Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827

Radical Blake Influence and Afterlife from 1827

Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker

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Radical Blake

10.1057/9780230287402 - Radical Blake, Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker

Also by Jason Whittaker

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WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE MYTHS OF BRITAIN

10.1057/9780230287402 - Radical Blake, Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker

Radical Blake Shirley Dent and

Jason Whittaker

10.1057/9780230287402 - Radical Blake, Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker

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Influence and Afterlife from 1827

© Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–98645–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dent, Shirley, 1970– Radical Blake: afterlife and influence from 1827 / Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-333-98645-8 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827--Influence. 2. Blake, William, 1757–1827--Political and social views. 3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 4. Radicalism in literature. 5. Radicalism in mass media. 6. Radicalism in art. I. Whittaker, Jason, 1969– II. Title. PR4148.I52 D46 2002 821’.7—dc21 10 11

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For Nathan, Sam and our parents

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Acknowledgements Key to Abbreviations List of Plates

viii ix xi

Introduction: Radical Blake

1

1 Visionary Blake

11

2 Metropolitan Blake

44

3 Blake and Nationalism

67

4 Blake, Emancipation and America

96

5 Blake and Women

120

6 Blake and Blasphemy

143

7 Hacking Blake

169

Conclusion

195

Notes Select Bibliography Index

198 217 229

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Contents

We would particularly like to thank David Worrall and Steve Clark for the help and advice that they have given at various stages in the life of this book. Thanks are also due to Rebecca Mashayekh at Palgrave for her guidance during the production of Radical Blake, as well as to Eleanor Birne and Lucy Qureshi who responded to our original proposal with enthusiasm. Parts of this book have developed out of research undertaken at the University of Warwick: colleagues we would like to thank there include Anne Janowitz, Malcolm Hardman and Michael Bell. Support was also provided by the Falmouth College of Arts Research Fund. We have both given papers at the Blake Society, and would like to thank members for their insight and knowledge, particularly Keri Davies who, as a testimony to his work on Blake, has greatly influenced the ways in which we look at Blake’s books. Papers given at the ‘Blake and the Book’ conference at Strawberry Hill in 1998 and ‘Friendly Enemies: Blake and the Enlightenment’ at the University of Essex in 2000 resulted in helpful comments from G. E. Bentley and Joseph Viscomi, which have proved extremely useful. Other colleagues and friends have kindly lent books, made suggestions, read drafts and suffered our zeal with patience, including Mark Douglas, Maria Magro, Clarissa Smith, Alex Goody, Catherine Spooner, Jim Hall, Jayne Armstrong, Wiesiek ‘Prof’ Powaga, Jim Herrick, John Metcalf, Emma Mason, Grainne Walsh, Chloe Peacock, Ruth Saxton, Janine Wignarajah, Chris Clark, James Hopkin, Duncan Yeates, Andrew Marshall, Katie Bailey and Justine Brian. Finally, thanks are due to both sets of parents who have given time and time again in too many ways to mention. We would also like to thank the visual experts in our lives whose ‘altering eyes have altered all’: Sam and Nathan.

viii

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Acknowledgements

All quotations from Blake’s writings follow The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revised edition, edited by David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988). These are identified in the text as ‘E’, followed by page number. Abbreviations to Blake’s works A DC E FZ J M MHH PA Songs Urizen VDA

America Descriptive Catalogue Europe Four Zoas Jerusalem Milton The Marriage of Heaven and Hell A Public Address Songs of Innocence and of Experience The [First] Book of Urizen Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Abbreviations to other works Anathemata Anne Gilchrist AS Autobiographies BAV BB BIQ Blake/Shelley

BR Broadway Ballads Collected Poems

David Jones, The Anathemata Anne Gilchrist, Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay Kathleen Raine, Autobiographies Special issue of Blake Newsletter on Blake and the Victorians (BAV ), 8: 1–2 (1974) G. E. Bentley, Jnr., Blake Books Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly James Thomson, Shelley, a poem: with other writings relating to Shelley, by the late James Thomson (B.V.) to which is added an essay on the poems of William Blake, by the same author G. E. Bentley, Jnr., Blake Records William James Linton, Broadway Ballads Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1985 ix

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Key to Abbreviations

Radical Blake

Confessions Counting House Eagle’s Nest Ellis/Yeats

Famine Human Body IB Ireland Last of England Life

Modern Nature Nineteenth Century

Passion Practical Hints

Radical Artisan Slave Song Swin. Letts. UDC

Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley David Dabydeen, The Counting House John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats (eds), The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical William James Linton, Famine: A Masque James John Garth Wilkinson, The Human Body Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book William James Linton, Ireland for the Irish Derek Jarman, The Last of England Alexander Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1945 edition, Ruthven Todd (ed.). Also Life 1863 and Life 1880 editions. Derek Jarman, Modern Nature Deborah Dorfman, Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve William James Linton, Some Practical Hints on Wood-Engraving for the Instruction of Reviewers and the Public Francis Barrymore Smith, Radical Artisan, William James Linton 1812–1897 David Dabydeen, Slave Song Algernon Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters J. G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company

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x

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Life Mask of William Blake (Photograph by Dave Mann) Frontispiece to Secular Hall pamphlet (Courtesy of the British Library) William Blake, Job and his Daughters (Courtesy of Tate Britain) Frontispiece to Linton’s Famine (Courtesy of the British Library) William Blake, The Blasphemer (Courtesy of Tate Britain) William Blake, Satan in all his Original Glory (Courtesy of Tate Britain) Muir’s Frontispiece to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Courtesy of the British Library)

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List of Plates

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xii Radical Blake

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Date: 11 February 2001. Place: Tate Britain. Event: the last day of the largest William Blake exhibition ever mounted. The scene inside: making our way through the milling throngs of sudden Blake enthusiasts, the newly renamed Tate Britain had not appeared so full for years. One almost, for a moment, had the impression of being inside the immensely popular Tate Modern. As we walked through, we could feel the rising buzz of excitement and expectation. If the Tate Britain organisers had been A&R men for a record company, or distributors promoting a new film, this star’s signing would have exceeded their wildest expectations. One of us had had the foresight to apply for membership of the Tate, ensuring that they could enter the exhibition on its final day. The other, one of the foolish virgins who had not prepared for the master’s return, looked set to remain outside: despite having visited the exhibition several times before, to be excluded from such an exhilarating closing gig would have been a disaster. Fortunately the wise virgin managed to wangle a back-stage pass. As we walked around the exhibition for a final time, it was extremely difficult to catch a glimpse of the celebrity of the show, but we were carried along on the tide of enthusiasm. As one visitor remarked: ‘Blake, what a man!’ This scene was very much in contrast to a corporate view that one of us had been invited to previously: with their backs turned to Jerusalem, Blake’s grandest illuminated book, London’s élite discussed six-figure bonuses with hardly a glance at the spectacle around them. Outside the exhibition, visitors ascended and descended the steps before the imposing Victorian façade rather like the angels on Jacob’s ladder. After purchasing an ice-cream, some of these angels were resting on the steps, looking over the glittering Thames. Across the 1

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Introduction: Radical Blake

Radical Blake

river, there used to be a paving stone on the Poet’s Walk that was inscribed with lines from Blake’s ‘London’ celebrating the Thames. This was removed some years ago to make way for redevelopments on South Bank, which included the County Hall Hotel and the Millennium Wheel. As far as we are aware, it has never been replaced. Returning to Millbank, the formal gardens outside Tate Britain are protected by that familiar Victorian fortification, black iron railings, on which anonymous protestors had plastered homemade posters. Simple photocopies with an image from Blake’s anti-slavery illustrations to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, these posters were a protest against the exhibition’s sponsors. A line from Blake’s ‘A Divine Image’ – ‘Cruelty has a Human Heart’ – was used to draw a parallel between the abject cruelty of the eighteenth-century slave trade and the calculated cruelty of twentieth-century pharmaceutical trade in Africa. At the core of the internal show and external protest are Blake’s works. The Tate curators had accomplished a remarkable feat. Their purpose, as made clear in the exhibition catalogue, was ‘to explain and bring to life the achievements of William Blake, one of our greatest and most intriguing artists, poets and writers . . . [focusing] on his vision, his rich and complex mythology, his political interests, and his highly original working techniques.’1 A primary function of the exhibition, amidst the more general one of bringing a wider range of original works to more people than ever before, was to emphasise Blake’s radicalism in ‘four thematic sections’: spiritually (‘One of the Gothic Artists’); politically (‘The Furnace of Lambeth’s Vale’); as an imaginative visionary (‘Chambers of the Imagination’); and bibliographically (‘Many Formidable Works’). One barometer of the exhibition’s success was the appearance of articles on this apparently obscure artist in newspapers, magazines and Sunday supplements. Significantly, some of these articles displayed how Blake had been catapulted over the line from academia into pop culture and, at the same time, reproductions of his works moved from magazine art sections to those concerned with lifestyle.2 Not all such articles were complimentary: Waldemar Januszczak, for example, criticised the Tate for ‘clinging rather pathetically to the past’ and ‘dumbing down’. Attacking Tate Britain for selecting Blake to reinvigorate its declining audience share, Januszczak rather amusingly observed that, ‘visiting the Blake show is like being chained to the soapbox of a ranting religious lunatic at Speaker’s Corner’.3 Januszczak’s polemic ended with an appeal to devote such public

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space to ‘any one of a hundred better British artists’, Gainsborough or Stubbs, for example. Gainsborough and Stubbs, however, do not draw in the punters. The Blake exhibition pointed out how popular Blake has become – so much so that Tate Britain is increasing the space given over to its permanent collection. Yet, and here Januszczak is surely right, one of the real purposes of exhibiting an artist such as Blake had little to do with him at all and everything to do with the painful ‘divorce’ from Tate Modern. Outside religious lunacy and economic expediency, however, a very different Blake was chained to the railings of Tate Britain, in the form of the bill of protest mentioned above.

Where does Blake come to life? William Blake (1757–1827), an artisan engraver, was to become known as one of the greatest visionary poets that England has produced. He was one of the few artists to be born, live and die in London, the city that shaped his imagination. The poet of the famous lyric known as ‘Jerusalem’ also engaged in mental fight against the narrow nationalisms of his day and was a political radical, whose eye crossed the international horizon in support of the American and French revolutions. Social, political and religious freedoms were interlinked in his work with those pertaining to gender roles and relations between the sexes. All of these concerns, critiques and arguments found expression in some of the most extraordinary works that have ever been produced. During his lifetime, Blake suffered considerable neglect: apprenticed as an engraver to James Basire in 1772, Blake’s father must have seen himself as providing his son with a useful career in what was typically considered one of the minor arts, and Blake was certainly well trained in the craft of copperplate engraving. Blake’s own aspirations, however, soon proved to be much higher and he applied to be a student at the recently founded Royal Academy in 1779. Although he submitted a number of paintings to the Academy in the 1780s, as an engraver the most he would ever be able to achieve would be the position of Associate rather than full Royal Academician: ‘engravers were considered to be useful artists rather than real artists’.4 Rather than submit to the thoroughly reasonable status quo of the age of reason, Blake insisted on pursuing his career as an original artist, a position that would later infuriate friends such as John Flaxman who could not see why Blake did not accept his lot. As the engraver was to write later in Jerusalem, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another

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Introduction: Radical Blake

Radical Blake

Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’ (J 10:20–21, E153), and while neglected in his day his obstinacy in pursuit of vision means that his once-obscure works are now more widely recognised than those of Flaxman and other doyens of the Royal Academy. As one of the first British artists who would later be labelled one of the ‘Romantics’, part of Blake’s inspiration to later generations of artists, writers and critics was his early involvement with the revolutionary fervour that swept America and Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. While he was probably always an independentminded London Dissenter, Blake’s political sympathies were only overtly aroused at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. It was during the 1790s that he composed his one text that came closest to publication by conventional methods, The French Revolution, prepared for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, and began work on the beautifully illustrated texts for which he is best known such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and, reflecting on his thoughts from the earlier American revolution, America. As he and his wife, Catherine, had moved to Lambeth in 1790, the books from these prolific years became known collectively as the Lambeth prophecies. Yet Blake’s support for revolutionary ideals and the work of radicals such as Tom Paine (who, apocryphally, he was meant to have warned to leave England) failed to connect with an audience in what his most recent biographer, G. E. Bentley has called ‘dark profitable years’: counterrevolutionary organisations such as the Society of Loyal Britons marched near the Blakes’ home, burning effigies of Paine, as optimism turned to terror and early supporters of events in France became more circumspect or were deliberately silenced. Despite the fact that Blake tempered his early enthusiasm for revolutionary politics in the later years of his life, he was never a turncoat like his near contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Southey. Arrested and tried for sedition in 1803 after an argument with a soldier in Felpham (where the Blakes had moved in 1800), Blake was genuinely afraid for his safety in the early nineteenth century but never entirely recanted his oppositional stance towards the British Establishment, composing his epic poems Milton and Jerusalem between 1804 and 1821. By the end of his life, Blake had begun to attract a small but devoted circle of followers who became known as the Shoreham Ancients after the home town where Samuel Palmer’s grandfather lived. At the time of Blake’s death in 1827, he was better known as the eccentric jotter of the visionary heads (a series of apparitions that he caught on paper to

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entertain his friend, John Varley) than as one of Britain’s great visionary artists. And yet, one step at a time, his reputation began to be gradually transformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As friends such as Palmer and John Linnell recounted stories of Blake’s life to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorians such as Alexander Gilchrist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, so a public gradually grew for his works. At first, he was the Pictor Ignotus, the neglected artist, but by the end of the twentieth century Blake had been courted as an occultist, revolutionary, surrealist and prophet of the counter-culture. It is this afterlife and influence, the appropriations and misappropriations of generations of artists, writers, thinkers, filmmakers and activists seeking an alternative tradition for their own activities, that is the subject of this book. By the time of the Tate Britain exhibition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, posters were on display in the capital carrying the tag line, ‘It’s a fact. Many artists today are working whilst under the influence of Blake.’ One example will suffice to demonstrate just how complex this influence can be: Self, by Marc Quinn, which came to public attention in the 1997 Sensation exhibition, was the first in a series of life masks created by the artist from his own blood and a mould of his head, to be followed by a new Self every five years.5 Quinn has made similar casts from a multitude of materials, including glass, silver, polyurethane rubber and his own faeces. But Self is exceptional in this context because claims for it have been made on the basis of its inspiration in the life mask of Blake made by James Delville, an amateur phrenologist, in 1823 and now on display in the National Portrait Gallery.6 Mark Gisbourne has warned against a simplistic comparison, but remarks that ‘what the work shares with Blake and Bacon primarily is a basic concern with the incarnation and existential condition of mankind’.7 Delville had created his life mask from plaster in order to demonstrate the ‘imaginative faculty’: it was not produced to create art, but was intended to capture a physical instance of the artist and, equally significant, to make concrete the apparently insubstantial process of art through a phrenological taxonomy. By pointing to the appropriate part of Blake’s skull, Delville believed that he would be able to demonstrate immediately why Blake was a visionary artist. This mask, seen by other artists such as Francis Bacon and Anthony Gormley, as well as Quinn, has been the catalyst for their own artistic productions in a variety of materials, including paint, bronze and blood. This plaster head has become the spark for other instances of art that do not

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Introduction: Radical Blake

Radical Blake

simply copy the original (as did Delville) but translate it into new media: reading Self forces us to re-read Blake. Delville’s attempt to capture the original artist’s inspiration succeeded in a way that he could not, ironically, have imagined and what we see in the life mask is Blake’s major piece of performance art, centred on his own body and the myth of his life as an imaginative artist. This book is concerned with an afterlife that is not simply about the anxiety of influence or the preservation of the Blakean record. Our concern is also the propagation of Blake. The type of transformation that occurs in Quinn’s Self is not just an example of the faddishness of BritArt or the Saatchi scene of late nineties Britain: it is not an isolated or idiosyncratic use of Blake, but one that is fundamental to the work of artists, writers, filmmakers, social commentators and activists. When an object such as Quinn’s Self encounters the Blakean artefact, it cleaves to it and from it. There is a friction between the two. When speaking about the reception of Blake and his works, it is not enough to speak in terms of dialogic or dialectic. These expressions may be useful, but the one we really need here and which has long been out of fashion is, simply, struggle. This is because Blake himself struggles for meaning, and we as readers seldom have critical closure on the meaning of works such as Jerusalem: what can be seen as a system failure from the view of a formalist reading is that which allows others to take Blake forward – it is what makes Blake germinal. One of the reasons for this is that Blake’s meanings do not work in a closed literary or artistic system, but came to life within social, psychological and political struggles, as in his relations to the French Revolution, Swedenborgianism and personal poverty. The feeling of systems being down when reading Blake has recently been addressed by Morris Eaves. His out-of-the-closet confession in ‘On Blakes we want and Blakes we don’t’ is a rare admission of the confusion entailed by Blake’s struggles: This account [by Tilottama Rajan] does not line up with my experience of the later books. Rajan writes with more confidence about what is and is not in them than I can summon. No one, to be sure, is going to miss the signs of mythmaking energy that are everywhere in Blake: all those compass points aligned with all those characters, emanations, cities, cathedrals, professions, and bodily organs; and all those secular local events read by the light of sacred universal narratives. These seem to be elements of a rhetoric of conviction that Blake offers as a support-system for readers in time of their greatest

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need. All will be revealed, it implies, to those who tough it out: ‘Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation’ (Milton 2:25, E96). For me and I gather for others, those elements glittering on the surface constitute one of the most seductive features of Blake’s illuminated books, symbolizing with the reader that there is a deeply coherent system somewhere here, and that the investment of readerly exertions will eventually pay off in a grasp of it. To mount her argument, Rajan needs to take it for granted that Damon and Frye were right at least half the time – about Jerusalem if not about The Book of Urizen. I feel obliged to repeat what I have said perhaps too many times already: my best reasons for believing that there is a system that can really be understood come from the secondhand testimony of great systematizing critics like Frye. Personally I have never experienced the grasp of Blake’s meaning to which they, and she, have so eloquently testified.8 Such honesty blows some of the cobwebs off the huge critical apparatus of the Blake industry that has built up over the past decades, and to which this book is (if we are equally honest) a contribution. This is not to dismiss that apparatus, without which this book could not have been contemplated. Two areas in particular have been key to the writing of Radical Blake: cultural historicism and textual bibliography. Unlike certain idioms such as deconstruction and those that focus on formal readings, these areas ground the struggle for Blake’s meaning in material conditions. This, against expectations, is not an exercise in rooting Blake and his meaning to the historically specific. What the work by David Worall, Jon Mee, Steve Clark, D. W. Dörrbecker, Helen Bruder, Christopher Z. Hobson and many others has done is to provide us with a kaleidoscope of potential – Bruder, for example, has demonstrated how the complex reactions to Marie Antoinette during the early 1790s can lead to a much more sympathetic reading of Enitharmon in Europe as a patsy of patriarchy, while Worrall indicates how The Book of Ahania could be caught up into ‘London’s heated Age of Reason debate’ pursued through the caricatures of satirists such as William Dent.9 These historical critics have not and do not attempt to nail Blake’s meaning to the coffin of any particular historical event, but work by suggestion, re-creating the plural world in which Blake lived. Our response in this work is to take this approach to the reception of Blake’s work. Why should we expect that this great poet of contradiction would be or, more importantly, should be, critically or creatively tied up into neat formulae? If we

