William Blake Biography

Table of Contents
BookRags Biography....................................................................................................1
William Blake.......................................................................................................1
Copyright Information..........................................................................................1

William Blake Biography.............................................................................................2

Further Reading....................................................................................................2
Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography.......................................................3

i
BookRags Biography

William Blake

For the online version of BookRags' William Blake Biography, including complete
copyright information, please visit:

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/william-blake-dlb2/

Copyright Information

Alan Richardson, Boston College. Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006

Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

(c)2000-2006 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

BookRags Biography 1
William Blake Biography

Name: William Blake

Birth Date: November 28, 1757
Death Date: August 12, 1827
Nationality: English
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet, engraver, painter

Further Reading

• The standard editions of Blake's writings are Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The
Complete Writings of William Blake (1957; rev. ed. 1966), and David V.
Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1965), with commentary
by Harold Bloom. Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (1863), is still
a standard biography; another biography is Mona Wilson, The Life of William
Blake (1927; rev. ed. 1948). A recommended biography is G.E. Bentley's The
Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (2001). For Blake the
artist see Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (1959). For the reader
making his first acquaintance with Blake, Max Plowman, An Introduction to the
Study of Blake (1927; 2d ed. 1967), and Herschel M. Margoliouth, William
Blake (1951), are recommended. The most searching critical study is Northrop
Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947). Excellent
commentary on the longer poems is provided by S. Foster Damon, William
Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), and Harold Bloom, Blake's
Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (1963).

William Blake Biography 2

 William Blake Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography

William Blake, poet, painter, illustrator, and printer, is one of the most compelling and
idiosyncratic figures in the history of British culture. His works, little known until
their rediscovery some forty years after his death, have eluded one interpretive
category after another, including genre, period, and even conventional distinctions
between literature and the graphic arts. In considering Blake's relation to the British
tradition of writing for children, the difficulties in classifying his work become even
more pronounced, as it remains unclear whether Blake wrote for children at all. Are
the Songs of Innocence (1789) and For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) books
intended for children, parodies of children's books, or sophisticated versions of
children's genres aimed primarily at adults? Despite lasting uncertainty regarding the
intended audience of these works, Blake has become a crucial presence in modern
interpretations of early children's literature as a brilliant adapter and implicit critic of
the writing for children available in his time, and as an exemplar of what children's
poetry and picture books could become.

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in London, and he would live most of
his life in or near the city. His father, James Blake, was a hosier (selling stockings,
gloves, and haberdashery) who maintained a precarious competency somewhere above
working-class poverty and below middle-class prosperity. His mother, Catherine
Harmitage Blake, was thirty, a year older than her husband, when they married in
1752; she gave birth to seven children during the next fifteen years, two dying in
infancy. The youngest, Robert (born in 1767) became William's favorite sibling.

Although city bred, Blake lived within walking distance of the fields, hills, and rustic
villages then bordering on London, and as a child he wandered urban streets and rural
lanes alike. According to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, Blake's visionary
tendencies were already manifest when, at around age nine, he looked up in the course
of a country ramble to see a tree filled with angels. Still younger, at age four, Blake
had allegedly screamed when he saw God "put his head to the window." Blake's

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 3

 William Blake Biography

parents, probably Baptists (at least by the mid 1760s), did not encourage these visions:
William's insistence once nearly led to a beating (for lying) by his father, who
generally found corporal punishment useless with a boy of his son's high temper.
Neither did he force William to attend school, for which Blake later expressed
gratitude.

If fundamentally self-taught, however, Blake did receive instruction in drawing,

painting, and engraving, a marketable skill that his father encouraged. At age ten
Blake began drawing lessons at Henry Pars's academy; at fourteen he was apprenticed
to James Basire, a master engraver who held to an unfashionable preference for clean
outline. One of Blake's assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at
Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would
draw inspiration throughout his career. After completing his apprenticeship at
twenty-one, Blake briefly enrolled (1779-1780) in the Royal Academy, though the
theory and practice of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, were antithetical to Blake's
emerging aesthetic ideals.

