, 309 Golden Dawn 342 ‘Introduction’ (Innocence)
Ghost of Abel, The 46, 318–19 Hervey, James 192 65–7
Gilchrist, Alexander 7, 8, 22, Hewlett, H. G. 340 Isaiah 53, 106
29, 31, 35, 36, 39, 43, 64, Hilton, Boyd 153 An Island in the Moon 44–5,
67, 95, 122, 139, 177, 185, Hilton, Nelson 65 52, 61
200, 205, 239, 265, 302, Hirsch, E. D. 152
306–7, 322, 336–8, 339, Hogarth, William 14 Jacobins 152–3, 161, 187–8
343, 348 ‘Holy Thursday’ (Innocence) James ii 95
Gilchrist, Anne 114, 337, 338, 45, 72–4, 76, 75 James, R. M. 127
348 ‘Holy Thursday’ Jarman, Derek 356
Gillray, James 14, 94, 96, (Experience) 74, 155 Jefferson, Thomas 115
203 Homer 271, 314 ‘Jerusalem’ 9, 34, 242–5,
Ginsberg, Allen 349–51, 352, Hoock, Holger 34 343–6, 356, 359
354, 355–6 Horovitz, Michael 356 Jerusalem the Emanation of
Glorious Revolution 95, 115 House of Death, The 183 the Giant Albion 11–12,

388

15, 16, 21, 34, 78, 168,
203, 213, 215, 219, 284–
99, 285, 288, 290, 293–7,
354
Job 131
see also illustrations to
the Book of Job
Jóhannsson, Jóhann 361
Johnson, Joseph 17, 59–60,
84–5, 87, 116, 124, 127,
190, 201–2, 234
Johnson, Samuel 44
Jones, John 47
Joseph of Arimathea 245
Joseph of Arimathea among
The Rocks of Albion 33–4,
55, 26
Joseph of Arimathea
Preaching to the Britons
245
Joyce, James 8, 23, 289,
342–3
Kauffman, Angelica 34
Keats, John 15
Keery, James 354, 356
Kerouac, Jack 349, 351
Keynes, Geoffrey 342
Kidane, Daniel 361
‘King Edward The Third’
40–41
Klopstock, Friedrich 233–4
‘The Lamb’ 70, 148–50
Lamb, Charles 151
Lambeth 16, 21, 87, 121–3,
284
Langland, Elizabeth 158
Laocoön 314–16
A Large Book of Designs
184–5
large colour prints, the
177–86
Larrissy, Edward 355
Lavater, Johann Caspar
51–2, 52, 263
Lawrence, Sir Thomas 310,
335
Leonardo da Vinci 35
Life of William Blake 8, 21,
23, 29, 36–7, 39, 114, 122,
177–8, 205, 336–8
Lincoln, Andrew 63–4, 73–4,
75, 78
Linebaugh, Peter 138
Linnell, John 114, 238, 278,
301–4, 307, 310, 321–2,
324, 336
‘The Little Black Boy’ 71
‘A Little Girl Lost’ 156
Little Tom the Sailor 229
Locke, John 17–18, 64, 67,
89, 106, 181, 193, 211
‘London’ 9, 15, 120, 153–4,
357
London Corresponding
Society 142, 153, 202–3
Lord’s Prayer, The 316–17
Los 118, 123, 138, 144, 163,
167–72, 175, 176, 206,
211, 213, 214, 249, 284,
288–9
Louis xvi 92–3, 152–3
Lyrical Ballads 43
Luvah 208–9, 212, 213, 297
Macklin, Thomas 190
McClure, Michael 352
McManus, N. C. 178
McPhee, Peter 115
Macpherson, James 53, 54, 55
Malkin, Benjamin Heath 151
Malthus, Thomas 59
Maniquis, Robert 161
Mann, Paul 164
Marlowe, Christopher 40
Marsh, Edward 240, 242
Marsh, Nicholas 70
Index
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
The 17–18, 41, 46–7, 49,
50–51, 79, 90, 91–2, 101–
15, 102, 107, 119, 122, 123,
130, 139, 146, 158, 182,
211, 247, 274, 278, 284,
316, 317, 319–20, 326,
330, 343, 354, 357–8, 361
Matthew, Harriet 39, 44
Matthew, Revd Anthony
Stephen 39, 43, 44
Mee, Jon 157
Michelangelo (Michelangelo
di Lodovico Buonarroti
Simoni) 12, 34, 35, 229,
268
Millais, John Everett 338
Milton a Poem 15, 16, 21, 34,
78, 101, 116, 122, 164,
215, 239–56, 241, 246,
248, 250–51, 253, 255,
274, 278, 280, 284, 286,
289, 308, 315, 342, 343,
357
Milton, John 11, 14, 34, 41,
68, 83, 92, 109, 112–14,
130, 137, 147, 152, 166,
174–6, 177, 191, 206–7,
210, 225, 227, 233, 245,
249–54, 256, 273–84,
327, 333
Mitchell, Adrian 356
Mitchell, W.J.T. 15, 164
Montgomery, James 261,
263
Moore, Alan 8, 308
Moore, Marianne 348
More, Hannah 63
Morrison, Jim 354–5
Moses 146, 173, 174, 176
Muir, Thomas 142, 153
Myrone, Martin 267, 273,
361
389
 divine images