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Introduction: Radical Blake

Radical Blake

think the Victorian readings of Blake were wrong, are we any more the right? If we tut-tut at The Doors for having the temerity to name themselves after Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are we defending? The anti-Swedenborgian marriage? The pro-libertarian marriage? The Jacobin marriage? Or copy A, K or L? Copy A, K or L – if a seminar tutor ever wants a handy example to dislodge any comfortable notions their students may be harbouring that a text is a text is a text and there really is no need to read the Jane Austen novel as the film will tell the story exactly like it is (because a text is a text is a text) then Blake is the man. Copy after copy of the same book – Urizen, for example – is altered in numerous and subtle ways. As historical readings give us insight and impetus in tracing Blake’s reception, so the innovative and painstaking bibliographical and textual scholarship that seems so intrinsically tied to textual specifics opens out the work rather than closes it down. Textual bibliographers – G. E. Bentley, David Erdman, Robert Essick, Keri Davies and Geoffrey Keynes being amongst the most notable working on Blake in the twentieth century – strove to lift the face off the text: it is due to their work that what we get is not just what we see. The intricacies and subtleties of Blake’s emendations and clarifications – his material and conceptual grapple for meaning on the copperplate – are recorded and noted in standard critical editions. A study which was concerned with the preservation of Blake’s works and treated the text as a fossil record of correct evolution could well use these scholars ‘textually correct’ findings to batter the miscreants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Blake scholarship and reception into an insignificant pulp. But this is a study that is concerned, as we have stated above, with both propagation and preservation and which is not concerned with either the ‘textually’ or the ‘politically’ correct. What matters to Radical Blake is the continuing corrosive power of Blake’s work to eat through complacency, whether that be on or off the copperplate, ‘melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’, or in wider social, political and cultural contexts. What Blake bibliography has provided us with is the tools to judge against, to question and explore why Blake’s text should re-emerge differently at different social and political nexuses. One of the most significant ‘complacency shakers’ in Blake scholarship over the last twenty years has been the work of Joseph Viscomi and the publication of Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993).10 Dates, copies and page numbering – even the authenticity of particular copies

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of particular books – changed because of Viscomi’s findings. A fait accompli with only one Achilles heel: whereas the recreation of Blake’s production method started in the Manchester Etching Workshop of 1983 helps us know how the works were created, no one thought (what a feat of imagining!) to recreate Peterloo, to suggest, perhaps, why the works were created in a particular way at a particular time. Radical Blake is, therefore, both a lapdog to the new bibliography and biter at its heel. We cannot, and do not, attempt to come up with better answers than those already provided in the fields of historical and bibliographical criticism of Blake. These are already well-accomplished fields and we have no answers not to be found elsewhere. Instead we have furrowed a neglected field for new insights that draw together the historical and the bibliographical, that is reception, from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Unlike the last full-scale study of Blake’s reception history, the highly informative Blake in the Nineteenth Century by Deborah Dorfmann, we do not aim to provide an extensive bibliographic record or to question whether certain textual transmissions were right or wrong. We aim at the heel, at the moments when how, where or when Blake is being represented or reproduced do not quite make sense and yet our sense of Blake is being formed. We have concentrated, therefore, on seven main areas in which Blake emerges in a symbiotic (and sometimes parasitic) relationship, often fruitful, sometimes destructive. The first chapter, Visionary Blake, lays the groundwork for how we see Blake as a visual and a visionary artist, both a fantastic projector outwards of the imagination into social, political and aesthetic spheres and a psychonaut of inner space in the work of Alexander Gilchrist, W. B. Yeats, Algernon Swinburne, Paul Nash and Georges Bataille. Metropolitan Blake explores how the writer of ‘London’ and engraver of Jerusalem has influenced the streetwalkers and flâneurs of the great ‘Wen’, from W. J. Linton’s Bob-Thin and James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night to the ‘visionary London fiction’ of J. G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. Blake’s nationalism and internationalism are the subjects of the next two chapters. Blake and Nationalism traces how the Enlightenment notion of popular sovereignty could form the basis of an inclusive republic in the works of Blake’s followers, especially as envisioned by Linton, David Jones, and Derek Jarman, in contrast to the more ill-fated (and, unfortunately, more typical) exclusive nationstate that has blighted world history. Blake, Emancipation and America looks across the Atlantic to Blake’s reception in the American

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Introduction: Radical Blake

Radical Blake

republic as it flourished through the slave trade in the nineteenth century and expanded into new forms of economic imperialism in the twentieth: works such as the illustrations to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam were integral to resistance to the corruption of the republic, initially as they inspired direct opposition to the slave trade, for example in the writings of Moncure Conway and Phillis Wheatley, and then the crass commercialism of post-war America in the work of Allen Ginsberg and Jim Jarmusch. Emancipation of a different kind is the subject of Blake and Women, from a patriarchal tyranny in which Blake is frequently figured as a significant oppressor. In recovering the practices of women working with Blake’s texts, such as Catherine Blake, Anne Gilchrist, Kathleen Raine, Patti Smith and Angela Carter, we can evaluate Blake’s contribution to the battle of the sexes in a new light. The right to oppose Blake is, in one sense, the right to free speech, and this is the theme of Blake and Blasphemy, whereby the influence of Blakean badmouthing (as in texts such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is traced throughout the acts of freethinkers such as G. W. Foote, Swinburne, Aleister Crowley and Chris Ofili. Finally, Hacking Blake takes a bite out of the hand that fed both this book and many of the texts cited here by re-examining notions of textual transmission and concluding that what may be seen as forgeries or fakes could potentially be the most innovative areas of Blake propagation in the work of nineteenth-century pamphleteers and booksellers from William Muir to the anonymous facsimilist of the Address on the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society: here the idea of Blake and the book is radically re-examined. Blake’s afterlife is so rich and vital that not all of the writers, artists, and freethinkers that we encountered in the writing of this book can be included. Blake and music, for example, including musicians and composers as diverse as John Taverner, Julian Cope, Van Morrison and Jah Wobble, is not as well represented as we would have liked, and indeed would have formed the basis of an entire chapter in its own right. Nonetheless, we hope to have extended the gallery space that preserves Blake’s works into the creative streets and fertile imaginations that propagate his radical influence. The Tate exhibition of 2000–2001 proved how popular Blake could be: this book demonstrates that he can also be ground-breaking.

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I: Ways of seeing William Blake died on 12 August 1827.1 Let us start here, accepting this initial statement as a bare fact subsequently embellished. In many ways Blake’s death and the descriptions of that death are indicative of what Blake means and has meant and what we know and have understood about Blake. There is the accepted version, which many readers of this book will know, faithfully passed down from that Victorian guardian of Blake’s reputation, Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake, where a singing, drawing, dying Blake is envisaged in a small room at 3 Fountain Court departing gently into the ‘next room’, a very moving scene of an exemplary death. Not so many readers, we are prepared to bet, will know of the extremely provocative (and to a certain extent more moving) suggestion relating to Blake’s death made by Joseph Viscomi and Lane Robson in a 1996 article in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly.2 The Blake scholar and the medical doctor suggested that the likely cause of Blake’s death was a pulmonary oedema resulting from liver failure, which itself had its roots in a form of biliary cirrhosis resulting from a condition known as sclerosing cholangitis. What is shocking, upsetting and revealing about their thesis is that Blake may have contracted this condition through breathing in copper fumes. In other words, like so many workers, his labour killed him. This is a much-needed pragmatic twist on a subject that is clogged with well-meaning piety and choked with misconceptions of the visionary. What we see in most descriptions of Blake’s death, is in fact, the visionary man, ‘the stranger from paradise’ as G. E. Bentley’s recent autobiography describes Blake, pushing out the visual artist, the 11

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

jobbing engraver, the political thinker and – this sometimes gets forgotten – the Enlightenment individual, dying, as most early nineteenth-century deaths would have entailed, a near-medieval death with no drugs, no anaesthetics and no pain-killers (it is doubtful whether the working-class Blakes would have been able to afford morphine or opium, a fact which those who are keen to place Blake as a proto-recreational drugs guru would do well to remember). A comparison between the glut of Victorian descriptions of Blake’s death and the Viscomi/Robson intervention is instructive in where it leads. In most descriptions of Blake’s death, we see pious exhortations of the mystic’s death. We will open this study with what will be, certainly for some Blake scholars and enthusiasts, a heretical stance. We doubt the total hand-on-heart veracity of the Gilchrist description, which has its roots in Allan Cunningham’s soap-opera death-bed scene. Allan Cunningham’s 1830 biographical sketch of Blake in Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a vignette of piety.3 He had now reached his seventy-first year and the strength of nature was fast yielding. Yet he was to the last cheerful and contented. ‘I glory,’ he said, ‘in dying, and have no grief but in leaving you, Catherine; we have lived long; we have been ever together, but we shall be divided soon. Why should I fear death? Nor do I fear it, I have endeavoured to live as Christ commands, and have sought to worship God truly – in my own house, when I was not seen of men.’ In Cunningham, the potential dynamism of Blake’s contemporary concerns became silted up by the minutia of domestic detail. Cunningham neatly dissipated any unseemly controversy adhering to Blake in a sepia-tinged martyrdom. The scene reads like a deathbed recantation. Following Allan Cunningham’s poetic licence in ‘inventing’ Blake’s death-bed speech, his death became the subject of several sentimental studies. These included Felicia Hemans’s domestic rendering of the deathbed scene, focusing on the presence of Catherine, her ‘[. . .] extraordinary character and the painfulness of her situation’.4 The Viscomi/Robson attempt to re-examine at a material level the circumstances surrounding Blake’s death is an example – perhaps extreme – of the ‘New materialism’ that emerged in Blake studies in the 1990s, with particular prominence in bibliographical work via Joseph Viscomi’s workshop experiments, and in

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historical contextualisation, via the Steve Clark/David Worrall school of rigorous historical scholarship. The attempt to ‘nail’ Blake’s death to material conditions is, as the attempts to meticulously score through and hammer out copperplates in a re-enactment of Blake’s working practice, symptomatic of a particular way of seeing Blake. The ‘covering Cherub’ of the all-singing, all-seeing, all-delicatelydying Blake is replaced by the ‘Spectre’ of a hard-headed materialist approach. At least, this is what surface readings suggest. In between many different ways of seeing Blake have risen in, and fallen from, favour, from symbolist systems to post-structuralist deconstructions. At least, again, this is what surface readings suggest. What we would like to suggest is that these various ways of seeing Blake are often shot-through, spiked and spurred-on by other, sometimes completely contradictory concerns. And that the enduring idea of Blake as a visionary artist (in the catalogue accompanying the 2000–2001 Tate Britain exhibition, Peter Ackroyd ends his essay by describing Blake’s life as ‘one of vision embodied and art made alive’5) is sustained by others’ vision keeping Blake’s art alive. In other words, there is something about Blake’s vision that is proliferate: it has inspired the lone mystic as well as the gregarious revolutionary. Blake’s vision is multifarious: it is artistic and aesthetic, political and social, mystic and pragmatic, visual and imaginative. Likewise the reception history of visionary Blake is multiple and meaningful. In studying that history there are certain re-occurring traits that exhibit the intriguing feature of re-occurring in completely different and diverse forms. One such trait is the reproduction of Blake within specific visual art movements: the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists being the two most prominent, with 1990s ‘BritArt’ and the YBAs putting their own unique spin on the subject. As a recent paper by Mei-Ying Sung demonstrated, a constant vehicle for the art-movement influence on the interpretation of Blake has been Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake. A brief précis of the Life’s bibliographic history illustrates this:6 edited (after the premature death of Gilchrist) by those Pre-Raphaelite movers and shakers, Dante and William Michael Rossetti (in conjunction with Anne Gilchrist) in 1863, then by the practising artist W. Graham Robertson in 1907, and then by the surrealist Ruthven Todd in 1942 – we await with baited breath the BritArt edition, that is, we are sure, coming soon. As will be discussed in detail below, The Life of William Blake, has an openness of and to vision – artistic, social and cultural – that has enabled it to become not only one of the most enduring foundation stones of Blake scholarship, but

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

an aesthetic and cultural sponge, imbued with the artistic concerns of the time it is reproduced in. The near-arrival in its wake of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s tumultuous, bleeding art (and heart) defence of Blake and Art for Art’s sake is a contemporary case in point. Another, parallel trait, is the interpretation of Blake within specific religious, political, and cultural discourses: Swedenborgianism and Symbolism had a firm grasp in the nineteenth century, although there is a perhaps surprising challenge from Secularism in the late-nineteenth century; the twentieth century has seen Blake as a subculture sage (the mind-expander of the Doors and Aldous Huxley), as a working-class hero (the Jarrow marchers singing ‘Jerusalem’) and a nationalist stalwart (members of the Women’s Institute singing ‘Jerusalem’). The topic of visionary Blake is potentially huge, so, within the confines of this study and this chapter, we would like to focus on the shifting and slippage between visual art and cultural or social vision. The two traits described above – the artistic and the social – converge at certain points. The nineteenth-century gradual withdrawal of Blake and his work into a symbolist system (gleaned from Swedenborgain mysticism) finds its twentieth-century secular match in the surrealist eye that casts Blake as a psychonaut of the inner imagination. However, before engaging with these influential ways of seeing Blake, there are two further points to examine. Even though the descriptions of the surrealist Blake or the PreRaphaelite Blake or the symbolist Blake seem to be air-locked containers, hermetically sealing in a particular ‘Blakean value’, they are by no means exclusive categories. A brief consideration of the way in which the nineteenth-century artists and cultural commentators, John Ruskin, Dante Rossetti and W. B. Yeats saw Blake, reveals cracks in any – and all – aesthetic and cultural filters. There are few pure readings of Blake, fewer pure visions of Blake. However – bringing us to our next point – there is one ‘pure’ way in which the reception history of Blake went on and goes on: that is, the just looking at Blake. This was the great strength of the Victorian encounter with Blake, starting with Ruskin, visually exploding with the Pre-Raphaelites and Rossetti, and curtailed by Yeats (whose ‘vision’ would never be so common as to merely entail looking at something). Before embarking on those artistic and literary figures, it is worthwhile just briefly to consider the nineteenth-century Blake as a visual artist. A ‘growth’ area in Blake studies since Deborah Dorfmann’s Blake in the Nineteenth Century is undoubtedly, and correctly, interest in the visual reproduction of Blake’s works as well as textual and critical

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commentary. This new work has the habit of filtering through in a couple of tantalising paragraphs in the ‘Minute Particulars’ section of Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly. It is becoming clearer that as the visual language of nineteenth-century media is recovered and re-read, Blake’s presence will be rediscovered in more and more diverse arenas of Victorian political and cultural life. The high-low culture distinction of Fine versus Popular or Illustrative does not add up when considering Blake’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century reputation. Blake was both Fine Artist (conceptual) and Jobbing Engraver (illustrative). Both legacies endure. There are numerous references to Fine Art interest in Blake throughout the nineteenth century. Suzanne Hoover has estimated that before Gilchrist’s Life was published in 1863, Blake’s work potentially had an audience of millions through art exhibitions in Manchester, the Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition (1857) and London, the International Exhibition (1862). Blake is entered in Francis A. Palgrave’s Handbook to the International Exhibition. There is also a review in the Athenaeum stating that Blake’s ‘transcendental fancies are freely seen’. William Bell Scott’s ‘The Blake Catalogue’ for the Burlington exhibition was published in the Academy.7 As well as public exhibitions, there are textual illustrations before 1863, such as those identified by G. E. Bentley in 1838 in The Pictorial Edition of the Book of Common Prayer, indebted to Blake’s designs to Blair’s Grave.8 Interest in Blake not just as an artist but as an illustrator is evident early in Blake’s Victorian reception. For example, Frances Carey gives momentum to the importance of marginalia as critical process, describing how James Smethan visually monumentalised his copy of Gilchrist’s Life.9 Because of the nature of the illustrator’s art, which focuses on drawing, Blake’s influence is often most palpable in sketchbook jottings and copyings, or marginalia such as Smethan’s. The Jerusalem copyings of Theodore von Holst, Fuseli’s pupil,10 is another example. In the 1880s, an attempt to elevate illustrating and engraving to the status of fine art was embarked upon in the Century Guild Hobby Horse. William Blake was well represented. For example, in 1887 Blake made at least five separate appearances, in reproduced work or commentary upon that work.11 Even when an essay was not specifically directed to discussion of Blake, his influence is pervasive. John Ruskin (1819–1900) tells us how his own facsimilist and illustrator, Arthur Burgess, came to purchase Blake’s work: ‘He [Burgess] was again in London after that and found there and possessed himself of some of Blake’s larger drawings . . . They were the larger and more terrific of

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

these [the Blake drawings originally sold to Ruskin by George Richmond] which poor Arthur had now again fallen in with – especially the Nebuchadnezzar – and a wonderful witch with attendant owls and grandly hovering birds of night unknown to ornithology.’12 The Bohemian, Blake-inspired illustrations by John Trivett Nettleship for Arthur W. E. O’Shaugnnessey Epic of Women and Other Poems carried Ruskin’s fascination with Blake’s figurative exuberance into a new era.13 Michael Tolley’s note on John Todhunter’s poems, ‘Lost’ and ‘Found’14 in ‘Blake Among Victorians’ acknowledges the Irish creative debt to Blake and also provides a link with one of the most important ‘visionary’ commentators on Blake, as well as the visual embellishments of Nettleship. John Todhunter was Professor of English Literature at Alexandra College, Dublin, and part of the other (that is, not Pre-Raphaelite), Irish brotherhood that adopted Blake as a seminal spirit in the nineteenth century. ‘The Brotherhood’ consisted of John Butler Yeats (William Butler’s father), Edwin Ellis, John Trivett Nettleship and George Wilson.15 The group was important in spreading knowledge of Blake in Irish intellectual circles, avoiding ‘dogmatic inbreeding by communicating its enthusiasms to outsiders, especially Yeats’s school friends from Trinity College Dublin days, Edward Dowden and John Todhunter, who as teachers then shared their insights with students and friends.’16 Todhunter delivered a lecture series on Blake between 1872–74. The list could go on, and we are certain that the visual impact of Blake in the nineteenth century is not yet fully understood, nor do we have the complete picture of Blake’s visual reproduction in the nineteenth century. However, the afterlife of Blake was a ghost created by influential artists who disposed generations to a particular way of seeing the world and of seeing Blake within that world. Taking Dante Rossetti first, we would like to look at the literal configuration of the Pre-Raphaelite ‘ghost’ of William Blake.