More congenial (at least for a time) was the circle of young artists Blake met through
the painter and collector George Cumberland, which included Thomas Stothard and
John Flaxman. Blake began receiving his first independent engraving jobs, including a
design for William Enfield's The Speaker, an anthology of recitation pieces for
students, commissioned by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson in 1780. Johnson
would eventually become Blake's major link to the relatively new world of publishing
and writing for children.

On 18 August 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who signed the marriage
register with an X. Under her husband's tutelage she became an able assistant and
something of a disciple. The marriage seems to have been stable and successful, but
for some reason the Blakes had no children. Catherine once remarked, "I have very
little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise"; she came to have visions like
those of her husband, who described her (in Milton, 1804) as his "Shadow of Delight."
Through Flaxman, Blake found early supporters in the Reverend Anthony Stephen

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 4

 William Blake Biography

Mathew and Harriet Mathew, a fashionable couple who hosted gatherings of artists,
musicians, and writers in their Soho parlor. There Blake would sing lyrics from
Poetical Sketches (1783) and perhaps from Songs of Innocence to tunes of his own
devising that, sadly, went unrecorded.

The printing of Poetical Sketches, Blake's first published volume, was underwritten by
the Mathews and Flaxman in 1783; the condescending "Advertisement" by the
Reverend Mathew describes it as the work of "untutored youth," replete with
"irregularities and defects," but redeemed by "poetic originality." Modern readers have
found in Poetical Sketches a remarkable series of experiments in various styles and
modes, including imitations of traditional ballads, the works of Edmund Spenser, and
Elizabethan lyrics; verses in the manner of "Ossian" (the Celtic bard fabricated by
James Alan McPherson); and poems in the "sensibility" register of William Collins,
Christopher Smart, and Thomas Gray. The Mathews also helped Blake open a small
print-selling shop in 1784 with James Parker, a fellow apprentice of Basire's, at 27
Broad Street (next to Blake's family home), but the partnership was soon dissolved.

Given Blake's fierce sense of artistic independence and his often fiery temperament, it
is hardly surprising that he eventually broke with the patronizing Mathews and went
on to satirize them in An Island in the Moon (composed in 1784). This work,
unpublished in Blake's lifetime, is a sometimes trenchant, sometimes airy satire in
prose and verse; its targets are not only avant-garde conversation parties of the type
held by the Mathews but also the scientific, philosophical, and educational ideas,
innovations, and jargons likely to be encountered there.

The one-sided dialogues between wise adults and docile children characteristic of
late-eighteenth-century children's authors such as Eleanor Fenn are parodied in the
exchanges between the pedant Obtuse Angle and Aradobo, a hopeful youth ever in
quest of information. Blake also includes parodies of versified alphabets in the style of
the Newbery books and the simplistic style of writing for small children recently
introduced by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer. The last chapter of the
unfinished manuscript includes versions of three songs that became better known as

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 5

 William Blake Biography

"Holy Thursday," "Nurse's Song," and "The Little Boy Lost" in the Songs of
Innocence. Blake's satire on modern children's literature and education seems to have
led him toward a different and more telling mode of imitating and implicitly
commenting on his era's innovative writing for and about children.

Following Blake's withdrawal from print-selling in 1785, he and Catherine moved to

Poland Street, where he struggled to succeed as an independent engraver and
continued training his brother Robert (who had made himself part of the family at 27
Broad Street) in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of
1787 and died, most likely of consumption, after being lovingly tended by William,
who went the last fortnight without sleep keeping vigil at his brother's bedside. As
Robert died, William saw his spirit rise up and ascend through the ceiling, "clapping
its hands for joy." Exhausted and (presumably) depressed, William slept through three
days and nights. He felt that Robert's spirit continued to visit him and later claimed
that in a dream Robert taught him the secret of stereotype printing (etching text and
illustration in relief on a single copper plate), which Blake developed for use in Songs
of Innocence and other "illuminated" works. In contrast to the specialization that
increasingly marked the engraving and illustrating professions, relief etching allowed
Blake personally to control nearly every aspect of book production and marketing, and
he remained uniquely independent of the established book trade.