Narrative, of a Five Years’
Expedition, Against
the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam 132–4, 138, 133
National Assembly, the
94–5, 108–9, 115, 126,
152, 202
Nebuchadnezzar 9, 162, 177,
186
Necker, Jacques 92, 117
Nelson, Horatio 270, 272
New Jerusalem Church, the
100, 101
Newlyn, Lucy 113, 274
Newton 9, 11, 179–82, 180
359
Newton, Sir Isaac 9, 24, 67,
112, 144, 163, 179–82,
186, 193
and the Pantocrator
180–81, 210
Nietzsche, Friedrich 105
Night of Enitharmon’s Joy,
The 144
Night Thoughts 183, 188–99,
189, 192–3, 195, 197–8,
203, 216, 239, 260, 284
Noah 146, 163
Nurmi, Martin 104
Ofili, Chris 359
Okri, Ben 358
Ololon 242, 252
O’Malley, Andrew 60–61
On Homer’s Poetry and On
Virgil 314
On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity 276–7
Oothoon 63, 127–32, 196
Orc 10, 118, 123, 132, 135,
137–41, 143, 163, 166,
172, 174–5, 176, 183,
196, 211–12, 213, 280,
343
Original Stories from Real
Life 84–7, 85
Ossian 53, 54–5
Ovid 271
Paine, Thomas 11, 96–7,
115–17, 125, 137, 153,
161–2, 201
Palamabron 247
Paley, Morton 267, 289, 315,
316
Paley, William 50
Palmer, Samuel 8, 23, 114,
200, 239, 303–5, 313, 322,
337
Paolozzi, Eduardo 9, 359
Parable of the Wise and
Foolish Virgins 221
Paradise Lost 11, 14, 113, 147,
152, 175, 191, 206–7, 210,
249, 252, 274, 278–81,
283–4, 308, 327
Paradise Regained 282–4
Parker, James 39, 44
Parry, Sir Charles Hubert
242, 344–6
Pars, Henry 29
Paulson, Ronald 152
Perkins, David 232
Phillips, Michael 15, 61
Pickering Manuscript, the
230
Pilgrim’s Progress, The 303
Pitt, William 124, 142, 153,
202–3, 270, 272
Plato 110, 210
Plutarch 89
Poetical Sketches 20, 39–43,
67, 68, 73, 117, 118, 122,
130, 230
Pope, Alexander 40, 44, 68,
83
Pound, Ezra 289
Power, Stephen 66
Pre-Raphaelites, the 22, 23,
303, 338–40
Price, Richard 95
Priestley, Joseph 44, 45, 59,
142, 202
prostitution 121–2, 131
Pullman, Philip 360
Quaritch, Bernard 341
Raine, Kathleen 152
Ranger, Christopher 356–7
Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzia da
Urbino) 12, 35, 268
Read, Herbert 355, 361
Rediker, Marcus 138
Rees, Abraham 314–15
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 35, 51,
268–9
Richardson, Samuel 59
Richey, William 118
Richmond, George 23, 303,
305, 338
Rights of Man 96, 115, 201
Rintrah 247
Rix, Robert 101
Robertson, W. Graham 361
Robespierre, Maximilien
142, 153, 159–61, 175, 187
Robinson, Mary 127
Rose, Samuel 239
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 8,
10, 12, 22, 319, 336–9
Rossetti, William Michael
22, 336–7
Rosso, G. A. 207–8
Roszak, Theodore 356
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 61,
65, 126
Royal Academy 14, 34–5, 51,
267, 301
Royle, Edward 153
Rubens, Peter Paul 12, 268
Rushdie, Salman 357–8