II. Rossetti, Ruskin and Yeats: three through the looking glass It would seem that Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) succumbed to the aesthetic comfort of Blake’s pious death and domestic bower of bliss. Responding to Frederic Shields’s drawings of Blake’s last residence, 3 Fountain Court, Rossetti wrote a sonnet, which after several revisions worked its way into his Ballads and Sonnets of 1881.17 Robert Essick is quite clear on the ‘flimsiness’ of Rossetti’s effort,

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finding in Rossetti’s death-room sonnet ‘an equal measure of the antithetical, the twice or thrice removed, the pathetic and the evanescent’, and concluding that ‘Rossetti joins with Shields and Gilchrist to celebrate Blake’s death as a passing into the heaven of Victorian sensibility’.18 But Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, in their editing and reproduction of Blake’s works, were engaged in a far more serious activity than the simple prettification of Blake. This needs to be stated and re-stated again. The clues are there in Rossetti’s sonnet if we care to look for them, particularly the sestet and the variations between the draft Rossetti sent to Frederic Shields and the version included in Ballads and Sonnets. What Rossetti creates in the sestet is not simply a pious vignette but a restructuring of the mundane into the sacred. A secular vision is created that tallies with the Pre-Raphaelite project of a secular-sacred in the aesthetic. The Blakes’ cupboard becomes a vestment of the soul, the ‘Holy of Holies’, figured in terms of poetic inscription, ‘Of his soul writ and limned’. Catherine’s bread cupboard – ‘this other one, / His true wife’s charge, full oft to their abode / Yielded for daily bread the martyr’s stone’ – already bears the signs of artistic sacrifice and aesthetic martyrdom, recalling the empty plate that Catherine lay before Blake in Gilchrist’s Life. Rossetti’s sonnet then steps into a higher plane of sophistication, transferring Christ’s New Testament teachings from Palestine to 3, Fountain Court. The direct echo of Matthew 4.4, ‘Man shall not live by Bread alone, but on every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God’, can be heard in the closing lines of the draft sonnet, ‘Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone, / The Words now home-heard from the mouth of God’. The domestic space of Blake’s final days becomes the centre of logos, of the Word. The Word of God floats in the everyday air and breath of the artist’s room as easily as Frederic Shields’s floating spirits. However in the version published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets, Rossetti makes a change in the last line that turns the humanity of the Word, of the Bible, into the humanist Word. ‘Home-heard’ becomes ‘home-speech’. There is a certain audacity here. Instead of the scene being filled with the radiance of spiritual words, the poet and his wife listening to hear the Word of God, they instead emanate those words themselves, they speak the Words. There is something here that touches blasphemy, appropriating the words of the Bible and redeeming the domesticity of the death bed scene with an intense power of humanist language and self-determination. Craft, authenticity and

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

spirituality are the subject matter, rather than cupboards, angels or sensibility. This is a very human vision. Rossetti’s reading of Blake here is a reversing out of Ruskin’s Blake, where it is not the secular in the sacred that is sought, but the sacred in the social. In comparing Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Blake, Jerome McGann does not fix upon poetry or frescos or engravings, but the book: Books are dominantly textual works, often (even) dominantly linguistic, but, as we know from the history of inscribed materials, they bear within themselves iconographic powers that can be released and developed. Certain artists – Blake, Klee, Kandinsky; in our own day Johanna Drucker – work on one side or the other side of the text/picture divide to exploit the expressive potential of the two media. Rossetti is emphatically an artist of that sort.19 In his book design, Rossetti strove for a completeness of vision and verse that married the technicality of craft to the religion of aesthetics.20 In doing so, he created artefacts that spoke of the self-induced blasphemies of the age, of the shift from the sacred to the secular, and the anxieties of those, who unlike the Secularists and freethinkers, could not or would not become out-and-out nonbelievers. Rossetti asks the reader to invest the material presence of Blake’s works with human significance. In his commentary upon Blake’s poetry in the second volume of Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake, the presence of the human individual, and the empathy of the reader with that presence, takes precedence over everything else, be it political, social or theological. This can be seen in Rossetti’s comparison of the two ‘Chimney Sweeper’ poems from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience: ‘For instance, there is no comparison between the first Chimney Sweep, which touches with such perfect simplicity the true pathetic chord of its subject, and the second, tinged merely with the common-places of social discontent’ (Life 1863, II, p. 25). The self, the personality of the individual, is at the centre of Rossetti’s aesthetic. For Rossetti, Blake’s attraction is not in his ability to transcend the material world, but in his expression and experience of living as a poet-artisan within it: In each style of the art of a period, and more especially the poetic style, there is often some one central derivative man, to whom personally, if not to the care of the world, it is important that his

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However much Rossetti recognised the need for the visual artist to hold on to his own vision and for the world to own it as his own, it did not stop him being one of the most consummate Blake adulterers of the nineteenth century. For Rossetti, the inclusion of draft copies of poems from Experience in the notebook known as the Rossetti manuscript, allowed him to adulterate Blake’s best-known works with a hint of Pre-Raphaelite exclusivity. David Erdman, in the 1973 facsimile edition of Blake’s notebook, described Dante Rossetti’s binding and transcription of the notebook, when it came into Rossetti’s possession on 30 April 1847.21 The binding together of Blake’s work in progress and Rossetti’s creative transcription is a twist in the sobriety of the manuscript poems: draft poems, emblems, all infused with the immediate energy of Blake’s imagination, became riddled with the trademark Rossetti ‘freewheeling editorial practices’.22 Most of Rossetti’s emendations to the Songs involved splicing together the notebook variations of Experience with the versions engraved – and in some cases already reproduced in conventional letterpress – in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He added a second ‘Cradle Song’, included in draft form in the notebook (Nineteenth Century, p. 121) and probably at some stage intended for inclusion in Experience as a companion piece to the poem of the same name in Innocence.23 Rossetti mentions the inclusion of the second poem in the preface and, in accordance with the notebook title, ‘A Poison Tree’ becomes ‘Christian Forbearance’ (Life 1863, II, p. 25). John Ruskin also rediscovered Blake, in Ruskin’s case while assembling material for the first volume of Modern Painters (1843).24 Although Marcia Allentuck has argued that the idea of Ruskin as a Blake ‘enthusiast’ has to be tempered by other concerns such as changing taste and financial concerns,25 Blake is the delicate tip of a social-spiritual iceberg where Ruskin is concerned. In mapping out the Gothic, both Blake and Ruskin agree that the living form is the essence of Gothic aestheticism, in comparison with Greek or Classical aestheticism. Blake states his aesthetic theory: ‘Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil, E270). Ruskin reflects on the beauty of this aesthetic: ‘Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent . . . And in all things that live there are certain

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creative power should be held to be his own, and that his ideas and slowly perfected materials should not be caught up before he has them ready for his own use. (Life 1863, II, p. 118)

Radical Blake

irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty.’26 However, there is one crucial difference between Blake and Ruskin. The Blakean imagination retains a Platonist inflection. It is ‘Eternal Existence’. Ruskin’s ‘Gothic’ is rooted in a material world of organic mutability: ‘imperfection is in some sort essential to all we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change.’27 Ruskin applies the imperfection of the grotesque to Blake’s art: ‘Blake, perfectly powerful in the etched grotesque of the book of Job, fails always more or less as soon as he adds colour; not merely for want of power (his eye for colour being naturally good), but because his subjects seem, in a sort, insusceptible to completion.’28 The grotesque of Job is its aesthetic power – its beauty lies in its imperfection, in the artisan’s Gothic imagination. In turn, this aesthetic power of imperfection has a social significance. It is the mark of artisan liberty. The Gothic is a form free from the conformity demanded by capitalist labour systems.29 However, Ruskin’s proto-socialist outpourings tend to get clogged by the mystic urge, the divine deference to ‘spiritual’ knowledge that plagued nineteenth-century Aestheticism, and into which Blake gets inevitably dragged. In quoting Blake’s motto to Thel,30 Ruskin talks of a hierarchy of knowledge, dividing divine knowledge from humanity, and human knowledge from animalism: ‘there is a different kind of knowledge good for every different creature, and . . . the glory of the higher creatures is in ignorance of what is known to the lower’ (Eagle’s Nest, p. 27). Ruskin might be said to negotiate between secular materialism and divine cognizence. In this sense he sets the stage for the Pre-Raphaelite revival of interest in Blake. In its blending of materialistic nostalgia and secular mysticism, the kindred grouping of Pre-Rapahelitism and Aestheticism is a product of religious shutdown: ‘in a sense all of Aestheticism might be said to emerge out of the twilight of a waning religious faith in the later-nineteenth century’.31 Ruskin created a quasi-divine aesthetic that aimed to build its temples on the ‘spiritual’ stones discarded by the industrial Revolution: ‘Ruskin . . . had attempted to divorce his aesthetico-moral theory from religion’.32 If Ruskin was a spiritual architect of the social and saw Blake as a visionary labourer, and Rossetti was a social artist who saw Blake as the secular spirit of the aesthetic, then William Butler Yeats was the demolition man, who scrapped the social-secular Blake. Although it is Edwin Ellis’s claim that Blake is Irish that has become the straw-dog of twentieth-century Blake criticism, it is William Butler Yeats’s

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(1865–1939) peculiar tangle of post-Swedenborgian mumblings that sucked out the political vision and left us with mystical Blake. The Yeats/Ellis reading of Blake is stunning in being so splendidly wrongheaded and yet so splenetically right. In A Vision, Yeats does a thoroughly self-absorbed job in pressing home the merits of his sub-Swedenborgian system of the Universe and everything. There is real scholarship in Yeats’s A Vision, despite the thick slather of self-justification. But this scholarship does Blake no service when it cites him explicitly as merely one in a string of Neoplatonic influences: I had once known Blake as thoroughly as his unfinished confused Prophetic Books permitted, and I had read Swedenborg and Boehme, and my initiation into the ‘Hermetic Students’ had filled my head with Cabalistic imagery, but there was nothing in Blake , Swedenborg, Boehme or the Cabala to help me now.33 Yeats’s problem is that he is setting out to envision the Universe without the need to engage in the here and now. A radical departure maybe, but one that strips the flesh and blood of Blake’s human vision to the dryness of symbolic bones. The ever-so-slight patronising tone of ‘little’ Blake – the self-taught mystic who couldn’t get a grip on the complexities of Neoplatonic thought and so wrote songs about roses leaves Yeats red-faced once we pull the plug on the mystic circuit. Whereas Yeats seems content to ogle a rag-tag skeleton of abstract symbolism, Blake was chewing heart and soul on the political meat of his times. Hazard Adams’s summation of Blake and Yeats only half-hits the truth: ‘In a sense then, Blake and Yeats, looked at the same world from different points of view. Yeats focused upon the frustrations of this world from within this world, and Blake focused upon the possibilities of this world from a position extremely difficult to pinpoint anywhere in the delusion we call space.’34 The truth is that Yeats’s reading of Blake marks the high tide of a particular mystical-visionary perspective that had, as can be gleaned from Ruskin’s writings, long currency in Blake’s reception history. This religious ‘tick’ in the way Blake is understood – the high-windows of mystic symbolism – have undoubtedly and undisputedly, illuminated much that would seem obscure in Blake. But these windows have their own smudges and their own cobwebs and it is with such that a social vision of Blake must contend, before we can understand the extreme, though complex, short-sightedness of the Ellis/Yeats vision of visionary Blake.

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Radical Blake

The confluence of art and politics in the interpretation and reproduction of Blake’s works in the nineteenth century is matched by the confluence of religion and art in that interpretation and reproduction. One of the first reproductions Blake’s works after his death, namely James John Garth Wilkinson’s 1839 edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is particularly inflected with Swedenborgian imagings. Wilkinson writes in the preface of this edition: ‘He [Blake] here transcended Self and escaped from the isolation which Self involves; and, as it then ever is, his expanding affections embraced universal Man, and, without violating, beautified and hallowed, even his individual peculiarities.’35 In this instance, there is a direct link between Garth Wilkinson’s Swedenborgian beliefs, his critical and textual analysis of Blake’s works, and Swedenborg’s theological doctrine of correspondence between celestial and earthly bodies. Correspondence as described in Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings is a theological construct that unites the spiritual to the natural world: The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, not only in general but also in particular. Whatever, therefore, in the natural world derives its existence from the spiritual, is said to be its correspondent. It is to be observed that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause. Whatever is under the sun and receives thence its heat and light is called the natural world, and all the things which thence subsist belong to that world. But heaven is the spiritual world and all heavenly things belong to that world.36 In the transmission and reproduction of William Blake’s works within Swedenborgian circles in the 1830s and 1840s, an emphasis on correspondence as a literary trope can be detected. A comparison of Wilkinson’s and his fellow Swedenborgian, Charles Augustus Tulk’s (1786–1849) vision of the reproduced Songs of Innocence and of Experience37 illustrates how even at this relatively early date correspondence as a religio-mystic doctrine is giving way to a secular-political aesthetic. Although Tulk’s edition comes after Wilkinson’s, Tulk is placing neither himself nor Blake nor, for that matter, Swedenborg, fully into a public literary arena. It is Wilkinson’s appropriation of correspondence in order to explain literary authorship that marks the

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III: Swedenborg and symbol

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transfiguring moment whereby a theological doctrine becomes a textual aesthetic in the history of Blake’s reception. This is not Wilkinson’s professed intention. Tulk introduced him to the Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1838. In Wilkinson’s biography written by his son we are told that ‘[t]he delicacy and spiritual simplicity of the “Songs” made a deep impression on Garth Wilkinson, who was himself to do somewhat similar work in his Improvisations of the Spirit’. This impression was to prompt ‘the first printed, in the usual sense of the word’, edition of the Songs. The intention of the preface is described thus: ‘In his preface, after detailing the then known facts of Blake’s life, our young author sets himself to examine the spiritual claims of his poet.’38 It is the critical analysis of the poet’s spirituality that differentiates this edition from Tulk’s later work. This is not because Tulk is unconcerned with the spiritual or theological nature of Blake’s work. Tulk’s edition of Blake’s Songs is a matter of private vision, not a public spectacle. Tulk’s 1843 edition is an extremely rare book. The context of its publication was largely unknown before the presentation of a copy in 1945 to the British Museum.39 This contained the following note by Wilkinson: This copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience was printed by Mr Charles Augustus Tulk, a Friend of Blake’s, and a dear friend of my Wife’s and mine, – and spaced as in the Original, in order that any who chose, might copy in the paintings with which the original is adorned. Twelve copies only were printed April 9, 1886 J. J. Garth Wilkinson For M. J. Matthews The details of textual reproduction in this letter represent a correspondence between work and reader that elides the critic and the editor. There is no paratextual commentary. Instead, there is the white blankness of a page awaiting completion by the reader. It is not the reader’s own design that will go here but her or his translation of Blake’s design. The space for this interaction is opposite the typographic reproduction of the original work. This is a concession to the reader’s vision. There is something intimate and personal in this labour. Tulk lays bare a space within the text for the reader to inscribe his or her own interpretation of Blake’s visual works. Tulk silently invites the reader to partake in the labour that creates the work of art. In this, he seems to partially answer Blake’s call in Jerusalem to ‘Let

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Visionary Blake

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every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself openly & publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem’ (J 77, E232). There is a painting in the British Museum’s copy of the ‘Infant Joy’ design bound opposite Wilkinson’s note. Perhaps this was Tulk’s own work, following his copy of the original design. Wilkinson has a different conception of the relationship between the reproduced work of art and the reader. The question is not simply how Blake affects Wilkinson as an individual reader or even an individual Swedenborgian. It is how Blake affects society. In this much, Wilkinson also seems to answer Blake’s call to engage ‘openly and publicly’ in ‘building-up Jerusalem’. In this sense Wilkinson teeters on the brink of combining the private and public, personal and political space of vision. But he ultimately lacks the nous and commitment of a commentator and critic such as Swinburne. The early nineteenth-century Swedenborgians, Garth Wilkinson and Charles Augustus Tulk, link Coleridge not only to Blake, but Blake and Coleridge to the mystical tropes of symbolism and correspondence. Tulk introduced Coleridge to the works of William Blake,40 lending him an original copy of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1818.41 Famously Coleridge commented on this work in letters to the Reverend Henry F. Cary and to Tulk,42 in which he described Blake’s ‘despotism of symbols’.43 Tulk did not shy away from public politics, but his relation to Blake is predicated on the individual rather than the communal. He was an MP who campaigned for various humanitarian causes along with Coleridge. Raymond H. Deck, Jr. has suggested that the common interest of these two men in Blake illustrates a shared socio-political sensibility as much as a mystico-aesthetic one: It is also possible that Tulk’s loan of the Songs to Coleridge may reflect what Tulk took to be the common social as well as Swedenborgian concerns of himself, Coleridge, and Blake. Coleridge and Tulk sought passage of a ‘Bill for the Relief of the Children employed in Cotton Factories,’ which was before Parliament in early 1818; their mutual interest is apparent in Coleridge’s letter to Tulk on February 21st 1818 – only nine days after his commentary on Blake’s poems – about Coleridge’s ideas for fostering passage of the bill.44 However, in Tulk’s reproduction of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience there is not the drive towards the conflation of politics,

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literature and theology that marks Wilkinson’s career. Wilkinson rejects outright a closed system of reading communities, in which language is esoteric in its symbolism or hieroglyphic. Instead, there is an emphasis upon communal symbolism and mystico-political vision. This, as we shall see later, had its own concomitant danger. The Swedenborgian influence figured strongly in Blake’s American reception. American Swedenborgians were among the first to publish Blake’s poetry, as were English Swedenborgians. James John Garth Wilkinson, the first editor of Blake,45 provides the link between English Swedenborgianism and the American evolution of that tradition into Transcendentalism. Although there is evidence that Blake found his way into American Swedenborgian circles without the aid of Wilkinson,46 Wilkinson’s edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience did have a direct influence in the circle of American Transcendentalists.47 Among those who owned a copy of the Wilkinson Songs are figures at the hub of both American Transcendentalism and American literary life. Emerson inscribed a copy: ‘R. W. Emerson/ for his friend/ E. P. P.’, or Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose bookshop was a meeting place for the ‘Transcendental Club’ in the 1830s and 1840s. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was to become Emily Dickinson’s tutor, also possessed a copy.48 S. Foster Damon points out that the emphasis in American Swedenborgian and Transcendental criticism upon the visionary eccentricity of Blake is positive, rather than negative, because of the specifically mystical context in which they were read: ‘But nobody seems to have called him mad: Swedenborgianism had prepared America for such marvels.’49 Swedenborgianism and its generic origin, mysticism, are the strongest and most enduring foundation stones of Blake’s posthumous reception, spanning the whole spectrum of theological and aesthetic belief in the nineteenth century, from ‘card-carrying’ members of the New Church to aesthetic dissenters such as Swinburne. Given the hard currency and apparently receptive market for the Swedenborgian vision of Blake, why did the Yeats/Ellis reading emerge as seminal at the turn of the century? The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical is both an epiphany of Victorian constructions of Blake and his works, and a watershed for the Modernist myth of Blake the Symbolist. The preface to The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical knits together some of the most distinctive traits of the nineteenth-century ‘Blake renaissance’, while at the same time striving to distinguish the Symbolist interpretation from the

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Radical Blake

Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Gilchrist, and the brothers, Dante and William Rossetti, deserve well of literature for having brought Blake into the light of day and made his name known throughout the length and breadth of England. But though whatever is accessible to us now was accessible to them when they wrote, including the then unpublished ‘Vala,’ not one chapter, not one clear paragraph about the myth of Four Zoas, is to be found in all they have published.50 Champing at the bit of one-up-manship, Ellis and Yeats end their introduction by laying the ground for the ‘new’ Blake – the symbolist poet: The only other European mystics worthy to stand by his side, Swedenborg and Boehmen, were to a large extent sectaries, talking the language of Churches, and delivering a message intended, before all else, for an age of dogma . . . As the language of spiritual utterance ceases to be theological and becomes literary and poetical, the great truths have to be spoken afresh; and Blake came into the world to speak them, and to announce the new epoch in which poets and poetic thinkers should be once more, as they were in the days of the Hebrew Prophets, the spiritual leaders of the race. (Ellis/Yeats, p. xi) The swings-and-roundabouts of what is meant by vision – mystical otherwordliness, political conception, etc. – is the sustaining motivation and future momentum of Blake’s reputation. Ellis/Yeats, in this respect, cannot see the poltical trees for the spiritual wood. Denis Saurat succinctly states the case for Modernist-Mystic Blake: ‘But the two tendencies, the modern and the occultist-exotic are the same: the modern mind, awakening to clearer conceptions of its wishes, was merely looking for outside help wherever help could be found. Thus Blake is a curious witness of his own time; and as his time was merely the dawn of ours, he is a curious and important witness of our own mentality.’51 The rise of aesthetic vision, a secularmystic configuration, is the catalyst that transforms the potentially pious mystic of Gilchrist’s Life into a visionary artist and creates the

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critical works that had preceded it. Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas is held up as the symbolic foundation stone of Blake’s mythological system, and the Pre-Raphaelite Blake revivalists are taken to task for ignoring its significance:

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mystical fire of Swinburne’s secular prophet. Henry G. Hewlett, writing in 1889 has a firm, though critical, grip on the radical vision of Blake and his adorers: ‘Is it a fact without significance that those by whom the Blake-cultus has been most actively diffused are members of a coterie which has identified itself with extreme views in theology, ethics, and politics? Does any one believe that if Blake had been, say, a Calvinist and Conservative, we should have heard of his artistic and prophetic inspiration from those who now avouch it?’52 Hewlett need not have feared radical extremity of the political kind in the Ellis/ Yeats’s vision of Blake: ‘Such leadership was to be of a kind entirely distinct from the “temporal power” claimed to this day elsewhere. The false idea that a talent or even genius for verse tends to give a man the right to make laws for the social conduct of other men is nowhere supported in Blake’s works. The world in which he would have the poet, acting as a poet, seek leadership is the poetic world’ (Ellis/Yeats, Vol. I, p. xi). The Yeats/ Ellis study is a prototype for the New Age myth of William Blake: ‘the result was a new man and a new myth, more mysterious, supernatural, and Celtic than anything Blake’s friends would have recognized’ (BB, p. 29). Hazard Adams has described Yeats’s Blake as ‘the first prophet of the religion of art’,53 sequestered into the aesthetic vacuum of a ‘poetic world’. The political dynamism of Blake’s work is dissipated at the high tide of nineteenth-century aestheticism. What had been played out in the preceding century is the snatch, bite and suckle of contested knowledge and contested culture: aestheticism and pragmatism, mysticism and secularism, religion and positivism, high culture and popular culture. Blake is an object of this visionary contestation. And Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake is the shining light of a contested cultural visionary.