Blake's first trials of stereotype, or "illuminated printing," as he referred to it--the

companion pieces All Religions Are One (1788") and There is No Natural Religion
(1788")--are brief aphoristic works that readers have found helpful in first approaching
Blake's difficult "prophetic" books, a series in which the author's religious, political,
and social thought, his dazzling poetic mythmaking, and his ongoing
self-representation all become intertwined.

Songs of Innocence, a work of a different kind, represents Blake's first major success
with illuminated writing. It originally included twenty-three lyrics, four of which were
eventually transferred to its companion text, Songs of Experience, published as the
second part of an enlarged edition, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794).

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 6

 William Blake Biography

Blake continued to print separate copies of the 1789 volume, however.

The title page of Songs of Innocence features a mother or nurse holding an open book,
which two children, a boy and a girl, are eagerly reading. The group is sheltered by an
apple tree (the branches of which frame the word Innocence in the title) with a vine
growing around its trunk, suggesting the children's dependence on the adult and
perhaps also the folds of a serpent and the inevitable loss of innocence. The image
clearly refers to the children's-book tradition, but whether it is meant to announce
Songs of Innocence as a work for children, as a work that reflects and comments upon
children's books, or (like Lewis Carroll's Alice books) as both remains an open
question.

The first lyric, "Introduction," raises similar questions. The speaker, a pastoral poet, is
"Piping songs of pleasant glee" when he sees perched on a cloud a laughing child
muse, who commands him first to "Pipe a song about a Lamb"--pastoral and Christian
traditions had often been combined in English poetry, including in poems for
children--then to sing the songs, and finally to write them "In a book that all may
read." Does the child muse mean a book that the simplest reader can comprehend or
one that readers at all levels, children and adults, can appreciate in various ways? A
specialized children's literature market had arisen in England only a half-century
previously, and many popular chapbooks intended for a mixed audience of children
and adults were still in circulation. Although Blake exploits the thematic, stylistic, and
formal conventions of children's books throughout Songs of Innocence, he may also be
attempting to recapture a not so distant time before children and adults had been
segregated into distinct readerships.

Songs of Innocence refers to the developing tradition of children's literature in various

ways. As verses wedded to graphic images, some of them overtly symbolic, specific
songs such as "The Blossom" and "The Little Boy Lost" evoke the tradition of
emblem books aimed at children, best known from the republication of John Bunyan's
A Book for Boys and Girls (1686) as Divine Emblems (1724). As songs for children
with religious content and associations, lyrics such as "The Lamb," "A Cradle Song,"

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 7

 William Blake Biography

and "The Divine Image" recall such children's poems as Isaac Watts's Divine Songs,
Attempted in Easie Language for the Use of Children (1715), the hymns for children
included among Charles Wesley's works, and Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children
(1781), and critics have detected echoes from all of these writers scattered throughout
the Songs of Innocence. With their simple vocabulary, short phrases and easy syntax,
familiar imagery, and use of repetition and refrain, "The Ecchoing Green,"[sic]
"Spring," and "Infant Joy" reflect the simplified, accommodating style of children's
writing that Barbauld, Trimmer, and Fenn were pioneering in the 1780s. And in their
concern with questions of slavery, poor and working children, and compassion for
others, "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Holy Thursday," and "On
Another's Sorrow" take up issues that socially conscious writers such as Barbauld,
Thomas Day, and Mary Wollstonecraft were bringing into writing for children.

Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life, published by Joseph Johnson in

1788, was in fact illustrated by Blake when republished in 1791. Blake also engraved
plates (from designs by Daniel Chodowiecki) for Wollstonecraft's translation of C. G.
Salzmann's Elements of Morality, another children's book published by Johnson in
1791. Similar commissions from Johnson included engravings for Leonard Euler's
Elements of Algebra (1797), Charles Allen's histories for children of England and
Rome published in 1797-1798, and Salzmann's Gymnastics for Youth (1800).

Blake had begun frequenting Johnson's shop, a meeting place for authors, designers,
and radicals, in the late 1780s under the wing of Henry Fuseli, a Swiss artist and at the
time Blake's close friend and supporter. There Blake met Wollstonecraft, William
Godwin, and other radical and liberal writers, perhaps including Barbauld (another of
Johnson's authors). Through Johnson's circle Blake would have had greater and more
direct access to the world of progressive thought on education and children's reading
than he had encountered at the Mathews' parties.

