William Blake. Osbert Burdett

      Boyhood, 1757–1771

      In August 1827, confined to a couple of rooms in Fountain Court, an alley off the Strand, William Blake’s death passed unnoticed, save by a small but gradually extending circle of friends. These were young artists who revered him and regarded themselves as his disciples. Blake aroused such interest in all the finer spirits who chanced to discover his character and his work, and his legacy quickly began to be communicated to the world. In 1828, 1830, and 1832, J. T. Smith, Allan Cunningham, and Frederic Tatham published their recollections on the poet and artist. In the great span of time that divides these enthusiasts from ourselves, the interest in Blake has grown substantially; now, there are volumes written about him, and libraries and museums all over the world devoted to housing his work. The canon of Blake’s published writings is, even now, incomplete, and there is still a chance that some of his unrecovered works may emerge from their oblivion. We have come to see in him a prophet of the nineteenth century; the precursor, independently of Chatterton and the Lake Poets, of the Romantic Movement; the asserter of the principle of energy that is most valid in Nietzsche, whose mind and aphoristic manner curiously resembles Blake’s; and the recoverer of the spirit of forgiveness. Blake was a poet, an artist, a seer, and an eccentric, whose later writings tantalise scholars in their eager search for intelligible and apprehensible truths. Blake will forever remain a poet and a puzzle; indeed, his reputation has been strengthened by its extraneous, non-artistic peculiarities.

      Little is known of the history of his family. The parish registers, unearthed by Mr. Arthur Symons, reveal that William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, and that he was the third child of James and Catherine Blake, who were then living at 28 Broad Street, in the Golden Square neighbourhood of London. These registers further show that the future poet had two elder and two younger brothers, and that both the second and the fourth were christened John. Mr. Symons infers that the first John died before the age of five, and that his name was passed on to the fourth son, who, consequently, must be the John that Blake was to name “the evil one.” The fifth son is registered under the name of Richard, and was Blake’s favourite brother. These five boys were followed by a little girl, Catherine Elizabeth.[1]

      On December 11, When William Blake was a fortnight old, his parents carried him to St. James’s in Westminster, one of Christopher Wren’s churches; here, with five other infants, Blake was baptised. Also at this time, the Italian sculptor Canova was born; Blake’s future friends, the English painter and engraver Stothard and the sculptor and draughtsman Flaxman, were two years old; and the poet Thomas Chatterton was a little boy of five in Bristol. The atmosphere of Blake’s childhood is preserved for us in an anecdote recorded by the diarist Crabb Robinson, which recounts how in the poet’s wife would remind him of his earliest vision. “The first time you ever saw God,” she would say when her husband was describing his peculiar faculty, “was when you were four years old, and He put his head to the window and set you ascreaming.” By the time Blake was a child of eight his visions were becoming habitual.

      At that time Camberwell, Dulwich, Sydenham, and Newington Butts were still villages, and an active child who lived in Golden Square could quickly reach the open fields from London. On his return from one of these rambles, Blake ran home to tell his mother that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. Though the good woman beat the boy for this assertion, and was doubtless scandalised that any of the prophets should be more real to her child than to herself, she seems to have felt compassion for him, for a year or so later when Blake came home from Peckham Rye with the news that he had seen a tree filled with angels, and his father was about to whip him for telling a fib, his mother interceded. On a third occasion, one bright morning in early summer, watching the haymakers at their work, the child saw angelic figures walking among them. How this was received at home we are not told, but it is evident that both parents were growing aware of the boy’s peculiarities and had begun to tolerate them. Thus his father refused to send him to school, having learned from experience that young Blake had a temper. There had probably been explosions at home; his parents, having abandoned the rod themselves, and hesitating to punish him, did not care to entrust him to strangers who might be less patient than their puzzled selves. The child’s imagination and his impulsive expression of feeling were probably the worst faults they would find.

      Blake’s schooling, therefore, took place at home, where he learned to read and to write, but nothing more. His precocious poetry proves that these skills must have come easily to him. Moreover, with his active imagination, the sprawling environment, and the religious imagery of the conversation of his father and his father’s friends, it seems that Blake needed other companionship or a schoolmaster. If he had studied Greek and Latin in his boyhood, then the serious study of this literature and of the history that accompanies it might have given a valuable contrast to the exclusively religious interests in his home circle. Another mythology, another set of symbols, would thus have been presented to his mind. As things happened, the eccentric influence of Swedenborg[2] was uncorrected by any other standard of comparison. Blake’s father suspected no loss in this for the future of his boy since reading and writing were sufficient to equip him for helping his elder brother in the family’s hosery shop, to which their father naturally destined the pair of them.

      William, however, would draw and scribble on the backs of the customers’ bills and make sketches on the counter; it soon became a question whether he would make a good hosier and what to do with him if he would not. Allan Cunningham, who supplies these details, suggests the anxious discussions that went on, and the various sides taken by different members of the family, when he adds that the boy’s love of art was “privately encouraged by his mother,” and that “Blake became an artist at the age of ten, and a poet at the age of twelve.” The order in which these two talents developed is significant. The only formal instruction that Blake was to receive was inevitably designed for an artist, not for a man of letters. Of his twin dispositions toward art and poetry, the artistic was cultivated and the literary left alone. His observation was fed by watching nature and men in the fields and in the streets; his imagination, already stimulated by these, was nourished by looking at pictures; his intelligence was aroused by religious discussion, the sharing of opinions, and the entirely uncritical reading of books.

      According to scholars, Blake’s favourite studies were Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and his Sonnets, together with Jonson’s Underwoods and his Miscellanies. About this time Blake probably began to write, but his tendency to draughtsmanship was even more precocious, and as there is no formal apprenticeship to letters, his father, who was becoming more resigned to Blake’s evident desires, sent him at the age of ten to a drawing school kept by Mr. Henry Pars, a drawing-master and draughtsman himself, in the Strand. This decision had been confirmed from observing how the boy would spend his free time. When he was not rambling in the countryside or reading at home, he would visit such private picture galleries as were open to the public or attend auction sales of old prints at Longford’s and Christie’s. Longford, says Malkin, “called him his little connoisseur, and often knocked down to him a cheap lot with friendly precipitation. He copied Raphael and Michelangelo, Martin Heemskerk and Albrecht Dürer, Giulio Romano and the rest of the historic class, neglecting to buy any other prints. His choice was for the most part condemned by his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they called his mechanical taste.” There was no one,

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