William Blake (1757-1827). Poet, painter, engraver.
"God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is"
- There is No Natural Religion (1788)
William Blake, a self-educated man by choice, received his only formal education at Henry Pars's drawing school in the Strand, considered the best of its day. At age fourteen he became an apprentice to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. "Portrait of Queen Philippa, from her monument," an engraving credited to Basire, was said by Stothard to be Blake's. Blake was asked by Basire in the summertime to draw the monuments in London's old churches, which developed Blake's knowledge of and love for Gothic art.
Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy after his seven-year apprenticeship but soon disliked and eventually rejected academic study. His primary means of income was engraving for booksellers; he opened a printseller's shop in 1784. Blake was commissioned in 1791 to design and engrave six plates for Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories for Children" and her translation from German of "Elements of Morality."
Blake married Catherine Boucher (or Butcher) in 1782. Catherine was of great assistance to Blake and learned to color his illuminated prints by hand. Blake's greatest emotional attachment, however, was to his brother Robert. Blake closed his printseller's shop after Robert's death in 1787. He had "spiritual conversations" with Robert throughout his life and had said that the method of illuminated printing was revealed to him by Robert in a dream.
Blake's seven-year stay at Hercules Building, Lampeth beginning in 1793 produced 537 illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts. Only 47 of the illustrations were engraved due to the book's inability to succeed. Blake was then introduced to William Hayley, who invited him to reside in a cottage by the sea at Felpham while Blake worked on engravings for the Life of Cowper. Blake, who resented those who provided him with financial support, left after three years; he was said to be frustrated by the trivial and shallow environment surrounding Hayley. Before Blake left Felpham he was charged with - and acquitted of - sedition for denouncing the king to a soldier.
The period beginning with the end of 1794 and lasting for almost a decade is characterized by Blake's prolonged depression. Blake was commissioned to illustrate designs for Blair's "Grave" but became embittered when he was not allowed to do the actual engravings. His works during this period represent a fallen England; Blake's only offer of salvation "is an escape from the physical body, through death, into the spiritual afterlife" (Mellor; Matlak 275).
Blake's Jerusalem (1804-1820), one of his most apocalyptic writings, is an "epic story of man's fall into limited states of the mind and the body and of his regeneration or return to the Human Form Divine" (Mellor; Matlak 276). Man's four zoas fall away him and then further separate into a diminished male and a female emanation; salvation is possible only through reintegration into the body of Albion, the One Man.
Blake reinvisioned God as man: he believed that God is man. The Songs of Innocence expand on this vision and, by assuming that human nature is good as opposed to evil, is considered to be the ground of most radical utopian thought.
Bibliography
Lee, Sidney. ed. Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1909.
Mellor, Anne K. and Richard E. Matlak. British Literature 1780-1830. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996.
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