390
 Index

Ruskin, John 338 Snyder, Gary 352 Tatham, Frederick 7, 9–10,

Ryland, William Wynne 31 Socrates 306–7 38, 61, 177–9, 303, 336
Song of Los, The 84, 134, Taylor, Irene 315
Salemi, Joseph 89 146–7, 176 Taylor, Thomas 127
Sammes, Aylett 245 Songs of Experience 30, 61, 72, Tempest, Kae 8
Sampson, John 342 87, 123, 147–58, 311, 361 Terror, the 96, 109, 139,
Satan 11, 112, 113, 173, 175, Songs of Innocence 16, 45, 55, 142, 147, 152–3, 161,
179, 182, 183, 247, 249, 60, 61–2, 63–78, 82, 84, 183, 186, 188, 203, 212
252–4, 278–81, 283–4, 86, 89, 123, 147, 148, 311, Tharmas 208, 213
308, 322–5, 327 361 Thel 79–84
Satan in his Original Glory Songs of Innocence and of Thelwall, John 142
182 Experience 8, 15, 24, 43, Theocritus 68, 311
Schiavonetti, Louis 13, 62, 123, 148–9, 164, 230 Theotormon 127–32, 146
259–60 Sophocles 52 There is No Natural Religion
‘The School Boy’ 30–31, 65 South Molton Street 238–9 47, 49–50, 50, 61
Schütze, Sebastian 328 Southey, Robert 117, 118, Thomas, Dylan 343
Scolfield, John 235–8, 239 161, 229 Thomas, Revd Joseph 275
Scott, Sir Walter 16 Spenser, Edmund 68, 83 Thomson, James 40
Scurr, Ruth 159 spiritual form of Nelson Thompson, E. P. 154, 162
Seagrave, Joseph 229, 238 guiding Leviathan, The Thornton, Dr Robert John
shadowy daughter of 268, 270 229, 302, 310–11,
Urthona 135 spiritual form of Pitt guiding 313–14, 316, 320
Shakespeare, William 24, Behemoth, The 269, 270 Tilloch, Alexander 199
40–42, 52, 83, 118, 130, ‘Spring’ 67 Tiriel 52–4, 55, 84
137, 147, 177, 274, 333 Srigley, Michael 157–8 Tiriel Supporting the Dying
Shakespeare Gallery 190 Stedman, John Gabriel Myratana and Cursing
Sharp, William 99 132–4, 138 His Sons 53
Shaw, Calvin 361 Stothard, Thomas 38, 264–6 Tooke, John Horne 142,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 22 Stubbs, Harriet 361 202
‘The Shepherd’ 68–70, 311 Stukeley, William 292 Townley, Charles 216
Shoreham Ancients, the Sung, Mei-Ying 32 Townsend, Joyce 178
8, 23, 303–5, 313, 337–8, Surrealism 178, 343 Traubel, Horace 347–8
343 Swedenborg, Emanuel 17, Treacher, Graham 361
‘The Sick Rose’ 157–8 91, 97–101, 205, 342 Trimmer, Sarah 64
Sinclair, Iain 356 Swift, Jonathan 44, 83 Trobridge, George 99
slavery and the international Swinburne, Algernon Trodd, Colin 340
slave trade 129–31, Charles 22–3, 54, 67, 91, Trussler, Revd Dr John 213,
133–4, 141, 347 114–15, 336, 339, 342, 313
A Small Book of Designs 184 343, 348 Tulk, Charles Augustus 62,
Smart, Christopher 64 Swinton, John 348 99
‘The Smile’ 230–31 Tulk, John Augustus 99
Smith, John Thomas 10, 335 Talleyrand Périgord, Turner, J.M.W. 15, 218
Smith, Patti 8 Charles-Maurice de 85, Tussaud, Marie 226
Snart, Jason 164 126 ‘The Tyger’ 8–9, 15, 150–52

391
 divine images

u2 8, 361 Watson, Richard 124, 161

Urizen 10, 29, 118, 123, 130,
139–40, 146–7, 161, 163,
166–76, 183, 196, 208,
210–12, 213, 214, 222,
249, 280, 281, 284, 297,
317, 327, 343
Urthona 207, 208–9, 213
Vala 213, 288, 297
Vala or The Four Zoas see The
Four Zoas
Varley, John 301, 304–8
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
121
Vico, Giambattista 50
Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, A 85, 125–7
Viscomi, Joseph 15, 31, 47–8,
61–2, 101, 108, 178–9,
183
A Vision of the Last
Judgement 228–9, 228
Visionary Heads, The 306–9
Visions of the Daughters of
Albion 11, 123, 124–32,
134, 138, 166, 184, 249,
351, 361
Virgil 68, 302, 310–14, 316,
331
Volney, Constantin 111
Voltaire 111, 306
Vonnegut, Kurt 352
Watts, Dr Isaac 18, 64, 75
Watts, G. F. 340
Wesley, Charles 75
West, Benjamin 34, 301
Whitman, Walt 347–8, 349
Wilkinson, James John
Garth 347
William of Malmesbury 245
Wordsworth, William 15–16,
17, 22, 43, 65, 67, 93–4,
118, 151, 159, 161
Wollstonecraft, Mary 17, 60,
84–7, 125–7, 158, 274
Woolf, Virginia 342
Wright, Julia 139
Yeats, W. B. 8, 23, 195, 205,
341–2
Young, Edward 183, 188,
191–6, 203, 206, 257,
260
Younghusband, Francis
344–5
Zamoyski, Adam 200

Wainewright, Thomas
Griffiths 287
Wakefield, Gilbert 201–2
Walford Davies, Sir Henry
344–5
Walker, Luke 352
Walpole, Horace 40
Ward, James 310
Warner, Janet 231–2
Washington, George 115, 137

392