IV: The eye openers The image of Blake that the 1860s ‘revival’ brings before the world would seem to collude in the aesthetic fantasy of Romantic disillusionment. Biographical and critical commentary concerning William Blake produced in the 1860s seem to both describe Blake as retreating from the modern world and use him as an example of the displaced artist, a man out of time with the mechanisation of art, yet strangely attuned to a spiritual past. Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), the formative Victorian biographer of Blake, evoked Blake’s style as an enigma comprised of tradition and innovation:

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

Where beyond the confines of his own most individual mind, did the hosier’s son find his model for that lovely web of rainbow’s fancy already quoted? I know of none in English literature. For the Song commencing My silks and fine array, with its shy evanescent tints and aroma as of pressed rose-leaves, parallels may be found among the lyrics of the Elizabethan age, alien though it be in its own. (Life, p. 21) Gilchrist was not alone. Swinburne at one point equates Blake with Shakespeare (AS, p. 12). A few lines later he calls Blake an ‘obscurely original reformer in art’ (AS, p. 13). A comparison with Shelley positions Blake as the poet in extremis: ‘Shelley in his time gave enough of perplexity and offence; but even he, mysterious and rebellious as he seemed to most men, was less made up of mist and fire than Blake’ (AS, p. 3). But a few pages later Blake is described in terms of literary nostalgia: ‘One can say, indeed, that some of these earliest songs of Blake’s have the scent and sound of Elizabethan times upon them’ (AS, p. 9). Gilchrist’s Life, to which Swinburne’s essay is a critical and highly individual adjunct, is crucial in the appropriation of Blake by both avant-garde aesthetes and political radicals. Gilchrist’s biography constantly strives after Blake’s imagination, leading to a speculative interplay of vision and technology, of the spiritual and the profane, of the mystical and the material. Although Gilchrist’s Life may conclude that Blake was a man of ‘childlike, simple faith’ (Life, p. 352), the biography is littered with wormholes that lead to other social, political and cultural dimensions, and which other nineteenth-century explorers of Blake utilise. One point of displacement being played out in Gilchrist’s description of Blake, embracing both historical or aesthetic dislocation, is technological alienation. The estrangement of divided labour is not the end-point for Gilchrist. Instead mechanical alienation leads into a discussion of spiritual personality; Blake’s visionary distance from the scientific positivism of the age is tempered by recognition of Blake as part of a visionary history lost to contemporary culture. For Gilchrist, Blake’s visionary capacity seems to go hand-in-hand with an aesthetic rejection of the mechanical age. Blake is presented as a God-like child in a Godless world. The representation of Blake by Gilchrist as ‘an other-worldly enthusiast’ (Nineteenth Century, p. 100) is, ironically, the first link in a chain that unites the backward-looking aestheticism of the Blake revival to the forward-facing problems of social organisation

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in a secular society. The recognition of Blake as other than the status quo is the guiding principle of Gilchrist’s Life and the template that facilitated the adoption of Blake as one of radical culture’s own in the later-nineteenth century. Gilchrist describes Blake as a spiritual radical, a mystical dissenter: ‘I have spoken of Blake’s daring heterodoxy on religious topics. He not only believed in a pre-existent state, but had adopted, or thought out for himself, many of the ideas of the early Gnostics; and was otherwise so erratic in his religious opinions as to shock orthodox Churchmen’ (Life, p. 326). In The Life of William Blake, then, there is already a strange mixture of mystical vision and secular pragmatism. The result is a very earthly enthusiast and an all too human visionary: I think it may not be superfluous to take into account here, as we did when first alluding to these notes on Reynolds, all the sources of Blake’s hostility towards the universally admired and extolled prince of English portrait painting. The deepest of these was the honest contempt of a man with high spiritual aims for one whose goal, though honourable, and far above common attainment, was at as widely different an altitude from Blake’s as the mere earthly hill-top from the star which shines down upon it. Hence the entire antagonism of their views; for such different ends must be reached by wholly different means. It is no invalidation of this high claim for Blake to add that the vivid contrast of their respective lots was another source; for recognition is dear to every gifted man, however unworldly, however sincere his indifference to those goods of fortune which ordinarily accompany recognition, but are the mere accidents of which that is the precious substance. (Life, pp. 274–5) Gilchrist steers a course between spiritual endeavour and petty emotion. He could just have come out and said that Blake was jealous of Reynolds. But in navigating between celestial inspiration and worldly ambition, Gilchrist delineates the equilibrium between cultural vision and aesthetic identification. The emphasis is upon recognition. Gilchrist pursues the dialectic between the visionary artist and the social and economic realities of his labouring life. The Life of William Blake is an open dialogue between spiritual heritage and cultural neglect. Recognition in the Life is an aesthetic trope. The 1880 expanded edition of The Life of William Blake contains in the second volume a memoir of Alexander Gilchrist, who died before the completion of the first edition, by Anne Gilchrist, his widow. Anne

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

talks of ‘dear Alec’s’ future projects, which included a planned biography of Wordsworth. Anne’s description of biography is not genealogical. It does not trace the poet’s place in literary history. Instead Anne figures visual tropes as keynotes for both the biographer and reader in deciphering the life of the biographical subject: ‘to create a small gallery of portraits in which the lover of literature should linger with as curious an interest as does the antiquary amid the relics of the past’ (‘Memoir’, Life, 1889, II, p. 374). The portrait and gallery tropes in Anne’s memoir of her husband are a continuum from The Life of William Blake. Both Anne and Alexander Gilchrist emphasise recognition by the spectator in their biographical writings. What is particularly emphasised in these moments of recognition is the coming together of historical difference between the object and the spectator. Anne Gilchrist compares the biographical portrait to ‘the relics of the past’ and the ‘lover of literature’ to an ‘antiquary’. At another juncture in the memoir, Anne describes visiting art galleries and sites of architectural interest with her husband. They encounter art and architecture with an eye born from Ruskin, reading history in holistic beauty: ‘every stone of which was scanned till it yielded up its quota of history, as well as of the meaning and the beauty of the whole’ (‘Memoir’, Life, 1880, II, p. 370). The way in which the Gilchrists read art is predicated upon the historical and history as part of an aesthetic whole. This perspective informs The Life of Blake and aims to recall history, connecting the temporal to the eternal, the individual with the special. Literature and biography become correlative points forming a constellation between different points in history. What configures this historical constellation is the aesthetic eye of the reader. Gilchrist constantly extols the reader of the Life to look. The 1863 and 1880 editions of the Life are designed to be eye-catching. Samuel Palmer, writing to Anne Gilchrist after the publication of the Life, describes the biography as ‘the richest Book of all illustrated ones I have ever seen’.54 Samuel Palmer, one of the Felpham disciples, was inclined by talent and temperament to promote visual recognition above mental cognition: ‘Talent thinks, Genius sees; and what organ so accurate as sight. Blake held this strongly.’55 Palmer’s reading of Blake is written as a personal moment of visionary revelation. Gilchrist widens that moment of revelation for the Victorian reader in general. Gilchrist brings the inner life of Blake’s imagination into relief against the reader’s reality. The spectator is presented with Blake’s imagination as a power that requires a particular type of reading. Gilchrist does not specify how to read Blake. He says at one point that

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At Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, among the select thousand water-colour drawings, hung two modestly tinted designs by Blake, of few inches in size: one The Dream of Queen Catherine, another Oberon and Titania asleep on a Lily. Both are remarkable displays of imaginative power, and finished examples in the artist’s peculiar manner. Both were unnoticed in the crowd, attracting few gazers, fewer admirers. For one needs to be read in Blake, to have familiarized oneself with his unsophisticated, archaic yet spiritual ‘manner’ – a style sui generis as no other artist’s ever was – to be able to sympathize with, or even understand, the equally individual strain of thought of which it is the vehicle. (Life, p. 2) In establishing the visual trope of recognition so early in the biography, Gilchrist agitates the communal memory for recognition of Blake. The biography is from the outset an odyssey of the seeing eye. Gilchrist creates a critical ‘kaleidoscope of consciousness’ which, as we begin to look at Blake’s works, slides in another frame in which it is our looking that has become the focus. Gilchrist’s Life certainly rests on a knife-edge between the aesthetic sanctity of Blake and the socio-political realities of his life. Deborah Dorfmann describes Gilchrist’s Blake as a man of ‘ardent and innocent enthusiasm’ (Nineteenth Century, p. 70) a touchstone of avant-garde untouchability. Gilchrist’s presentation of Blake attempts to do a lot, to suggest both aesthetic removal from life and social volition within life: ‘It was a favourite dogma of Blake’s, not, certainly, learned of the political economists, that the true power of society depends on its recognition of the arts’ (Life, p. 246). Blake is seen as a social visionary, empowering society through the agency of art. At the same time, he is seen as disengaging from the urgent political economy of his day. Bourgeois refuge from the agonies of life seems to be suggested. Suggestions of bourgeois collusion – images of Blake patronised into the politically autistic pet of the avant-garde, the ‘wild pet for the supercultivated’ (an image that Eliot rejected)56 – are undone, irrelevant. Critic and reader are encouraged to see Blake anew, as Gilchrist’s critical aesthetic comes to pre-empt the Modernist epiphany. The overriding force of Gilchrist’s Life is the desire to open the eyes of the reader to Blake. It is a book full of feeling, of sensuous moments of

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‘one must almost be born with a sympathy for it’ (Life, p. 2). We are told to look at Blake’s works, but there is no attempt to ‘show and tell’, to intrude upon the experience of seeing Blake’s work:

Radical Blake

looking and listening. The force of detail that comes from ‘seeing the same horizon, listening, pondering, absorbing’ is aporetic. It is the missed vision of the biographer – what cannot be clearly seen – that enables the epiphanies of vision between author, biographer and reader. The biographer invites the reader into the flux of the historical subject’s life. Blake is seen as part of the crowded continuum of human life, as well as a special example, a hero-poet. It is the uninterpreted areas of blankness in the life and work that allows the literary biography, The Life of William Blake, to open up to the reader’s own subjective vision. As if to point to this clearing of interpretation, Gilchrist celebrates ‘incompleteness’ and the ‘unfinished’ in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience: First of the poems let me speak, harsh as seems their divorce from the design which blends with them, forming warp and woof in one texture. It is like pulling up a daisy by the roots from the greensward out of which it springs. To me many years ago, first reading these weird songs in their appropriate environment of equally spiritual form and hue, the effect was as that of an angelic voice singing to oaten pipe, such as Arcadians tell of; or as if a spiritual magician were summoning before human eyes, and through a human medium, images and scenes of divine loveliness; and in the pauses of the strain we seem to catch the rustling of angelic wings. The Golden Age independent of space or time, object of vague sighs and dreams from many generations of struggling humanity – an Eden such as childhood sees – is brought nearer than ever poet brought it before. . . They are unfinished poems; yet would finish have bettered their bold and careless freedom? Would it not have brushed away the delicate bloom? that visible spontaneity, so rare and great a charm, the eloquent attribute of our old English ballads and of the early songs of all nations. The most deceptively perfect wax model is no substitute for the living flower. The form is, in these songs, a transparent medium of the spiritual thought, not an opaque body. (Life, pp. 62–3) The entire key of Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelitism would seem to be sounded in this passage: the nostalgia for an idealised ‘Arcadian’ past, the transcendental desire for a ‘Golden Age’ undefined by space or time, the secular-mysticism of ‘a spiritual magician’ corresponding through ‘human eyes’, and through a ‘human medium’, the opiumtinted detail of dreaming transfiguration. But it is in the respect of

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detail and form that Gilchrist distinguishes his work from Aesthetic formalism. It does not detract from the ‘spiritual sight’ of Blake’s works that the aesthetic and formal details are imperfect. Gilchrist is an epiphanic critic, celebrating the fullness of the experience between spectator and creator. The stage, through the groundwork provided by Gilchrist’s Life, has been set for the visual filter to be turned inwards, for the visionary eye to become the psychological ‘I’. Charles Algernon Swinburne moves beyond Gilchrist in realising the powerful psychology of Blake’s vision. Swinburne explores symbolism in Blake’s works as an active entity, realising the importance of Blake’s works as landscapes of psychological symbolism. In the 1863 edition of Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake, Anne Gilchrist writes in the preface: ‘But however small may be the literary value of the Europe, America, Jerusalem, &c., they are at least psychologically curious and important; and should the opportunity arise, I hope to see these gaps filled in with workmanship which shall better correspond with that of the rest of the fabric.’57 Swinburne’s William Blake: a Critical Essay attempts to fill the hermeneutic gap that Anne Gilchrist calls ‘psychologically curious’. Swinburne does this by describing the aporias within Blake’s own work as creations of the human psyche: Between the former of these and The Human Abstract there is a certain difference: here, the moral point of the poem is, that innocence is wholly ignorant, and sees no deeper than the shell of form; experience is mainly malignant, and sees the root of evil and seed of pain under the leaf of good and blossom of pleasant things: there, the vision is the poet’s own, and deals with that evil neither actually nor seemingly inherent in the system or scheme of created nature, but watered into life by the error and fed into luxuriance by the act of ‘the human brain’ alone. (AS, p. 147) A psychological discourse emerges in Swinburne’s William Blake: a Critical Essay, and gives added complexity to the rhetoric of materialism and morality already at play in the essay. This is the real significance and force of Swinburne’s essay. Swinburne’s strange configuration of the material takes on new nuances of meaning. The twinning of the moral and the material in phrases such as ‘moral or material duty’ or ‘material virtue’, can now be seen as symbolic constructions referring to the individual’s internalisation of an abstracted social order. Swinburne, through Blake, is engaging in Romanticism’s struggle between aestheticism and ideology.58 The

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

self-reflexivity of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ in William Blake: a Critical Essay is not the fatal narcissism of aestheticism gone astray, but a political strategy confronting the alienation of capitalist materialism. Swinburne is deeply engaged with the struggles of Blake’s works, which sometimes results in a hiatus of sense or even form. Swinburne’s essay is a great exercise in the blindness and insight of aesthetic praxis, as Hugh J. Luke remarks in his introduction to the 1970 reprint of the essay, a moment in the 1860s when literature and humanity come together in an experimental and tentative psychological discourse. Swinburne is the first critic of Blake to move beyond the question ‘Was Blake Mad?’, and to examine the works through the inner eye of psychological symbolism. The beauty and force of Swinburne’s William Blake comes partially from a poet talking about another poet in bursts of Bacchic energy, pushing at the limits of interpretation. But the critical value of the essay is the interpretation that frames the poetic frenzy and creates a new critical and aesthetic perspective. Swinburne understands that Blake’s poetry is at the very edge of literature, not because it is mad, but because it deals in the creation of madness, as Swinburne’s comments on ‘The Human Abstract’ demonstrate: ‘Only in the “miscreative brain” of fallen men can such a thing strike its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere else in all nature can the tyrants of divided matter and moral law, “Gods of the earth and sea,” find soil that will bear such fruit’ (AS, p. 121). Those twin pillars of repression signal the complexity of how Swinburne reads the formation of the ‘miscreative brain’. Swinburne’s reading is particularly charged here because of the hermeneutic leap that it refuses to make. He does not complete the aetiology of the ‘miscreative brain’. Is the brain psychologically faulty, and the tyrannical repression, exerted by materialism and moral law, a natural result of natural causes? Or do exterior forces corrupt the brain? Or yet again, is it the brain that adulterates phenomenological data? Swinburne’s diction is electrified by an intuition that unites the dissenting tradition with the psychological pressures of the secularised, atomised individual. The Antinomian revolt against the ‘moral law’ is enjoined to the Aesthetic retreat from mechanical materialism or capitalism.59 Swinburne takes the sovereign individual within capitalist society and re-examines the effect of ‘moral law and divided matter’ upon the inner experience of the psychological being. Swinburne finds in Blake’s works an aesthetic model for his proto-psychological interpretation. A Gnostic inheritance is teamed with the poetics of inner experience, which is expressed as both sovereign and communal.

