Who was William Blake?


William Blake (1757-1827) was born in London in November 1757. His father sent him to a drawing school, and Blake finally chose to become an engraver by profession. (An engraver is an artist who uses metal or wooden plates into which he cuts his designs.) A self-trained man, William Blake began to publish his own poems, and in 1789, he printed his best-known poems, the Songs of Innocence which he had beautifully engraved on copper plate. Blake lived in London most of his life, and etched and published several poems (some of them of epic length, such as Milton). In 1794 he added Songs of Experience to his earlier Innocence poems. Even in his own lifetime, Blake was as well-known as a painter as he was as a writer and although he was not deeply appreciated then, his influence on later times—particularly the modern period—has been profound. Blake died in 1827, at the age of 70.

Blake’s early poems are chiefly lyrical. As a visionary, the poet looks behind the visible world for the glories and terrors of the world of spirit. His lyric faculty was peculiarly original. Compton-Rickett observes about his lyrical faculty, “It is like the singing of a happy child, expressed with the art of a man.” While he loves joys of simple life of nature, and heart, he is not blind to the ugliness and cruelty of the world. Like Shelley, he has a passion for liberty. He thunders at kings, priests and oppressive rulers.

Social and historical background
When Blake was born on 28 November 1757, in London, George II was still the King, the largely rural population of England and Wales was about 6.5 million, and the Industrial Revolution was scarcely imaginable, although the preconditions for it (growing population and demand for goods, agricultural surplus, and technological innovations) were certainly established. When he died, not quite seventy years later, on 12 August 1827, the number of people in England and Wales had more than doubled and the Industrial Revolution had progressed well past irreversible ‘take-off’: cotton textiles, for example, an almost negligible product in 1757 (compared to woolen goods), had grown by 1827 to command half the value of all domestically produced exports and employed an army of weavers on perhaps 50,000 looms powered by steam. London’s population had gown faster than the national average and now approached 2 million, making it by far the largest city in Europe. It was not the industrial centre (Blake never visited the new industrial cities of the north), but it was the European hub of commerce and banking and the heart of a global empire.

Blake was seventeen when he heard about the battles of Lexington and Concord, and thirty-one when the Bastille was taken in Paris. The American and French Revolutions engaged his imagination and set it on a course from which in certain essentials it never wandered. But during over half of his lifetime England was at war with the revolutionary countries he admired. The “moral subversion” of young people that Wordsworth blamed on England’s reactionary policy towards France, affected the somewhat older Blake as well, and his bitterness was deepened by oppression at home— the sights all around him of hunger and disease, vagabonds and harlots, boys sold into servitude to chimney-sweep masters or drafted into the army to fight other boys from France, and imaginative engravers and poets neglected by the “hirelings” that dominated the book trade and academies. Those who knew him, however, called him a happy man, continually in converse with spiritual beings, serenely detached from earthly woes. The evidence of his works is less one-sided: he despaired and struggled against despair, sometimes triumphantly, through much of his life.

Life and Works

Blake was the second of five children born to James Blake, a hosier, and his wife Catherine. As a child he saw visions and showed artistic skill, so he was sent to drawing school and then, in 1772, apprenticed for seven years to James Basire, engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries, where he learned his craft as well as acquiring some of his political and poetical opinions. (The society took an interest in republican ideas and revered John Milton.) In 1779 he began studying at the Royal Academy and within a year began exhibiting pictures there, often with historical themes. At twenty-four he married Catherine Boucher, five years younger than him and illiterate; he taught her to read, write, make prints and colour. They never had children, but Blake was devoted to his brother Robert, ten years younger, taught him drawing and nursed him when he caught tuberculosis until his death, at nineteen, in 1787. Thereafter he communicated with Robert “in the Spirit” and even claimed to learn new techniques from him; in his prophetic epic Milton, which has much to do with brotherhood, Blake engraved two full-page, mirror-image designs of ‘William’ and ‘Robert’ receiving inspiration from a high level.

Blake made a modest but promising start as a poet (Poetical Sketches was printed, in normal type, in 1783 but distributed only privately), as a painter and as a book illustrator, but a print shop in which he was a partner failed. In 1789 he began attending meetings of the Swedenborgian Society, inspired by the writings of the Swedish scientist and mystical Bible commentator Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), but within a year he broke with it; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which he finished engraving in 1792, is among other things a brilliant parody of Swedonborg’s writings. Having illustrated books for the publisher Joseph Johnson since 1780, Blake met several of the prominent radicals in the Johnson circle, including Thomas Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (who’s Original Stories from Real life he illustrated). Between 1789 and 1795 Blake began a series of poems and designs in his ‘illuminated printing’ that constitute his greatest achievement: Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, Vision of the Daughter of Albion, America: A Prophecy, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Europe A Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Song of Los, The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania. Of these only a few of the short songs became widely known; of the longer poems, at most a score of copies have survived, and not many more of them were produced or sold. A very ambitions book illustration project followed 537 watercolour drawings for Edward Young’s popular Night Thoughts (1742), of which forty-three were engraved – but within a year Blake had no commissions for books, only a handful of patrons and friends (among them the artists Flaxman and Fuseli) and little reputation either as poet or as painter.

At this point (1800), Blake responded to William Hayley’s invitation to move near him in Sussex, where he could work on commissions that Hayley had arranged. He enjoyed what he called his ‘three-years’ slumber’ in Felpham in some ways, but the work was uninspiring, he had a quarrel with Hayley (obscurely recounted in the ‘Bard song’ of Milton), and a drunken soldier named Schofield accused him of seditious utterances against the king. Blake was acquitted (1804), but the experience can only have deepened the political bitterness he had felt for years. Milton and Jerusalem, his two completed epics, are both dated 1804 but took many years of engrave; the latter draws on the manuscript of Vala or The Four Zoas, which has survived. He found a few more book commissions and patrons for watercolours and oils, but he also felt tricked by engravers and publishers and deliberately ignored or unfairly ridiculed group of young painters, who included Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert. His last major projects were his design for the Book of Job, which integrated pictures with quotations to make a visionary interpretation of the book, and his one hundred watercolours for Dante’s Divine Comedy.

He died aged sixty-nine, sighing, it is reported, of the sights of heaven. Four years later Catherine died, also aged sixty-nine.

Category: History, Government & Society, People