Although none of the poems in Songs of Innocence is overtly satiric (unlike some of
their counterparts in Songs of Experience), it is clear that Blake's relation to both
traditional Christian writers for children and the progressive children's authors

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 8

 William Blake Biography

cultivated by Johnson was often a critical one. Some readers have insisted on taking
Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, particularly those who consider it
primarily a children's book, but others have found signs of parody or critique even in
the most seemingly naive and simple of the lyrics. "The Divine Image," for example,
can be read as a children's lyric in the tradition of Bunyan and Watts, enjoining the
Christian child to pray to "God our father dear," who exemplifies the qualities of
"Mercy Pity Peace and Love." But one could also read this poem as an instance of
Blake's radical humanism, his insistence that God exists in and through human beings,
and that no human being (Christian or not) stands beyond the pale of God's mercy:
"And all must love the human form / In heathen, turk or jew."

The critical edge of this song emerges through implicit contrast with earlier Christian
poetry for children: Bunyan, for example, depicts the unredeemed child in Divine
Emblems as a "swarthy Ethiopian" or "Black-a-more," and Watts gives "Praise for
Birth and Education in a Christian Land" (as opposed to heathen "Ignorance and
Darkness") in the Divine Songs. Blake's "Holy Thursday" could be read as an
uncomplicated celebration of the Charity School movement, which gave rudimentary
educations, clean uniforms, and a sense of order and decency to poor children. But
details such as the children's regimented marching, the disciplinary "wands" of the
beadles who shepherd them, and their placement above the "aged men" who have
appointed themselves "wise guardians of the poor" suggest an implicit indictment of
the condescending, self-interested, and frequently harsh treatment that poor and
working children of the time frequently met at the hands of their would-be
benefactors.

Much more has been made of the relation, however critical, of Blake's lyrics to
"official" children's literature than of his evident interest in and relish for what can be
called, in contrast, the "underground" world of oral forms--nursery rhymes, riddles,
folk songs, fairy lore, folktales--and of the popular chapbooks that drew significantly
upon the same traditions. These forms were still, in Blake's time, largely uncensored,
often aimed at a mixed audience of children and adults, and represented a traditional
lower-class culture under assault from the "guardians of the poor," religious and

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 9

 William Blake Biography

progressive alike. The rhythms of Blake's songs owe as much to Mother Goose as to
Watts or Wesley, and at a time when many educators and children's writers were
working to lure children away from the streets and village greens, Blake took up the
burden of popular rhymes. In the popular traditions Blake found ample precedent for
including verbal ambiguity, covert satire, and sexual imagery in children's forms,
whereas "official" children's literature had been increasingly marked by a program of
formal simplicity and sanitized content.

In August 1790 the Blakes moved across the Thames to Lambeth, a suburban area
with open meadows and swamps. There Blake wrote and etched the Songs of
Experience, dating the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience volume 1794,
with the subtitle "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." In thus
framing the two works, Blake forestalled attempts to read them in terms of a
progression from a simplistic to a more sophisticated viewpoint, or a biographical shift
from a youthful and naive attitude to an experienced and cynical one. Instead
Blake--who wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793") that "Without
Contraries is no progression"--has been understood as insisting that neither an
innocent nor an experienced perspective is in itself adequate to the complexities of
human life. Each underscores and corrects the partialities and deficiencies of the other:
a comprehensive vision allows on the one hand for the unguarded openness to life, the
sense of a benign, quasi-parental providence, and the simple joys associated with
innocence, and on the other for the acknowledgment of human perversity and cruelty,
the questioning of natural and providential design, and the impatience with social
repression associated with experience. Moreover, these contraries can be found
inhering within individual lyrics in either group of songs. Some of the Songs of
Innocence were given explicit counterparts in the Experience volume: there are
"contrary" versions of "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Nurse's Song,"
and "The Lamb." But it would be oversimplifying to try to read the two volumes in
terms of a series of one-to-one correspondences, and Blake rearranged the plates in
every copy he produced, each arrangement suggesting new interpretive possibilities.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 10