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Visionary Blake

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Could god bring down his heart to the making of a thing so deadly and strong? Or could any lesser daemonic force of nature take to itself wings and fly high enough to assume power equal to such a creation? Could spiritual force so far descend or material force so far aspire? Or, when the very stars, and all the armed children of heaven, the ‘helmed cherubim’ that guide the ‘sworded seraphim’ that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at the sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to man – ‘Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ (AS, p. 120) Swinburne’s proto-psychological probing of Blake’s poetry has wider social connotations than metaphysical musings. In Blake’s writing, the mysterious figuration of the human through the non-human facilitates a pre-Freudian symbolism of the unconscious. This is not because Blake’s mythological characters are read as positive symbols of the id or ego or super-ego, but because they negate simple questions of morality. The question instead becomes one of negative vision and negative creation. Perhaps it is the very shifting of classification both in this period and in how Blake is interpreted in this period, which allows him to be both the black-out and floodlight of social and psychological discourse. Romantic poetry was not disseminated as the musings of ‘ineffectual Angels’ in political and social ‘voids’, but was seen as vital anticipations of the modern world. In 1878 Edward Dowden interpreted Romantic literature in the light of the French Revolution. He saw that there was no easy separation of political will and imaginative liberty in Blake’s mythology: ‘In Blake’s enormous mythology the genius of Revolution was an honoured divinity. Its historical apparition, however, although Blake hailed that apparition with enthusiasm, was less to him than its eternal essence, its “spiritual form”.’60 It was one of the most secular of nineteenth-century commentators on Blake, the Freethinker editor, George William Foote, who most effectively articulated the blind-spot even the most rational Victorians had for Blake’s vision:

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Swinburne uses some of Blake’s most powerful poetry as a vehicle to ask some fundamental ontological questions, thrown up by the inexplicable relationship of material and spiritual creation:

Radical Blake

William Blake is a figure quite unique, baffling all classification except of the broadest kind. His work is unlike every other man’s; he belongs to no school, and has no actual disciples or imitators; his birthright consigned him to companion-less solitude. None ever had intenser fire of genius. He lacked the versatility of completer minds, but the defect is atoned for by his concentration on the loftiest objects of thought, and the deepest, most shrouded, secrets of being. He is a star of the first magnitude in the constellations of poetry and art, shining with quenchless lustre amid the astral glories of their lucid firmament, companioned now in mid-heaven by the sacred band of great ones who have passed through the gloomy portal of death to emerge transfigured and deathless evermore.61 God and myth might be absent from the Secularist ontology, but this does not dissolve the thirst for metaphysical knowledge. Georges Bataille’s comments, in his essay on Malcolm de Chazal, place Blake at the culminative, still point of humanist metaphysics.62 As Existentialism may be the end-point of Humanism, Surrealism may be the end-point of Secularism. If the Surrealist appropriation of Blake is not the inheritance of the mid nineteenth-century English criticism, then the French avant-garde at least interpreted Blake in interestingly similar ways to the English avant-garde in the previous century. This is important because the Surrealists and Existentialists, particularly Georges Bataille, start from a position that places Blake as a precursor of Surrealism and at the limits of religious and poetic vision: ‘Blake managed, in phrases of a peremptory simplicity, to reduce humanity to poetry and poetry to Evil . . . Blake’s achievement was to strip the individual figure of both poetry and religion and to return to them that clarity in which religion has the liberty of poetry and poetry the sovereign power of religion.’63 Bataille’s ‘phrases of peremptory simplicity’ hold good for the midnineteenth century reception of Blake. Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and Secularism are not misinterpreters of Blake. They are engaged in exactly the same interaction between poetry and religion that Bataille attributes to Blake’s works. It is their closeness to the subject matter that induces these ‘[c]ritics’ moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions’ which ‘are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insights’.64

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Visionary Blake

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Surrealism – combining psychological vision with modernist epiphany – would seem to be the home for Blake in the visionary art of the twentieth century. Blake was not particularly well known to most French Surrealists other than to a handful such as André Breton, Georges Bataille and Jean Wahl, although he was important to English artists associated with the movement. At the same time, the Surrealists’ commitment to the imagination and a rejection of the ‘rational’ madness that had ended in the horrors of the First World War, expressed in the poetry of André Breton, Paul Éluard and Pierre Reverdy and the dreamscapes of Max Ernst, André Masson and Salvador Dali, made them the inheritors of Blake’s revelations. For Breton (1896–1966), who included Blake as one of the precursors to the Surrealists, the realistic tradition from Aquinas to Anatole France was ‘hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement’.65 Breton twice referred to Blake as one of the precursors to surrealism, including his essay ‘Originality and Freedom’ (1941–2), where Blake is numbered as one of the ‘explorers’ (with writers such as Novalis, Poe and Baudelaire) who traversed to the further shores of the imagination. Blake is invoked in a very different context in the much earlier piece, ‘Revolution Now and Forever!’, a document written as a response to the Moroccan war in which Blake’s political and philosophical values are foregrounded rather than his aesthetics and in which he is listed with Nietzsche, Marx, Kant, Spinoza and others as ‘the beginning of your [bourgeois capitalism’s] downfall’.66 In the Manifestos of Surrealism, Breton argued against the absolute rule of logic and his call to unfurl the ‘flag of imagination’ repeated many of the demands of key romantics such as Blake and Shelley. For example, in his account of the illustration The Bard, from Gray, Blake had written that nonmimetic artistic forms had their own public following, and asked whether painting had to ‘be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile’ (DC, E541). Blake is often encountered in the fringes of accounts of Surrealism as well as more contemporary works dealing with the literary fantastic (such as science fiction). One important and relatively early commentator on surrealism, Anna Balakian, noted that the Surrealists were generally influenced more strongly by the Symbolists than the Romantics, particularly writers and poets such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Lautréaumant, and in particular that Surrealism was a reaction to the naturalistic representation of much visual Romantic art. Blake,

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V: The altering eye

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Radical Blake

William Blake was one of the earliest of these spiritual forebears, but not the Blake who expressed himself through Christian symbols. Rather, the Surrealists have seen Blake as a visionary in Rimbaud’s sense of the term and have extolled him for rejecting exterior reality as a subject of artistic expression and for transforming the physical world in his effort to alter its dimensions. Blake’s eye, they thought, absorbed but did not determine: as an intermediary instrument, a recorder of physical sensation, it left the matter of interpreting to the imaginative faculty. By refusing to make of nature the object of aesthetic creation, Blake had removed painting and verbal imagery from the controlling factors of phenomenal reality. Blake has been admired by the Surrealists because like them he made poetry a way of life: his pictorial and poetic imagery was the overflow of a spiritual crisis and his art asserted man’s creative capabilities.67 This passage is worth quoting in length because it represents an important way of misreading Blake by the Surrealists that is also important for those later writers and artists who deliberately ignored his Christian ethic to concentrate on the poet as ‘complete artist’. With regard to Romantic writers more generally, Breton described Surrealism as the ‘prehensile tail of Romanticism’, offering a dialectic of Romantic immateriality and realist tangibility. While the Surrealists, like the Futurists and other avant-garde movements, rejected the Romantic visual arts as ‘passéisme’, Romanticism could nonetheless offer a model of revolt against bourgeois rationalism that the Surrealists combined with Marxism and psychoanalysis. Such revolt could be openly political, or psychological and sentimental, so that ‘many Surrealist texts testify openly to the emotional sway under which Surrealism works, in the wake of Romanticism’.68 In the Anglo-American world, figures such as Ruthven Todd (1914–78) combined an interest in Blake with new developments in modernism. Todd, who had been educated at Edinburgh School of Art and was the author of works such as Over the Mountain (1939) and In Other Worlds (1951), also experimented in replicating Blake’s technique with the printmaker Stanley Hayter and the Spanish surrealist Joan Miró in 1948.69 Similarly, the movement identified as NeoRomanticism by various commentators, shared similarities with surrealism and was greatly influenced by Blake and Samuel Palmer.

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virtually alone as a visual artist, was exempt from this condemnation, even praised as a precursor:

39

Raymond Mortimer first used the term ‘neo-Romantic’ in a review of the 1942 exhibition New Movements in Art: Contemporary Work in England.70 Comprising artists such as Graham Sutherland, John Piper, and John Minton, all of whom shared a common interest in Blake, the most significant figure was Paul Nash (1889–1946). Nash, a painter, printmaker, designer, writer and photographer, studied briefly at the Slade but was, according to his biographer Andrew Causley, essentially self-taught.71 After his first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in London, Nash served as an officer during the First World War before becoming Official War Artist in 1917. His ‘Void of War’ exhibition in 1918 established his reputation, but his real period of innovation began in the late 1920s, so that, for example, he was the main force behind the formation of Unit One in 1933, which brought together British abstraction, Vorticism and surrealism. Many critics have placed Nash in a tradition of English art that includes Blake, Palmer and Rossetti, and Nash was very explicit about the importance of Blake to him, as for example in a letter to Dora Carrington in 1913, in which he remarked ‘I expect you love Blake as I do.’72 In 1917 he completed two illustrations based on Tiriel and Margot Eates notes how Nash’s early vision drawings of 1910 such as ‘Angel and Devil’ and ‘Our Lady of Inspiration’ were directly inspired by Blake’s poem to Butts, ‘Over sea, over land, / My eyes did expand / Into regions of the air’ (E712), while in 1918 Jan Gordon compared Nash (not entirely complimentarily) to Blake in British Artists at the Front.73 And yet, while Nash himself felt the importance of Blake strongly, the influence is in one sense a surprising one: Nash hardly ever painted figures, and then generally as part of the landscapes which distinguish his art, while Blake largely rejected the landscape painting of English Romantic art. Nash himself recognised this in an article he wrote on ‘Abstract Art’ for The Listener in 1932: Perhaps the strongest contribution to the history of the pictorial subject in England, and one whose character is, in a sense, extremely modern, was made by William Blake. Blake is said to have hated Nature, and his work certainly shows a contempt for natural appearances. Like the Surrealists of to-day he sought material for his pictures in other worlds. Within the realm of the mind he conceived certain very precise and solid images, bright with colour and of a rather persistent curvilinear design. The finest of these do indeed burn with unreal life and seem the product of unique vision.74

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

Landscape, then, may be ‘Nash’s elective theme’ in paintings such as Landscape in a Dream (1936–8) and his Landscape of the Megaliths series (1934–7),75 but Nash still laid claim to an English surrealism that had its roots in Blake. The connection between the two is completely comprehensible if we restore Samuel Palmer to his position of fulcrum between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an artist who transformed Blake’s visionary aesthetics from figurative to landscape art. While Nash (as well as Sutherland, Piper and others) knew more of Blake’s art than the woodcut illustrations to Thornton’s Virgil, these minute but powerful engravings provide the true influence on his art as art. This is very clear, for example, in Nash’s book of woodcuts Places but also in his final series of sunflower paintings made in the 1940s.76 As Hartley Ramsden explained in her contribution to the Paul Nash Memorial Volume (1948), Nash spent long hours contemplating Blake’s poem, ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’: Ah Sun-flower! Weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go. (E25) Paintings such as Sunflower and Sun (1942) and Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) depict gigantic sunflowers absorbing the life of the sun, bringing its energy to the youth and pale virgin. Leonard Robinson remarks that although Nash’s interest in Blake waned during the middle part of his life, it revived towards the end and, as the sunflower paintings indicate: ‘Blake now constantly engaged Nash’s mind.’77 Blakean energy also occupied the mind of probably the most original Surrealist commentator on Blake: Georges Bataille (1897–1962), founder of the literary review Critique, was a philosopher and author of erotic novels such as Histoire de l’Oeil (1928), a writer whose view of Blake was profoundly different to that of Breton.78 While there are problems with homogenising the work of a writer and thinker for whom the response to the other was profound, his works may generally be described using the title of a series of works from the 1930s and 1940s called the Summa Atheologica, continued for example by La Part

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Maudite (1967), translated as The Accursed Share. In The Accursed Share, Bataille outlines his theory of a ‘general economy’, that is the general principles of exchange in human activity. In this volume and its sequels, L’Histoire de l’érotisme and La Souveraineté (both published posthumously in 1976), Bataille draws principally upon Nietzsche and Sade, supported by Freud and Marx, to offer a total anthropology that has at its basis the theory of human sovereignty. For Bataille, man is that animal who denies his free animality: we distrust and revolt in horror against nature as sex, filth and death, but this denial is futile because we cannot escape our carnal origins. Repression and rejection are the source of potential human sovereignty at the same time as they signify a fall into alienation. Men wish to transform that which they wish to deny and the sacred is in fact that which is prohibited, cast out of profane life (as, for example, with animals which tend to become totems, divine creatures removed from dependence): ‘Thus, the sacred announces a new possibility: it is a leap into the unknown, with animality as its impetus. What came to pass can be summed up in a simple statement: the force of a movement, which repression increased tenfold, projected life into a richer world.’79 Why do we submit to a loss of freedom? Because, as free animals, we cannot recognise that freedom: it is only when the boundary is delineated that it can be crossed, that we can exercise sovereignty. ‘Servile Man’, man as a tool in the objective world, is concerned only with what is useful, and this servility dominates the bourgeois and communist worlds yet fails to redeem us from our alienation. Subjectivity, for Bataille, finds its apotheosis in consumption, which is our sovereign activity because it cannot serve a purpose. It is for this reason, for example, that we reject the free sexuality of animals, because only then can we define the futile and pleasurable squander of eroticism and are enriched as humans. According to J. M. Lo Duca, Bataille ‘should really be approached between Hegel and Nietzsche, between the dialectic and the tragic’, the struggle for an impossible consciousness or what Bataille termed ‘the impossibility of thinking’.80 While Nietzsche and Hegel (and indeed Sade) are central to Bataille’s theory of general economy, Blake is also significant: the opposition between consumption and accumulation is very similar to the prolific and devourers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, from which is taken the prefatory quote to La Part Maudite, ‘Exuberance is Beauty’. Blake also provides the central image for Bataille’s theory of squander, that ‘the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space’, a sovereign expenditure of energy with no thought for consequences outside the moment.

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Visionary Blake

Radical Blake

According to Bataille’s theory of general economy, the energy of this world absorbed from the sun can only be accumulated so far before it must be consumed luxuriously, wasted and squandered, for further accumulation simply brings with it greater pressure to consume. Yet this squander is not without benefit: the chieftain who consumes his (perishable) possessions in feasting earns himself (imperishable) fame, rank and sovereignty. Hence the form of Bataille’s most famous example of luxury (taken from Maus), potlatch, a means of circulating wealth that excludes bargaining and, like the sacrifice, removes the object from the servile world of things in its literal destruction. Luxury, therefore, and its greatest forms, eroticism and the sacred, are always in a dialectic with cruelty and evil: the gift always places the recipient under a burden which can only be redeemed by potlatch, sacrifice or war, the literal consumption of all energy to the point of ruin. As Elisabeth Arnould remarks, ‘Cross-culturally, sacrifice delineates the limit thought comes up against when it faces what it cannot think.’81 Capitalism deals with aggressive gift giving through the principle of moderation, but by returning the gift to the world of things, Bataille argues, this removes man’s ability to demonstrate his sovereignty. Sovereignty, then, stems from the primordial opposition of the human to the animal, but the exercise of sovereignty reminds us that ‘human existence [is] forever in the breach’, a hybrid return to an animality and rejection of the servile human world of things that is not the same animality that we left. Bataille’s humanism, therefore, does not denote the human as a stable position but rather ‘an impossible combination of movements that destroy one another’.82 This is not true of utilitarian man, who endures and avoids torments as much as he can, but rather the sovereign man who, in his celebration of NOTHING (no-thing) is literally evil, rejecting the utilitarian good and squandering of accumulated wealth. In his collection of essays Literature and Evil (1957), in which he opposed Sartre’s view of literature as a moral act of political commitment, Bataille applied an early form of this theory of sovereignty in which he argued for the hypermorality of literature.83 As evil has a sovereign value for us, literature should not shrink from communicating that evil to us but rather engage in a ‘rigorous morality’ that ‘results from complicit in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.’84 The eight writers discussed by Bataille include in addition to Blake Sade, Baudelaire, Kafka and one woman, Emily Brontë. The inclusion of Brontë, the female writer who, for Bataille, demonstrated ‘a

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profound experience of the abyss of evil’, immediately points to some of the failings of his sovereign theory of literature, that it is a hypermasculanised activity of transgression. More than this, Bataille the critic often makes factual mistakes and, likewise, is more than happy to distort and misread his subjects, commit acts of violence upon them that disfigure them to his notions of a general economy, not so much an anxiety of influence as erotic tortures that fulfil his theoretical position. And yet, despite these failings, even because of them, his misreading of Blake as a sovereign visionary of evil (a position that shares much with Swinburne), has been influential on several writers and artists discussed in this book who combat Blake in intellectual warfare. For Bataille, Blake is, along with John Ford and Brontë, the most moving of English writers, in the ‘excessive violence’ of whose work ‘Evil attains a form of purity’.85 For him, as for the other Surrealists, Blake epitomised the ‘total artist’, one whose life and art were uncompromised. The principal appeal of Blake’s art, particularly his poetry, is that it refuses to enslave us to a world of things but insists instead upon its own sovereignty, which is what Bataille means by the sacred. It is in this realm of the sacred that Blake’s special relationship to sovereign evil emerges, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell unsurprisingly providing the coda that throws light on such evil. To alienated, modern man who values accumulation and profit above all things, the prosperity of the gift, of waste and consumption, of squander, is forever denied as a sovereign activity. In Blake, however, Bataille recognised an agitation, an evil, an energy that propelled him to the peak of a disorder from which he saw, ‘in its integrity and violence, the extent of the instinct which propels us towards the worst, but at the same time raises us to good’.86 Kenneth Itkowitz has remarked of Bataille’s philosophy that ‘Beyond our condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the very ones we most celebrate’,87 or, as Blake wrote in The Marriage: Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy . . . Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight. (pl. 4, E34)

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Visionary Blake

2

I: London calling: streetwalkers vs. flâneur I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse (‘London’, E26–7) ‘London’ – the city universal in four short quatrains. This is a song of Blake’s that has many voices, and can change shape with the person who speaks the poem. On one level it is a great record of social discord and social decay; at another it is a call to arms, a cry against the reactionary ‘take over’ of radical London by royalist and tyrannical forces. 44

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Metropolitan Blake

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These readings share in common a concern with the social impetus of the poem, with what it says and means within the socio-political conditions of London which peopled those ‘charter’d streets’ with street-hawkers, Jacobin activists, prostitutes, salon intellectuals, dandies, entrepreneurs, soldiers, dissident preachers, beggars and others. They are readings that are not afraid to take a bite out of the underbelly of the metropolis. Importantly, they look outwards towards the social network of the eighteenth-century metropolis: these are the readings of the ‘streetwalker’. There is also another kind of Blakean-metropolitan reading, one that has found echoes in the modernist vertigo/postmodernist vortex of the city. Twentieth-century Blake-influenced writing, particularly literary fiction, has picked up on Blake’s city as a psychological landscape – the vertigo element – or as a plot of psychological potential – the vortical element. Both have roots in a particular subgenre of the novel, what Michael Moorcock calls ‘visionary London fiction’, as a practice of psychogeography, defined by the OED as ‘that branch of psychological speculation or investigation which is concerned with the effects on the psyche of the geographical environment’. Moorcock, in his introduction to Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, lists the major luminaries of this subgenre – Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, J. G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Fay Weldon, A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter1 – of whom the first three are most significant to this chapter (along with Moorcock himself) in that they are specifically indebted to Blake as one source of reading the city. Such reading, as Michel de Certeau has observed, requires an erotics as well as a poetics, where the skyscrapers of New York or immersion in the rush hours of Paris, London, Tokyo plunge the practitioner of everyday life into gnosis or abjection, somewhere between ecstasy and despair. Armed with such an erotics, a practice of reading pursued by artists such as Ballard, Ackroyd, Sinclair and, of course, Blake, the city’s lines shift to offer new glossaries: ‘Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.’2 In such texts, the focus is shifted to an intense and psychologically individualistic experience of the city and of reading Blake, towards the subjective ground zero: these are the readings (or writings) of the flâneur. The social and the psychological are entwined in the critical tradition of ‘London’ even amongst those who are known as pioneers of the ‘social’ reading of Blake’s works such as David Erdman and E. P. Thompson. David Erdman’s description of ‘London’ is spiked with

