seemed an increasingly quixotic venture.
In March 1861, he finally met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the pace of research increased still further. The Blake manuscript notebook, purchased over fourteen years before, was at last revealed. Over several later meetings at the Cheshire Cheese tavern, in Fleet Street, the new poems and drawings were discussed. Gilchrist quickly passed muster with the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, all of whom were suddenly excited by the prospect of the forthcoming book Rossetti’s friendship also brought him into contact with Swinburne, who now discovered a passion for Blake.
Most enthusiastic of all was Dante Gabriel’s brother, the art critic William Michael Rossetti, who encouraged Gilchrist to think in terms of an even more ambitious project. After the biography perhaps he could edit a companion volume of Blake’s poems and a catalogue of his art work? Spurred on by these late supporters, Gilchrist promised Macmillan to deliver the completed biography by spring 1862.
But after six years, the work was now close to exhausting him. Money was short, and by now the Gilchrists had four children. Gilchrist’s constitution, never strong, began to fail. He was frequently ill and depressed, harassed by his weekly art reviews. Sometimes he collapsed, unable to work on Blake for days on end. It was in this growing professional crisis that Anne Gilchrist began quietly to assert herself.
Anne had probably been working as Alexander’s part-time research assistant ever since the Etty days. But now she became his full-time amanuensis. She took dictation, copied Blake’s manuscripts, checked facts and dates at the British Museum, and prepared an index. She admired Gilchrist’s perfectionism, always pursuing one more source or reference. But sometimes she felt he would never complete the book at all.
Nonetheless, by late summer 1861, Gilchrist told Macmillan that he had a draft of the whole biography. Although he was continually slipping in extra materials and anecdotes, the basic structure of the book was secure. It was lucidly organized in thirty-eight short chapters, and he was ready to start sending it in batches to the printer, for setting up in proof. This was the usual procedure for a large book.
Macmillan was delighted and urged him to begin. Accordingly, Gilchrist sent the first eight chapters to the printers in September 1861, taking Blake’s Life up to the Poetic Sketches and the ‘Notes on Lavater’ made when Blake had just turned thirty. He promised to send in the next batch by November, with the aim of having the complete work in proof by the following spring. He was under great pressure, but believed that with Anne’s help he could just about fulfil his deadlines.
On 20 November 1861, Gilchrist wrote to his publisher that he had been unable to send the next ‘big mass of copy, consisting of the next dozen or so chapters (taking Blake up to forty and his most productive years). He explained that ‘domestic troubles have during the last month stood in the way’. For six weeks his eldest daughter, seven year old Beatrice, had been lying dangerously ill at Cheyne Row with scarlet fever. His wife Anne had insisted on a ‘rigid quarantine’, remaining alone in the child’s sickroom to carry out all the nursing herself. There was great fear of infection. Gilchrist was only allowed in once an evening, to make up the fire, while Anne stood back by the window. Meanwhile, he tried to look after the other three young children with the help of one (frequently drunk) domestic.
At the end of his letter, Gilchrist unburdened himself to his publisher.
We have been in great misery at times, aggravated by our having a doctor in whom we had not implicit confidence…My wife has during all this time been confined to the sickroom, without help!…Of hired nurses we have a horror, our friends have mostly children and others regard for whom makes them dread crossing the threshold of a scarlatina infected house. Forgive this closing matter.
Yours faithfully,
Alexander Gilchrist.
A week later, just as his little daughter Beatrice began to pull through, Gilchrist was himself struck down. Jane Carlyle sent notes offering help to Anne, and Thomas Carlyle brought a fashionable physician, who looked at Gilchrist from the distance of the sickroom door and hastily departed. After that, events unfolded quickly. Ten days after he had sent his desperate, apologetic letter to his publisher Macmillan, Alexander Gilchrist slipped into a coma.
Anne later wrote: The brain was tired with stress of work; the fever burned and devastated like a flaming fire: to four days of delirium succeeded one of exhaustion, of stupor; and then the end; without a word, but not widiout a look of loving recognition. It was on a wild and stormy night, 30 November 1861, that his spirit took flight.’
Alexander Gilchrist died at the age of thirty-three. His great biography of Blake, his labour of love, had been wonderfully researched and written in draft. But it was unfinished.
3
With her peculiar force and independence, Anne Gilchrist immediately determined to finish the biography for him. Less than a week after Alexander’s death, she wrote to Macmillan on 6 December 1861, ‘I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the Book. I was his amanuensis…’
She packed up his papers, returned a mass of borrowed pictures and manuscripts, refused Jane’s invitation to move in with the Carlyles, and took the children and the unfinished book down to a clapboard cottage in tiny village of Shottermill, a mile from Haslemere in Sussex.
To understand what happened next, we have to turn to Anne Gilchrist’s own story. She had always been an independent spirit. She was born Annie Burrows in February 1828 in Gower Street, London, but was partly brought up in the country at Colne in Essex. Here, when she was nine years old, her beloved elder brother Johnnie saved her life. The incident, as re-told, has a curious fairy-tale-like quality. While exploring a secret part of the garden, little Annie fell backwards into a deep well, and would have certainly drowned, had not Johnnie reached down and just managed to hold her up by the hair, until help finally came. Over thirty years later she put this strangely symbolic tale of survival into a children’s story, Lost in the Woods (1861).
Anne’s father was a London lawyer, strict and demanding, who died aged fifty-one in 1839, when she was only eleven. From then on, the family were on their own, and Anne was in some sense a liberated spirit. They moved to Highgate, where Anne went to school, a handsome tomboy, clever and rebellious. She was musical, well-read, and free-thinking. At seventeen she was surprised by the local vicar, when reading Rousseau’s sexually explicit Confessions on a tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. Embarrassment was avoided (according to Anne) when the vicar misheard the title as St Augustine’s Confessions.
At nineteen she became fascinated by scientific ideas, a further unladylike development. She announced to a friend that the intellectual world was divided between Emerson and Comte, between the spiritual and the materialist, and she was tending towards the latter.
In 1847 (the year Rossetti bought the Blake manuscript), she was devastated by the death of her ‘angel brother’, Johnnie. A year later, aged twenty, she announced her engagement to one of Johnnie’s friends, a handsome young law student, Alexander Gilchrist, ‘great, noble and beautiful’. In a way, he was probably a substitute brother. She deeply admired him, but from what she said later, she was never truly in love. What Alexander offered was the chance of freedom and independence. Their unorthodox Etty honeymoon was a promise of things to come.
After the birth of their four children – Percy, Beatrice, Herbert, and Grace – she set herself to earn additional household money by writing small pieces for the monthly magazines, and Chambers Encyclopaedia. The first of these, ‘A Glance at the Vegetable Kingdom’, was published in Chambers in spring