 William Blake Biography

Around this time Blake produced an emblem book, For Children: The Gates of
Paradise, which has sometimes been considered a children's book owing to its title, its
relation to earlier emblem books for children, and the fact that Fuseli is thought to
have given a copy to a five-year-old girl; on the title page Blake printed the name and
business address of Joseph Johnson, by then well-known as a publisher for children.
Yet in his prospectus "To the Public," dated 10 October 1793, Blake listed this work
simply as "The Gates of Paradise, a small book of engravings. price 3s,"
distinguishing neither it nor Songs of Innocence (priced still higher at 5 shillings) as a
children's book. In any case the relation of The Gates of Paradise to the tradition
exemplified by Bunyan's Divine Emblems is evidently a critical one. Whereas
Bunyan's and later emblem books for children painstakingly spell out the meaning of
each emblem and its moral application, Blake's captions are brief and suggestive,
giving far more interpretive latitude to and demanding far more work of the reader.
Blake reworked this volume some twenty-five years later as For the Sexes: The Gates
of Paradise, expanding the captions and adding two plates of "Keys" and an epilogue.

Blake's extraordinary poetic and artistic career, as well as his criticizing and reversing
of conventional pieties and wisdom, helped to develop his image as revolutionary poet
and latter-day prophet. As a graphic artist Blake is best known for his illustrations
inspired by the works of earlier poets; these illustrations (which include drawings and
watercolors as well as engravings) are not mere ornaments to the poems they illustrate
but constitute critical appreciations of them.

Blake's life was marked by conflict and the lack of widespread artistic recognition or
lasting commercial success. He quarreled with one friend and patron after another.
Blake's precarious commercial fortunes as an artist and engraver were not mended by
the exhibition he mounted in his brother James's house on Broad Street in 1809-1810
and for which he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809), and he spent the
next seventeen years working to stave off utter poverty.

Blake died on 12 August 1827 in a two-room flat in a house owned by relatives of his
wife; Catherine survived him by four years. In his final years Blake had found a small

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 11

 William Blake Biography

group of disciples in young artists such as Samuel Palmer and George Richmond, who
wrote Palmer of Blake's death: "Just before he died his countenance became fair. His
eyes Brighten'd and He burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."

Blake was known in his time primarily as an artist and engraver, but he had no great
reputation and was highly regarded only by a few. As a poet he was virtually
unknown--his insistence on printing his own works effectively excluded him from the
established world of publishing and reviewing--but a few contemporaries encountered
and left brief comments on his works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been lent a
copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, considered the author a "man of
Genius," and Wordsworth made his own copies of several songs. Charles Lamb sent a
copy of "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence to James Montgomery for
his Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing Boys' Album (1824), and Robert
Southey (who, like Wordsworth, considered Blake insane) attended Blake's exhibition
and included the "Mad Song" from Poetical Sketches in his miscellany, The Doctor
(1834-1837).

The publication of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus (1863)
brought new interest to Blake's poetry, which was taken up by important literary
figures such as A. C. Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Butler Yeats,
who edited Blake's poetry in 1893. Selections from Songs of Innocence and of
Experience were included by Francis Turner Palgrave in The Children's Treasury of
Lyrical Poetry (1875) and by Samuel Eliot in Poetry for Children (1880) and have
been featured in anthologies of children's verse ever since. A children's edition of
Songs of Innocence, cloyingly reillustrated by Harold Jones, was published in 1961.
Nancy Willard's A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced
Travellers (1981) is a recent children's book inspired by Blake's Songs and has also
been adapted for a video format (1986).

Blake's contribution to the children's literature of his own time must be considered
negligible at best, given how few readers (children or adults) encountered his books.
However, Blake's work has taken on major significance for the history and criticism of

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 12

 William Blake Biography

writing for children in at least two ways: as a brilliant adapter, parodist, and implicit
critic of early children's literature, Blake helped set the terms for any retrospective
understanding of both its achievements and its limitations; and as a creator of poems
in children's forms virtually unrivaled for their high aesthetic standards, compelling
rhythms and imagery, and subtle complexities, Blake provided an important example
and challenge to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's writers. There is
little doubt that Blake will continue to inspire the children's writers--and the
children--of future ages.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 13