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Metropolitan Blake

Radical Blake

political grime and claustrophobic turmoil: ‘we come upon infinite curses in a little room, a world at war in a grain of London soot’.3 Both E. P. Thompson and Erdman map out historical and political cues and clues in ‘London’, keeping up a chain of communication with Blake’s notebook.4 For example, if we take the third stanza, London is peopled by figures we know would have inhabited the streets of 1790s London, people Blake would have rubbed shoulders with in his everyday life, in places that would have dominated the cityscape. The references seem transparent: the poor chimney sweeps who experienced some respite from the appalling conditions they suffered with protective regulation in 1788, the ‘hapless soldiers’ of 1792–93 being ‘frequently inclined’ to mutiny.5 E. P. Thompson comments on these soldiers, emphasising the literalness of their blood: But the blood of the soldier is real, as well as apocalyptic, and so is the venereal disease that blinds the new born infant and which plagues the marriage hearse. The poem makes the point very literally. Blake was often a very literal-minded man.6 Presiding over this scene is the behemoth and leviathan of church and state, the ‘Palace walls’ and ‘blackening Church’. According to Erdman,7 the recapitulation of ‘London’ in the notebook poem, ‘An Ancient Proverb’, transmutes Blake’s descriptive narrative into a prescriptive message, a recipe for republican action: Remove away that blackning church Remove away that marriage hearse Remove away that — of blood You’ll quite remove the ancient curse (E475) But the assassin’s knife is necessarily blunted in Blake’s published poetry. The engraved version of ‘London’ in Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a mind-locked work. The political aetiology of the poem is withdrawn into a mindscape of personal reflection. The ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ are heavy links in the internal propagation of oppressive dogma. Both Thompson and Erdman, however, read the poem as a progression from objective spectator to subjective participant, as a breaking out of mental self-reflection and immersion into human society. In the draft of the poem, the deleted line reads ‘german forged

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links’ (E796), referring to George III, and the House of Hanover.8 The message is clear. The citizens of London are repressed by monarchy. There is an object at which to direct anger and a political course of action in which to enact social reform. In this transition from notebook poem to etched plate, ‘London’ shifts its frame of reference: sovereignty under goes a neat inversion. In the notebook version, the external forces of sovereignty are exercised and represented by the tyrannical figures of monarchy and priesthood. In the printed poem, sovereignty is the domain of an interior struggle to re-imagine the world. The shift in transmission from one form to another can be read backwards, a black hole in the textual constellations of literary history. This gap is an ontological fault line exposing the political damage beneath the text. In public, Blake must retreat inwards, into the mind, the contracted state of personal witness. In private, Blake can be free with direct criticism, issuing a ‘public’ declamation of the King’s guilt. In public, Blake sidesteps political outrage in order to encourage social sympathy with his subject: ‘On the illuminated page a child is leading a bent old man along the cobblestones and a little vagabond is warming his hands at the fire in the open street. But it is Blake who speaks.’9

II: Metroland: the streetwalkers For a writer such as William James Linton (1812–97), Blake gives flesh and blood to the abstractions of the city, and Blake’s influence can be seen in Linton’s own paean to the poor of London, Bob-Thin. In Linton’s career as an engraver and as a political commentator, we can trace a developing interest in Blake, not only as an artisan engraver, but also as a political symbolist. The ‘made’ nature of Linton’s aesthetics had an inbred political pulse which, increasingly, was to include a rich vein of Blake’s works. In his facsimile work for the art union treatise or Gilchrist’s Life, Linton was, in the main, an illustrator embroidering a project already in place. In his private and small-run publications, the aesthetic and political platform was his and Blake’s work was to make appearances in various guises, from an augury of famine to an icon of revolution. But before these semi-fantastical (but at the same time extremely serious) flights of the imagination, Linton was ‘to meet unwittingly’ with Blake in their respective work on London. Linton’s early work, Bob-Thin,10 covers ground common to Blake’s ‘London’, both in geographical location and in displaying a tapestry of social injustice. From the Gordon riots of 1780 in Blake’s

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London to the Chartist slogans and banners in the 1830s of Linton’s London, the metropolis maps out the socio-political consciousness of Blake and Linton. Their direct experience of metropolitan life informs their poetry and their politics, from the bloody soldiers and syphilitic infants of Blake’s ‘London’ to the absurdist logic and brutal suffering inflicted by the Poor Laws of Linton’s Bob-Thin. Of the working Pariah caste, who meet ye In the heart of London’s wealthiest city – London for ‘charities’ renown’d; Despite the daily traces found Of hoary Squalor’s crippled feet ’Twixt Lambeth and Threadneedle-street. Squalor resides in Bethnal Green! (Bob-Thin, p. 10) Reading Linton’s London against Blake’s is instructive and indicative of how Blake’s ‘London’ and Blake’s metropolis have been interpreted both as materially accurate and metaphysically pertinent. The undefined yet chartered streets of Blake’s ‘London’ are mapped out by ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. In Bob-Thin there is the literal tracing of named streets in ‘London’ by the figurative Squalor. Linton’s and Blake’s poems correspond to each other. Blake’s published London is manifested in metaphysical definition, the very streets configured by imagination ensnared. Linton’s poem is politically defined, almost to the point of satire. Yet both ‘London’ and Bob-Thin create a symbolic context that is recognisably the same. They are almost inversions of each other. Symbolic inversions in which the general in one is the particular in the other; the metaphysical aporia in one becomes the political definition of the other and vice versa. Blake paints with his finger as Linton points with his. The translocation of political, social and metaphysical discourse can be seen in the illustrations that accompany ‘London’ and Bob-Thin. Blake’s ‘London’ is a literal scene in which a child leads an old, crippled man. Geoffrey Keynes describes the connotations of this scene, in relation to Blake’s own mythology, thus: ‘In the illustration a child leads an old man on crutches through the streets. This bearded figure may be the creator, Urizen, himself crippled by the conditions he has created.’11 In retrospect, the figure is also reminiscent of Linton’s ‘Hoary Squalor’s crippled feet’. Thomas Sibson engraved the illustrations to Bob-Thin, which Brian Maidment describes as ‘powerful

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engraved woodblock capital letters which supply a running commentary to the text using the graphic idiom of Seymour and Cruikshank – a collaboration which may have been the outcome of a jointly projected radical history of England which Linton and Sibson had planned in 1842 or 1843.’12 Sibson’s illustrations to the above quoted passages of Bob-Thin are metaphorical rather than literal, the human cogs and wheels that are the engraved capitals of the Bob-Thin verses recalling Blake’s metaphysics of the mind in Milton: This Wine-press is call’d War on Earth, it is the Printing-Press Of Los; and here he lays his words in order above the mortal brain As cogs are formd in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel. (M 27: 8 – 10, E124) Blake creates a metaphor for the inner experience of humanity, alienated and isolated from community, spinning in the orbit of their own abstraction. Los’s words challenge the self-absorbed social entropy of this process. The Printing-Press is the harbinger of social revolution in Milton. It creates words which act as cogs ‘formd in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel’, causing a literal and metaphorical, textual and social, revolution in the minds of humans. Linton and Sibson take Blake’s metaphor and apply it to the page of the text, printing visual representations of the social and metaphysical enslavement of humanity. It is literally Blake’s visionary London turned upside down. Linton is not alone in plugging into that visionary energy that transforms Blake’s metropolis, that turns suffering into symbol and struggle into epiphany. Gilchrist’s Life gives us the widescreen cinema excitement of metropolitan mêlée twinned with those pre-modernist moments of individual reflection. That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from Justice Hyde’s house near Leicester Fields, for the destruction of which less than an hour had sufficed, through Long Acre, past the quiet house of Blake’s old master, engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and down Holborn, bound for Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no distanglement) to go along in the very front rank, and witness the

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Radical Blake

The historical event of the burning of Newgate is caught in a freeze frame of biographical action. The capital city is the gallery in which the authorial figure of William Blake moves. Alexander Gilchrist’s biography taps into the ley lines of imagination and self in Blake’s London while at the same time strongly defining the socio-historical reality of the city. Alexander Gilchrist is by no stretch of the imagination a Republican, but his biography does have a communal spirit abroad, focused not on the Universal but on the metropolitan. For Gilchrist, the secular self, seeking solace in society, is not an ‘Universal Individual’ but a ‘metropolitan Identity’. In this Gilchrist is following in Blake’s footsteps: ‘Blake’s continuing city takes its origin from a synthesis of literary antecedents with Blake’s experience of real cities.’13 Saree Makdisi sees a mapping out of modernisation in Blake’s city, the political reality of expanding empire becoming a ‘spatial forcefield’ of individual and system, community and capitalism.14 Gilchrist also remains in touch with the real city, but he seems to look forward towards the modernist city of outer epiphany, rather than backwards to the mystical city of the inner temple.15 Gilchrist makes the cosmopolitan the sub-text of his biography, moving Blake into a Baudelairean context of the modern city. The backdrop of London is everywhere in Gilchrist’s Life. Chapter II, for example, on Blake’s childhood, opens with a definitive evocation of time and place, stating that Blake was ‘[b]orn amid the gloom of a London November’ (Life, p. 4). The place of his birth, Broad Street, is described in detail, penetrating into the social and cultural life behind that particularity: The street is a shabby miscellany of oddly assorted occupations – lapidaries, pickle-makers, manufacturing trades of many kinds, furniture-brokers, and nondescript shops. ‘Artistes’ and artizans live in the upper stories. Almost every house is adorned by its triple or quadruple row of brass bells, bright with the polish of frequent hands, and yearly multiplying themselves. (Life, p. 4) Such detail continues throughout the biography. Sometimes it is deeply nostalgic. Outside, it remains pretty much as it must have looked in Blake’s

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storm and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates. (Life, p. 30)

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time; old-fashioned people having (Heaven be praised!) tenanted it ever since the first James Basire and after him his widow ended their days there. With its green paint, old casements, quiet old-fashioned shop-window, and freedom from the abomination of desolation (stucco), it retains an old-world genuine aspect, rare in London’s oldest neighbourhoods, and not at war with the memories which cling around the place. (Life, p. 19) But sometimes, as we can see from the description of the burning of Newgate, the descriptions are literally bursting with the political turmoil that engulfed London’s streets in the 1780s. Gilchrist continues to map out London in the Life as a place of artistic potential, one where the contingency of poets and artists living side by side, leaving traces of artistic endeavour in the fabric of the city, is everywhere: ‘In 1793, Blake quitted Poland Street, after five years’ residence there. The now dingy demi-rep street, one in which Shelley lodged in 1810, after his expulsion from Oxford, had witnessed the production of the Songs of Innocence and other Poetry and Design of a genus unknown, before or since, to that permanently foggy district,’ (Life, p. 85). For him, the city is also a place of spiritual as well as artistic possibility, where the labyrinthine, Dickensian streets are lit up by moments of visionary recognition. The foggy, dense streets of London become illuminated by a historical topography of personal and artistic endeavour. As much as Gilchrist’s Life is a biography of a unique personality, it is also a re-mapping of the metropolis as a humanist history of recognition. What Gilchrist gives us is not the ideology of the imagination but a literary landscape in which moments of epiphanic recognition may occur. The city becomes the configuring force of the imagination, as the poet-artist is not so much canonised in Parnassian idylls as secularised in urban London. London, in the Life of Blake, embodies Ruskin’s holistic vision of architect and labourer, artist and audience.16 In this way, Gilchrist draws an imagined portraiture of a human individual who sees through and is seen through – stands out from – the miasma of modern society. The biographer who sees the author, and the author who is seen by the biographer, are mutual reflections: If, then, I could briefly sketch a faithful portrait of Blake’s biographer, the attempt would need no apology; for if the work be of interest, so is the worker. A biographer necessarily offers himself as the mirror in which his hero is reflected; and we judge all the better

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Radical Blake

The mirror images of William Blake and Alexander Gilchrist reflect a social communion standing apart from society. In outlining the frameworks that enable and facilitate the modern self and human agency, Charles Taylor follows the shift of creative power from ‘the manifestation in the flux of an impersonal Form’ to ‘the model of the self-realization of a subject’.18 In what Taylor calls the ‘visions of the post-Romantic age’, the eternal flux of the social universe is married to the internal creativity of the subjective self. The result is what Taylor, borrowing from James Joyce, calls ‘epiphanic’ art, a critique of mechanistic or ‘vegetative’ views of the city that is also (as in the work of Schiller, Baudelaire and Eliot) hostile to developing industrial capitalist society. In the urge towards recognition that this mirror image implies, Gilchrist’s Life touches upon the social and aesthetic implications of the Modernist epiphany. Gilchrist takes trouble to illustrate the strange isolation of Blake amidst the society of his time. He writes of Blake in the opening of the Life: ‘It is not the least of Blake’s peculiarities that, instead of expressing himself, as most men have been content to do, by help of the prevailing style of his day, he, in this, as in every other matter, preferred to be independent of his fellows’ (Life, p. 3). But Taylor sees this opposition as a double-edged sword, for what is excluded can also be included, and opposition also can be collusion: The opposition of the visionary artist and the blind, or ‘philistine’, ‘bourgeois’ society brings together this vision of an exceptional fate and the hostility to commercial capitalist civilisation. United to a historical narrative of advancing discovery, it can yield the idea or myth of the avant-garde . . . This image expresses the opposition between artist and society – his exclusion. But it also allows for the connection, one might also say the collusion between them . . . Moreover, once this image becomes generally accepted; once it becomes not just the self-image of the misunderstood artist, but the socially accredited stereotype, the collusion between bourgeois and artist finds a language.19 Blake’s radicalism was still ‘fresh’ and untainted for the outsiders of Victorian culture. His image of the self in society was so forceful that it exceeded, and continues to exceed, the neutering image of ‘the

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of the truth and adequacy of the image by a closer acquaintance with the medium through which it comes to us.17

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III: Apocalypse Now: The City of Dreadful Night In James Thomson’s (1832–82) The City of Dreadful Night, poetry is not prophetic, celebrating a society liberated from the phantoms of superstition and religion by scientific progress. Poetry is pessimistic in an apocalyptic realm, focused upon the isolation of the individual who is divorced from both social fraternity and spiritual revelation. The reason of the secular community gives way to the alienation of the secularised city, a landscape of esoteric codes and fragmented voices. James Thomson’s city is not like Gilchrist’s. For Thomson, the city is place of human displacement and alienation. Thomson’s location of Blake in London at the end of his long essay The Poems of William Blake has nothing to do with recognition and everything to do with isolation: He came to the desert of London town Grey miles long; He wandered up and wandered down, Singing a quiet song. He came to the desert of London town, Mirk miles broad; He wandered up and he wandered down, Ever alone with God. There were thousands and thousands of human kind In this desert of brick and stone: But some were deaf and some were blind, And he was there alone. At length the good hour came; he died, As he had lived, alone: He was not missed from the desert wide, Perhaps he was found at the Throne.20 This is the territory of The City of Dreadful Night (1874), Thomson’s most famous and notorious poem. Thomson’s city is populated by those who are alone, broken free from God, yet still oppressed by the

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misunderstood artist’. Yet Blake also spoke to the other side of the self in the city, to the unanchored disenfranchised traveller. James Thomson is the voice of this city.

Radical Blake

metaphysical angst of simply being: ‘There is no God; no Fiend with names divine / Made us and tortures us; if we must pine, / It is to satiate no Being’s gall’ (City of Dreaful Night, p. 36). The city is a critical space for both Thomson’s Blake poem and The City of Dreadful Night. Unlike Gilchrist’s Life, Thomson’s metropolis is not a triumphant symbol of human communion. Instead the metropolis symbolises the superabundance of materialism. The ‘desert of London town’, where William Blake wanders up and down, is a ‘desert of brick and stone’. The human, silent language of The City of Dreadful Night is likewise formed materially. Vibrations are ‘wrought’, and the unarticulated thoughts and passion – the spirit, if you like – of the isolated human voices are breathed into the voiceless language until it is physically overladen, ‘fraught and overfraught’ (City of Dreadful Night, p. 39). Thomson’s city is a place of negative creation. Gone are the crisscrossing of visionary meeting-points, or the traces of artistic production lingering in specified London streets and houses, that we find in Gilchrist’s Life. Instead isolated icons, such as the parody of Blake’s Ancient of Days and Newton, whom Isobel Armstrong has identified as the prophet of a materialist universe,21 dominate. In Gilchrist’s Life, the city is a symbolic configuration of the deeper lying correspondences between human individuals. In Thomson’s Blake poem, the overriding image is of the isolated individual, entrapped within a vacuum of self-knowledge and self-creation, the separation of the self from the communal seems poignantly, yet coldly, represented in the oblique, mute symbolism of humanity turned to stone. In Thomson’s essay, ‘The Poems of William Blake’, what emerges between reason and revelation is the mystical imagination. Thomson plays with humanist interpretations of Blake, while at the same time striving for the epiphanic moment of recognition, of spiritual communion. For Thomson, ironically, secular redemption lies outside the city walls. But Thomson’s metropolitan imagination is a red-herring in considering what happened to Blake’s city, to Blake’s London at the hands of his Victorian interpreters. Thomson’s city is not populated by people but by the too-brittle ghosts of a hard, unforgiving material world. In twentieth-century ‘visionary London fiction’ these ghosts become a postmodern phantasmorgia that pushes against the very bounds of material reality. This fiction is Blake on the rebound, thrown out of his social precision and catapulted into a recapitulation of the visionary.

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The vision of London captured by Gilchrist and Thompson was the metropolis of modernism that suffered the apocalypse of the Blitz, a mythological fire that marked a new beginning for the eternal city, one built around motorways, flyovers and skyscrapers. This is the abode of De Certeau’s practitioner – a voyeur, flâneur and bricoleur, casually poaching narratives of the city to create a sphere of autonomy that is neglected by the ‘strong’. He or she is ‘everyman’ as well as ‘nobody’, sharing much with Blake’s own avatar, Los. Using the stones neglected by the deistic master builders of the city, the terrors, plagues, crimes and diseases caused by their rejection, Los builds Golgonooza, the City of Art, ‘Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London’ (M 6.1, E99). The passionate, apocalyptic poetry of Milton and Jerusalem, inscribed on a city well known to many writers (a myth in its own right), has been particularly appealing in post-war fiction. One psychogeographer who has occupied the marginal territories of that city, both literally and literarily, is J. G. Ballard (1930– ). Born in Shanghai, Ballard and his family were imprisoned in a civilian prison camp following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, an experience described in Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Returning to England in 1946, Ballard pursued a number of careers after a brief stint at Cambridge, publishing his first fantasy novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. One commentator has described Ballard as a ‘perverse contributor’ to the genre of science fiction, located alternately as the writer who seeks a transcendent escape from the modern and, at the same time, in novels such as Crash (1975) and High Rise (1975) is thoroughly immersed in the materiality of the modern world.22 Baudrillard has referred to Ballard’s work as an example of a hyperreality that has abolished both reality and fiction, in which ‘when the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality disappears’.23 As with de Certeau’s practice of everyday life, Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal is significant to a writer such as Ballard – and also Blake – in that it offers a grip on visionary psychogeography that is not simply transcendental: these visions that may overwhelm the imagination are also the maps through which the transformed and transforming imagination may traverse, walking, driving and flying, recreating the city according to desire. It is in his 1981 novel, The Unlimited Dream Company, that Ballard comes closest to William Blake’s hyperreal cosmography, indicating how much his own ironic conception of Shepperton (a suburb of London) draws

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IV: Inner city: the flâneurs

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upon the romantic cartographer of London through the name of the novel’s protagonist: Blake. As in Jarmusch’s Dead Man, that name is the centre of a complex, a world of imagination, mysticism and even terror, but if Jarmusch recreates a loose mythological narrative from the corpus of Blakean prophetic works, Ballard’s novel seems to be much more specific as a reworking of Milton, one that uses a fantastic landscape of London to consider a moral question of selfhood. The Unlimited Dream Company begins with a restatement of a key Ballardesque motif, flight, when the novel’s antihero steals a Cessna from the London airport where he works and lives as a dysfunctional and disillusioned toilet cleaner: the potential prophet of the eternal suffers a schizoid existence, the divided self operating on the borders of class and personality disorders. Returning to the world of unlimited dreams, the first description of Shepperton itself is a mixture of the sacred and profane, mundane and exotic, the juxtaposition of supermarkets and saw-leaved palmettos or giant orchids so beloved of the early European Surrealists, accidents that signify the searching and desiring eye, the projected psyche that is more than a mere tabula rasa or (to update the metaphor from Crash) an emotional cassette. More than these accidental encounters, however, the significance of William Blake’s psychic geography is figured in the first chapter of the novel as the protagonist offers up a vision of the future in prophetic mode: Soon there will be too many deserted towns for them [the helicopters] to count. Along the Thames valley, all over Europe and the Americas, spreading outwards across Asia and Africa, ten thousand similar suburbs will empty as people gather to make their first manpowered flights. (UDC, pp. 9–10) At a very early stage, then, the novel indicates its source, in William Blake as well as Father Thames, as being fairly explicitly related to Milton, where Ololon recalls: Where once the Cherubs of Jerusalem spread to Lambeths Vale Milcahs Pillars shine from Harrow to Hampstead where Hoglah On Highgates heights magnificent Weaves over trembling Thames To Shooters Hill and thence to Blackheath the dark Woof! Loud Loud roll the Weights & Spindles over the whole Earth let down On all sides round to the Four Quarters of the World, eastward on Europe to Euphrates & Hindu, to Nile & back in Clouds Of Death across the Atlantic to America North & South[.] (M 35:10–17, E135)

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This vision in Milton is ominous: it is the spread of the druidic cult of sacrifice and guilt across the entire earth, mankind’s subjection to the spectre of Albion, an act of imperial gnosis that will delineate every part of the earth in a restricted conceptual map stretching to the horizon, Urizenic lines crossed and broken again and again by the foot-soldiers of Christ: Los, Milton and William Blake himself. In Ballard’s novel, Blake’s fantasy is of another pagan religion spreading across the earth, a deliberate misreading that does not oppose the other Blake’s fiercely Protestant Christianity to the death cult of the orthodox Druids, but rather a dangerous and ambivalent cult of life and death to the simulated commodification of this twentiethcentury suburb. Unable to cross the materialist Udan-Adan that is the wasteland between Shepperton and London, Blake seeks a new sovereignty in dreams of flight, dreams of escape, violent eroticism, rape and murder, his avatar a semen-covered Condor like a demented version of Max Ernst’s Loplop. Blake is a sick man who by attempting to rape his adopted mother, Mrs St Cloud, demonstrates that he is locked into a selfhood in which only domination and absorption of the female can overcome the threat of castration indicated by the loss of his first mother. So long as this Oedipal myth is in place, Blake will never recover the female precisely because he wishes, like the satanic Covering Cherub of Milton (9:51, E104), to absorb, cover and thus destroy her. In this new anti-life, the deranged, violent and psychotic Blake considers himself a demonic and stinking messiah, and embarks upon a career marked by a proverb worthy of hell: ‘Whatever happened, I would be true to my obsession’ (UDC, p. 122). If this is the world turned upside down, of vice made virtue, heaven made hell, Blake’s sexuality within it is dark and sinister – he will fuck anything, his perverse desires paedophilic and cannibalistic as well as celebratory. His aim now is to recreate Shepperton, carnal and carnival, as a masturbatory facsimile; wherever he runs, ejaculating, exotic vegetation springs up as his semen lands. As in Milton and Jerusalem, Ballard figures his prophetic hero as building new maps of the city as he careers along, breaking the boundaries of each chartered street. Rather than the New Jerusalem, however, Blake is transforming the town of shopping centres and film studios into a mock Babylon, a druidic jungle in which he worships himself, part of his paranoid delusions. If Blake, then, is a reincarnation of Luvah-Orc, bursting forth as a pagan deity, this return of the repressed is an eruption of terror as well as joy. If he has recreated his four zoas as a family around him, it is as much

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a renaissance of the Manson family as William Blake’s Eternal family, gathered to celebrate a Parousia of the flesh that threatens to be both terrible as well as full of joy. If he has discovered the energy, the excess, the luxury of liberty, it is truly an accursed share, for he cannot hold on to this surplus. The tragedy of Blake is that in his selfhood he attempts to arrogate everything to himself, wishes all to be sacrificed to his will, does not understand that the prolific produce so that their work may be consumed and that sacrifice, potlatch, ‘is the specific manifestation, the meaningful form of luxury’.24 The original Parousia of the gospel of St John is a love feast centred on the self-sacrifice of Christ. The Parousia arranged by Blake is signified by a sacred marriage to his new sister, Miriam, an ominous epithalamium where it seems the female is to be sacrificed to the lust of the male: as they make love, their bodies may merge like angels in Paradise Lost but they also devour each other like the biomorphs of Dali’s Autumn Cannibals. As Blake continues to absorb the inhabitants of Shepperton after this wedding so that he can use their energy to escape, the porches of his body are filled with foreboding as he becomes an anti-Albion: ‘Alone now in the sky, I moved in huge strides across the air. I had become an archangelic being of enormous power, at last strong enough to make my escape . . . I needed their young bodies and spirits to give me strength. They would play forever within me, running across the dark meadows of my heart’ (UDC, pp. 160, 163). Blake, then, is not Albion or his prophet Milton but the shadow of Albion, first among the angels but first also to fall in this dark pastoral of experience. In Ballard’s novel, the world is revisioned, born from the envagination of inner and outer space, and the new space of Shepperton so transformed, Blake believes, is ethically transcendent, a ‘commonwealth of nature’. And yet, the commonwealth unleashed in The Unlimited Dream Company is equally insane as it is liberatory: Blake appears to offer a transcendent synthesis of evil, but actually his repudiation of evil is only half of the thesis ‘Without contraries is no progression’. While Blake’s inversion of Shepperton releases a bizarre carnival of the suburbs in the following chapters, the spiritual apotheosis of its presiding genius is not yet complete: he is, at this point, almost static, undergoing a fragmentation of self that is not actually the denial of selfhood but rather its intensification and duplication, in which he believes that he is omnipotent in this universe, numbered as one of the Elect rather than amongst the Reprobate. Leading a motorcade procession at one point, he assumes the form of a flying windmill

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structure, a ‘grotesque bird costume’ which is ‘an extravagant wickerwork structure with multiple wings’ (UDC, p. 180), like the druidic wicker man of Milton (37:11–12, E137). In Milton, this wicker man is the spectre of Satan, Milton’s perverse shadow, and so Shepperton itself is transformed into a bizarre tropical spectacle by the bloody sun, a sacrificial scene where the denizens of the town dance like the sons and daughters of Albion before the wicker man. Jeanne Moskal has argued that Blake’s ethical thinking changed from the 1790s to 1800s, that his concept of forgiveness increasingly challenged him to move from violation as error to violation as sin.25 Like the poems Milton and Jerusalem, Ballard’s novel is also about sin, the forgiveness of sin and sacrifice. Such forgiveness is not a light task: how, after all, can we forgive a rapist and murderer, violent and sadistic? In Blake’s sickness if his self seems to be disintegrating, submitting to the desires of the libido against those of the super-ego, it still clings to the wreckage of his body in his dreams of flight, for there remains a selfhood that dreams of escape. It is only when Blake recognises his guilt and dies to himself that he can move towards redemption and then go on to reclaim his own corpse, an act of self-knowledge very similar to Milton’s absorption of Satan in Milton: Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering. Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of Eternity Are not such: know thou: I come to Self Annihilation Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee[.] (M 38: 29–36, E139) Throughout the novel, Blake is clad in the tattered fragments of his flying suit and priestly garments provided by Wingate. At the end of the novel, however, he is finally naked, having cast off the ‘rotten rags of memory’ (a phrase cited by Jean Wahl in the catalogue for the Blake exhibition in Paris, 1947, where it caught the attention of Breton26) in preparation for his final task, to raise his emanation, Miriam, his Ololon, from the sleep of death. Miriam is naked with him, a new Eve in the Eden that is Shepperton transfigured, and even if it is the transformation of the film studio and the simulacrum it is also very Blakean. The time-space slip of the intellectual world is contracting

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and expanding, the visionary cosmogony remade by the time in which we live, for space, after Milton, is a ‘vortex’, a friend and a relationship (15:21–35, E109). And yet, as in Milton, this moment of transformation is not the complete apotheosis, for Blake is to rest, like Albion, on his couch of death until the final moment of eternity, deferred to an unknown point in the future. Another writer who has published a number of novels and poems on visionary London that owe a considerable amount to Ballard and even more to Blake (several through his own Albion Village Press which he ran in the 1970s), is Iain Sinclair (1943– ). Sinclair is often attributed with the invention of the term ‘psychogeography’, though the term has its roots in Surrealism and Situationism, particularly the work of Guy Debord.27 As well as sharing strong links (like Ballard) with these particularly European avant-garde movements, Sinclair’s work is also the most clearly post-structuralist or post-modernist of the visionary London novelists, and his wanderings through the ‘Schizo consciousness. City split. City within a city’28 can usefully be interpreted as an act of schizoanalysis, the schizophrenic out for a walk as a superior model to the introverted neurotic lying on a couch.29 In books such as Lights Out for the Territory (1997), Liquid City (1999) and Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z of London Walked over by Iain Sinclair (1999), Sinclair has literally covered such deterritorialisations, mapping out the fragmentary topographies of London with freelance photographer Marc Atkins, depicting obscure, banal, surreal and ridiculous emblems of London as diverse as the Roebuck of Durward Street, the Hardy Tree in St Pancras Cemetery, Lord Archer’s Thames-side apartment and the suburbs of Shepperton.30 As Tobias Hill has remarked, ‘London is not just Sinclair’s subject; it is his religion’ while Ian Thomson has called him ‘our greatest guide to London’.31 The most Blakean of Sinclair’s gazetteers were also amongst the first of his books to be published, Lud Heat: A Book of Dead Hamlets, May 1974 to April 1975 (1975), and Suicide Bridge: A Book of the Furies, A Mythology of the South & East, Autumn 1973 to Spring 1978 (1979), texts which also combine a great deal of the flavour of Ezra Pound, Austin Osman Spare and Allen Ginsberg (who was the subject of his 1971 documentary, The Kodak Mantra Diaries: Allen Ginsberg in London). Lud Heat begins with an account of Hawksmoor’s churches as the basis of a psychogeography of London, triangulations and pentangles of the city as part of a ‘favourable . . . opportunity to rebuild London [as] ye most August Towne in ye world’ (Lud Heat, p. 14). These regions and

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urban terrains, navigated and negotiated by the mental traveller, connect the individual to an occult history of London, a history of literary figures, Roman cemeteries and squalid crimes. The church, as ‘an active place, a high metaphor’, serves as one ‘system of energies’, intensities that must be decoded and, via this process, provide a framework for the delineation of a subject. Blake is immensely important to this territorial subjectivity: thus, for example, the lines from Jerusalem 28.4ff, ‘And every Act a Crime, and Albion the punisher & judge . . . At length he sat on London Stone, & heard Jerusalems voice’, serve as a coda on the ritual humiliation of the suicide and childmurderer John Williams, denouncing revenge (Lud Heat, pp. 25–6). Sinclair desires to overlay a hieratic chart across London and thus uses Blake’s systems of configuration of Albion, such as Los’s naming of cities and attributing parts of the body and country to points of the compass, in an attempt to extrapolate a mysterious code, a ceremonial ritual of the city that will reveal what was previously hidden. Sinclair’s psychogeography, for all its self-referential irony, shares some of the features of Blake’s Jerusalem or later texts such as The Anathemata of David Jones, an attempt to return to the western subject a sense of place. Suicide Bridge, therefore, becomes a grimoire, a collection of spells intended to focus the mind in a form of geomancy, and Sinclair employs Blake’s sons of Albion to figure his magical cosmogony, these Blakean fragments forming the wattle over which the later poet may daub the walls of his universe to resist ‘the Vegetated Mortal Eye’s perverted and single vision’.32 The trilogy begun with Lud Heat and continued in Suicide Bridge was concluded with White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), interleaving the stories of Sinclair and other down-at-heel bookdealers with what The Guardian described as ‘a spiritual inquest or séance’ into the Whitechapel Ripper murders. Although Blake is less significant in this novel compared to the earlier poems and essays, nonetheless ‘London’ is particularly important in providing an understanding of the seedy and diseased guts of the city, the poem ‘drumming like a madness’, tracing the conflict of good and evil figured on the bodies of midnight harlots and their murderous tricks. Marking the careers of James Hinton and Sir William Gull, Sinclair is a desultory private dick, recreating the scene of their crimes amidst ‘Hell’s hinges’ and ‘Whitechapel’s henges’. The novel is a despicable case study of psychopathology, gloating in the work of these murderers ‘appointed time’s abortionist’ (White Chappell, p. 127); yet if White Chapell appears to sink in the carnage of the Great Wen, a long letter from

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Radical Blake

we find of course a Blakeian stance towards good and evil: very much a Marriage but not of the Christian-like entities: more the creativities of the new sciences giving birth to phantoms more fit for our times . . . Great evil is a grand conception by our common terms: that is its allure. In act, it is the implosion into nothing, whereas good is the simultaneous fructification of nothing. They are utterly interdependent dynamically and yet good is the sovereign just as ‘all we have’ is sovereign over ‘all that we shall not have’. Unless there is the gradient of value – unless the very coincidence of contraries in the Blakeian sense has itself this gradient, as I think Blake saw – I can explain neither our actions nor our words. (White Chappell, pp. 159, 162) Evil, then, Oliver understands more in the terms of a Bataillean general economy, a necessary expenditure, a sacrifice: but evil is not the ground of sovereignty. Rather, evil as that surplus that gives itself up, that surrenders itself into nothing, must be the ‘fructification’ of nothing to be truly sovereign. It is the very luxury of life that spills over into the superfluity of death. Sinclair’s argument, then, tenuous as it often appears, is that such a search into London’s heart of darkness is a necessary contrary to its life and growth. As White Chappell completed one trilogy, so it set in motion another: in Downriver (1991), seething, energetic, corrupt life on the Thames is reflected from the multifarious windows of Canary Wharf or emerges from the dark catacombs and hidden places of the East End. The novel’s ostensible purpose, to trace the remnants and wreckage of the citizens of the river in the wake of ‘Britain’s Widow’, Thatcher, is frankly lost in its phantasmagoric meanderings. Rather, the river Sinclair and his fictional film crew travel down is Acheron, Lethe and Styx, tributaries of the mythic underworld of Father Thames that demonstrates some of Sinclair’s psychogeographical writing at its finest. It is difficult to pinpoint any area or figure that is central to the novel; instead, Sinclair concentrates on peripheral and liminal points of intensity that cross like psychic ley lines in an occult cartography. Significant locales are at once secret and known (or knowable): hidden from the gaze of the tourist, the diurnal consumer, they are also sites of local mythologies and literary accretions. For example, of the church of St John’s on Scandrett Street, once inhabited by marmosets

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Douglas Oliver, cited in the final part of the novel offers a potentially redemptory trajectory:

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brought ashore by sailors, the narrator comments that this is a ‘temenos remaining sacred because we do not need to visit it. It is there, and that is enough’ (Downriver, p. 33). Similarly, this psychogeography is a reading of runes, a paranoid critical decoding, or overcoding, of the unconscious daily practices of routes and habitations made by millions of people daily across train lines, roads, footpaths, the underground. Finally, as part of a visionary cosmography, the landscape must be marked by these mythographical, literary and psychic lines in order to assume a new significance: ‘I knew what the Isle of Dogs meant. An unlucky place, anathematized by Pepys; and identified by William Blake with the Dogs of Leutha, whose only purpose was to destroy their masters’ (Downriver, p. 269). Citing Jerusalem 45.15–16, Sinclair uses Blake in particular to orient his depiction of London, here, for example, to compare the construction of Canary Wharf to that of the Wicker Man in Jerusalem. Another example of Sinclair’s mythographical psychogeography marked out in Radon Daughters (1994) uses Swedenborg to orient fragments of London, a geometry of London mapped out as the New Church, Jerusalem, with its ‘towers, lanterns, octagons, domes, urns’ or as a series of hells that ‘present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after conflagrations, in which infernal spirits dwell and hide themselves’.33 While Sinclair seeks the novelty of Swedenborg rather than Blake as his guide through the paradoxical city, his reading of London as heaven and hell, Jerusalem and Babylon shares a great deal with Swedenborg’s most famous commentator whose (brief) membership of the New Jerusalem Church in 1788–9 was the seed of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake, then, provides an important model for novels such as Downriver, one used by Sinclair in conjunction with obscure but evocative contemporary subjects of his later works, nodes in his schizogeography such as the figure of David Rodinsky, a ‘Polish Jew from Plotsk or Lublin or wherever’ who inhabited the Princelet Street synagogue and disappeared one day in the 1960s, having achieved his own ‘Great Work’ (Downriver, pp. 134–5). And yet, there is an important distinction between Blake’s cartography of the hell of a London that devours its children in the wars against France, and Sinclair’s repetitive mapping of a personalised and often depoliticised mythology. In Downriver, without the anger of a Blake faced with transportation for his radical views, Sinclair’s psychogeography takes refuge in a debilitating self-mockery:

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We fell rapidly into our invariable order of battle. We tramped the chalk from Winchester to Salisbury, and on – via the UFO-haunted declivities of Warminster – to the serpentine water levels of Glastonbury. We have bumbled over the Black Mountains in wet mist, seeking out bogus abbeys or remote pulpits where Giraldus Cambrensis preached the Third Crusade. We have cruised the South Downs on Blakean awaydays, and crawled on our hands and knees over the sharpened limestone combs of Gower. The routine never changes. (Downriver, p. 385) In the final part of the novel the narrator, Joblard, mocks the aspirations of a fictionalised Sinclair: the routine never changes because Sinclair never really finds anything. Starting out from a capricious point on the map, with no real purpose to these excursions, mythography turns into mystification. One suspects that for Sinclair all significances are ultimately arbitrary, and the Blakean allusion is suitably ironic: by the 1990s, Sinclair is not so much mapping the lower reaches of Ulro or Udan-Adan to define the error he must fight but tracking back and forth across countless territories as part of a schizoanalytic process that may or may not promise liberty. The psychogeography of London has recently been taken to its logical conclusion in Peter Ackroyd’s (1949– ) London, The Biography, in which he remarks, ‘Whether we consider London as a young man refreshed and risen from sleep . . . or whether we lament its condition as a deformed giant, we must regard it as a human shape with its own laws of life and growth.’34 In nearly every work of fiction since The Great Fire of London (1982), notably Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1994), as well as in his biographies of Dickens (1990) and Blake (1995) and, of course, London, Ackroyd has charted the rivers and streets of a London that, in the words of Heine, ‘defies the imagination and breaks the heart’.35 Hawksmoor and The House of Doctor Dee are probably the most interesting novels in relation to Blake, the former tracing the work of Nicholas Dyer, a satanic architect who constructs a dark world of superstition against the temples of reason envisaged by Sir Christopher Wren, while in the later novel Matthew Palmer explores the sexual magic of a house he has inherited in Clerkenwell, reputed to belong to the black magician. Blake has frequently featured in Ackroyd’s work, taking a bit part in London and, of course, playing a major role as visionary cartographer of the city in his biography on the artist. As Ackroyd comments, ‘infinite London can be seen only within mundane London’,36 and if the memoir is, like so many similar

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works, overly dependent on Blake’s two greatest biographers, Alexander Gilchrist and G. E. Bentley, nonetheless it is a useful guide to placing the mystic’s feet firmly on the terra firma of London. Ackroyd, like Sinclair, is too often obsessed with an antiquarian display of knowledge that tends to be oblivious to the real human interest of the city. If these writers capture Blake’s fascination with the history of his city, their political and social engagement is frequently lacking or rings a false note. Michael Moorcock (1939– ), in Mother London (1988), offers a visionary history of late-twentieth century London, her myths and legends brought to life through the lives of three Londoners in a way that is frequently more vivid than the scratchings of Sinclair and Ackroyd, returning the flâneur to the beat of the streetwalker. Moorcock provides the social precision of Blake’s ‘London’ that these two have discarded. The lives of his three extraordinary mythographers, David Mummery, Josef Kiss and Mary Gasalee, weave with those of thousands of other ordinary Londoners, through the Blitz, the swinging sixties and Kensington Summer Festival, the seventies police riots in Notting Hill and the ‘gentrification’ of Clapham and Battersea under the Tories. The novel tracks back and forth between 1940 and the late eighties, its structure a steady inhalation and exhalation that inspires the daily chronicles of its characters amidst the larger biography of London herself. The novel has been hailed as Moorcock’s most mature work and, as Iain Sinclair has remarked, ‘Between them, for five or ten years, [Moorcock and Ackroyd] kept the London novel afloat. Story-tellers who didn’t need to dispute the bones of the city.’37 If Mother London lacks the audacity of Sinclair’s (and, for that matter, Ballard’s) imaginary fireworks in depicting the history and cartography of the city, it resolutely focuses on the small ways in which an imaginative perception of London transforms the lives of the working and lower middle classes of the metropolis. Sometimes overtly politicised, at all times is Moorcock concerned with a social, political, economic and psychological cityscape that is not merely backdrop but principal player and environment. This is London as Jerusalem and Babylon and, unsurprisingly, the writings of another Londoner who envisaged the city in similar terms echo the streets of Mother London. Literary intimations of the capital are not, obviously, restricted to Blake (in one amusing scene the discussion centres on the comparative virtues of Shakespeare, Dickens, Browning and Eliot for generating revenue from Japanese tourists fascinated by a heritage they barely understand unless it takes in a fish and chip shop), but from the first

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page when Mummery calms himself with the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, Blake’s vision persists throughout the pages of Mother London. His words are the elegy at the funeral of Ben French, the reminder that another world is found not in heaven but the streets and buildings of London herself: ‘The files from Islington to Marylebone, to Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold; and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.’38 Ben’s lover speaks of giving him ‘back to Blake’, painting him without fear of banality or selfishness, of celebrating his life by being ‘vulgar as Blake had been vulgar’ (Mother London, p. 130). Vulgaris, of the people or among the multitude; this is another aspect of Blake’s significance to these various psychic cartographers of London, that he straddled multiple worlds in many ways, not only the visionary and mundane but also indicated the ways that the values of a ‘high’ culture stolen by the metropolitan élite could also be those of the vulgar little people who refused to know their place, or rather knew that their place was London as a transforming locus marked by personal, familial and communal mythologies. David Mummery observes some of these myths at the end of the novel (King Lud buried under St Paul’s, Dick Turpin riding across Hampstead Heath and the carnage of the Balham Tube Disaster), while specifically Blakean images litter the book. Josef Kiss, pondering a fight against mental illness that owes much to the very Blakean therapist, R. D. Laing, asks: ‘What are those golden builders doing near mournful everweeping Paddington? Standing above the mighty ruin where Satan the first victory won, where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree’ (Mother London, p. 353). Unlike Sinclair and Ackroyd, then, Moorcock moves beyond a merely antiquarian interest in London to one concerned with the lives of its citizens – for, to paraphrase Blake, ‘cities are women, mothers of multitudes’. As such, the visionary London novel has frequently served in the twentieth century as a vehicle for prophecy. While drawing on Surrealism, Situationism and Romanticism there have been, as Sinclair observes, few better guides for the visionary mode than William Blake: The only point I would argue is the prophetic ‘failure’ of Blake . . . Prophecy has nothing to do with ‘accurately’ casting future events, like some speedy weather-man. It has to do with causing future events by the power of invocation (or necessary sacrifice). Blake’s razor-clawed chickens will be coming home to roost for aeons and were already doing so before he was imagined in Soho.39

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I: United Britons and united nations The century of Blake’s birth was that during which nationalism came to be regarded generally as the greatest determining factor of modern history, when Christian and Renaissance universal republics were replaced by amor patriae. National feeling was not something new in Europe, particularly during times of conflict, but such activities as the nationalisation of education, the organisation of political loyalties and cultivation of ‘mother’ tongues led to a demand for participation in the nation state that was to have revolutionary consequences by the end of the 1780s, what Hobsbawm called the ‘dual revolution’ of politics and economics.1 Modern Britain, formed by the union of England and Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was tested by the events in France, war both threatening and bracing a nation that prided itself on commerce and industrialisation. This, the spectre of British nationalism that emerged from the ashes of the French Revolution, was the shadow of Blake’s Albion. Englishmen such as Locke were at the forefront of the theorisation of this new nationalism, based upon a communal sovereignty. Fundamental to Locke’s political theory was the protection of individual property against violence and the arbitrary power of absolutism, to which purpose mankind, born in a state of nature, willingly subjugated certain individual liberties to form a commonwealth. While sovereign power ultimately resided with the people in Locke’s political theory, he did not make entirely explicit where immediate power lay. In practice, Locke appeared to favour a mixed constitution in which the legislative was an elected body and the executive was a single figure, usually a monarch. Yet it was not long before the sovereign will 67

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of the people was elevated much more radically. Rousseau had prepared the French for a popular form of nationalism by stressing the co-operation of citizens in the formation of that general will, but it was perhaps Tom Paine who most paved the way for an international radical sphere that would not restrict participation to gentlemen of property. Rather than simply dividing executive and legislative branches of power, Paine famously in Common Sense (1776) divided the blessings of society from the (sometimes necessary) evils of government, that latter ‘the badge of lost innocence’.2 As Linda Colley has observed, while one of the reasons that Paine later wrote Rights of Man (1791) was ‘to shatter the notion that liberty was uniquely first an English, then a British growth’, it is also evident that ‘even his more radical readers were reluctant to accept this particular part of his polemic. Too much of their own self-image was bound up with the belief that Britain was historically and in essence the freest nation in the world.’3 One of the reasons for Paine’s radical distrust of nationalism was that the honest commonwealth of trade had, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, slowly become a military imperium, what Simon Schama has recently referred to as the ‘wrong empire’.4 Historians such as Schama and Asa Briggs have observed how Pitt, through the restoration of the national finances, the implementation of administrative reforms, the rehabilitation of Britain in Europe, and reorganisation of the country’s Imperial commitments, had enhanced British national self-interest during the 1780s.5 The outbreak of war with France and the sense of British independence that this fostered over the next two decades, at least amongst the English élite, merely strengthened a national pride that had been recuperated in the ten years following the end of the disastrous American war. This pride, however, was polluted by two new constituents: xenophobia and intolerance. In Roy Porter’s words, the relaxed, tolerant optimism of the centenary celebrations of the Glorious Revolution that revered that institution as a broad church ‘did not long survive the outbreak of the French Revolution’.6 At the time that Blake was writing, therefore, the nation state was undergoing a transformation, becoming much more imperialist in western Europe at the same time that radicals in France, Britain and America saw nationalism as a means to galvanise the wider populace. David Erdman was the first scholar to draw significant attention to Blake’s relationship with national politics during the 1780s, particularly how ‘dissident’ supporters of the Revolution and the chancer

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Wilkes could portray themselves more patriotic than the crown.7 Other writers such as Jon Mee, David Worrall and E. P. Thompson have traced the relation of this ‘patriotism’ to radical and dissenting organisations that had their roots in the English civil wars and flourished, if only briefly, at the beginning of the French Revolution.8 What is clear, however, from Blake’s early writings is that if he was critical of England as an imperial power he also saw national sovereignty – particularly as the expression of the sovereignty of the general will of the people – as a radicalised version of Locke’s liberal source of power. While it is possible to read poems such as America and Europe, with their imprecations against ‘Albions Angel’, as anti-nationalistic, it is the royal prerogative against which he rages: this is the source of tyranny. Nationhood, by contrast, is the fountain of legitimacy. This is clearest in his unpublished poem, The French Revolution, in which the term ‘nation’ is repeated more often than in any work before Jerusalem. The word is an explicit invocation of the sovereign will of the people, to which the whims of monarchs must be subordinated, as when Mirabeau calls for Lafayette as ‘the General of the Nation’ (page 14, E298) or Burgundy declaims: Then the king will disband This war-breathing army; but if it refuse, let the Nation’s Assembly thence learn, That this army of terrors, that prison of horrors, are the bands of the murmuring kingdom. (The French Revolution 13, E297) The reason why Blake becomes such a powerful nationalist poet in later poems, particularly Jerusalem, is because he distinguishes the inclusive sovereign will of the people (how different to the eighteenthcentury mob or twentieth-century masses) from the exclusive, solitary will of the crown. Yet the recuperation of the nation is dangerously fraught: as Susan Matthews remarks, ‘Blake’s myth, like the visual imagery of nationalist art of his time, continually moves out from nation to world in a process which disturbingly echoes not only the revolutionary universalism of the 1790s but also the language of empire.’9 Paranoia, fear and triumph in the defeat of one’s enemy were the motifs of British nationalism in the early years of the nineteenth century, motifs that form the dark backdrop to Blake’s depiction of the nation Albion in his later poems, Milton and Jerusalem. And yet, despite

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the despair, despite his accusations of sin and pride against a fatherland that sacrificed its children for its own glory, Blake did not reject the nation as the embodiment of the popular sovereign will. Albion, in the poem Jerusalem, has withdrawn from his peers, become fortress Britain in response to the Napoleonic Continental System. Rather than a United Kingdom, however, Blake calls for United Britons, an echo, observes Worrall, of the radical movement of United Irishmen in the 1790s: What do I see? The Briton Saxon Roman Norman amalgamating In my Furnaces into One Nation the English: & taking refuge In the Loins of Albion. The Canaanite united with the fugitive Hebrew, whom she divided into Twelve, & sold into Egypt Then scatterd the Egyptian & Hebrew to the four Winds! This sinful Nation Created in our Furnaces & Looms is Albion (J 92.1–6, E252) The symbol of the United Briton is also joined in Jerusalem to that of the One Man, of the Universal, which unites all and is the symbol that links William Blake to both the heritage of theological mysticism and to the modern sovereignty of the secular self: We live as One Man, for contracting our infinite senses We behold as multitude; or expanding: we behold as one, As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him, Live in perfect harmony in Eden the land of life, (J 34[38]:17–20, E180) Blake never loses the ‘we’ of social communion. Even in the state of contracted sense, the sphere of individual being, perception is outgoing, able to become part of a wider societal impulse. David Punter has coined the term ‘Universal Individual’ in relation to Blake’s dialectics of subject and object, self and society.10 This transpersonal identity finds the humanist ‘soul’ in the immediacy of society. The unity of the One Man resides in ‘Jesus the Christ’ in Jerusalem, but Christianity did not have an exclusive purchase on the ideal of the ‘Universal Family’. All along the watchtower of nineteenth-century radical thought, Blake’s ideal reflects a Utopia of social organisation. Nicholas Williams sees the move from Milton to Jerusalem, from ‘an individualistic psychological mode to a social communicative mode

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II: Republic and commune When Blake’s life and work were re-awakened in the mid-nineteenth century by Gilchrist, Rossetti et al., Paine’s dictum of humanistic liberty without boundaries – the retort to Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Where there is freedom, there is my country’ of ‘Where there is none, there is mine’ – was already tainted. The Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality were faced with new barriers, both geo-politically, in the arising nations and empires of an industrialising, post-Revolutionary West, and economically in the hard currency of the individualistic capitalist market place. By the 1860s and the landmark publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake, individual and national liberty had a very different hue: the Enlightenment rainbow was unravelling itself, largely due to an unresolved tension between individual liberty transmuted into selfinterest and communal good transmuted into state sovereignty. In 1863 Nationalism continued to bite at the mother breast of Republicanism: the symbol of Enlightenment self-determination, the American republic, was tearing itself apart in Civil War, the confederates having suffered their first real defeats at Vicksberg and Gettysburg in July 1863. The 1860s and 1870s were to be decades when ‘a poetry of the people’ found no easy articulations nor offered no sentimental consolations, where ‘with the economic problems of class and colonialism becoming ever more complex, an uneasy fascination with power relations marks the latter part of the century’.12 Blake acted as a poetic power broker between post-Enlightenment near-socialism and post-Evolutionary near-secularism. Blake’s Albion is a strange island in Victorian Britain. Albion is both nation and individual for Blake. The sovereignty of nineteenth-century identity became less and less invested in religious configurations, such as the soul, and more and more isolated in the consciousness of the individual. Looking inwards from the secular culture of the nineteenth century to the experience of the individual, understanding and being are defined by a constant struggle for synthesis between self and society, between the psychological individual and imagined communities. The urge to encompass the human as both constituent of a body politic and as an individual essence is an urgent

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for the depiction of utopian change’, as the literary parallel of Robert Owen’s attempt to build a communal utopia at New Lanark between 1800 and 1829.11

Radical Blake

and haunting presence in nineteenth-century literature. Later nineteenth-century literature is constantly returning to expressions of the dichotomy between a social universe operating by structural laws and the compression of the individual into an alienated, isolated self. This is the underlying dread expressed in the alienation and fragmentation of James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night. This is the biting irony in W. E. A. Adams’ Memoirs of a Social Atom: ‘I call myself a Social Atom – a small speck on the surface of society. The term indicates my insignificance.’13 The difference between Blake’s celebration of the communal self in Jerusalem, and the troubled, problematic individualism of later nineteenth-century works occurs because the human horizon has been transformed by the 1860s. As Charles Taylor puts it, the embodiment of self had undergone a ‘subjectivist twist’.14 One such twist was to imbue the national socius with a dash of mysticism and pseudo-science, as in James John Garth Wilkinson (1812–99) The Human Body (1851). This once-popular book of physiology is a stew of ill-digested ego and religious bigotry. ‘The Divine Image’ from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, which Wilkinson calls The Human Form, is reproduced, immediately preceded by George Herbert’s ‘On Man’. Both poems are used as epithets to Wilkinson’s drawing together of human physiology and divine correspondence in which ‘minds, souls, societies, nations’ assume the human form (Human Body, p. 374). This may all seem initially innocuous enough, but Wilkinson’s attempt to avoid the political or social sphere whilst swiftly moving on to squeeze the last drop of spiritual goo out of the human form divine bucks the issue. Fifty-odd pages prior to his declaration of the Divine body-form, Wilkinson is cheerily engaged with ‘the geographical or regional consideration of the skin’ (Human Body, p. 313). Starting with the false premise that ‘true skin is white’ (Human Body, p. 313), Wilkinson rambles through bilious sub-spiritual bunkum. His writing is hard to stomach but is a lesson in the dangers of what in modern parlance has become known as ‘inter-disciplinary’ discourse, as when he ascribes an essentialist and hierarchical purpose to racial and class distinctions, so that: ‘The colored parts [of non-European races] in each instance appear to be a distinct tribal organization, required in different shades and proportions by various races under the same sky; for there is nothing to make it probable that the English skin for instance, place it under the line for a number of generations, would assume the jettiness of the Negro, or the tawny shade of the Malay’ (Human Body, pp. 314–15). Likewise: ‘Passing from the geography to the hierarchy of the

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skin, from its planetary to its social developments, we find that the skins of the extreme classes of society differ as much as the classes themselves . . . in a word, every circumstance connected with the lower classes, tends to produce and perpetuate. Their complexions are those of the brawny limbs of society,’ (Human Body, p. 316). Class, differentiation and hierarchy are key in the warm-up to Wilkinson’s Über-man/nation socio-political configuration: Again, a fourth view is, that the world is quasi-human, or indeed superhuman, in its parts and in the whole. On this score, the planet unites with man; the head races inhabit its head countries; in short, the human organs reappear on the surface of the globe, and account as well as they may for its relations and distributions, and for its housing of special nations. (Human Body, p. 365) This rag-tag bag of racist imperialism and mystical mumbo shows Wilkinson as nothing better than a national spiritualist. The pity is that Blake’s truly complex simplicity is thoroughly sold-out by association. In the ‘Divine Image’, Blake had written: Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress Prays to the human form divine, Love Mercy Pity Peace (E11) The inquiring universalism of such lines is suffocated by the cloying Eurocentric condescension of Wilkinson’s religio-racist discourse. This takes on connotations that are more serious when Wilkinson’s religioracist ideology seeps into an external socio-political arena. Wilkinson’s book, The African and the True Christian Religion, His Magna Carta; a study in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg is a fait accompli of twisted nationalism. Wilkinson suggests, with all the rampant naïveté of a religious ideologue, that the solution to racial oppression in the United States of America would be for Afro-Americans to return to Africa as members of the Swedenborgian Church.15 By making Swedenborg speak for them, African voices and African nationalism are literally and metaphorically stitched up in Wilkinson’s ‘archive book’. This is not a discourse of Blakean Universalism but of posited and persistent difference – religious nationalism in full swing. However, Wilkinson’s reprehensible appropriation of Blake stands

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alone. Late nineteenth-century commentary on Blake, particularly in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne and William James Linton, reveals one of the most enduring and powerful Enlightenment echoes, the Universal Republic. The freethinker George William Foote’s 1875 article on Blake in the National Reformer is a neat addendum to sunken Republican and revolutionary hopes post-1870, and represents the opposite side of the coin to Wilkinson’s politics: ‘Indeed, his [Blake’s] Republicanism was more pronounced and defiant than that of the practical un-visionary politicians who met at Johnson’s [the bookseller] . . . Readers will be pleased to, hear that mystical Blake saved practical Paine’s life in all probability.’ It is the mystical rather than the militant tendency in Blake that makes him a good Republican, the apocryphal saviour of Paine’s life. But the pragmatics of pronouncement and defiance still need a place. The cod-mysticism of New Age Nations is not enough. James Thomson, the poet laureate of secularism, was not immune to this cod-mysticism of misplaced Swedenborgianism. However, Thomson is miles apart from Wilkinson’s solipsistic mysticism. Whereas Wilkinson toys with Blake as a poet of the Spirit Nation, Thomson firmly puts the case that Blake is a national poet whose ‘Chant belongs to the whole British people’ (Blake/Shelley, p. 110). For Thomson, Blake’s works have a status within the material history of the nation. Secondly, that material history belongs to the public, over and above the private concerns and opinions of any one individual. Blake’s works are relics that belong to a public archive of knowledge and poetry and material symbols of a poet’s thoughts, which are welded into a nation’s communal spirit. Blake’s work and poetry is part of a mystical genealogy and to break apart the work is to break the spiritual chain of a people’s history: Again forty years come and go ere a few admirers worthy of him they admire can venture with much diffidence (surely but too wellfounded!) to bespeak the favour of his people for this Song, in which he has added a great and burning light to their illustrations the most splendid, and for other songs in which he has given them the seed whose harvest is likely to be the wealth and spiritual subsistence of generations yet unborn. (Blake/Shelley, p. 111). Purple the prose may be, but Thomson is creating a germinal space for Blake’s national lyricism, a lyricism that can be left to its own devices to flourish.

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Swinburne was more pro-active in ‘building up Jerusalem’. For Swinburne, Blake was a bard of the Universal Republic, and the form of the lyric was part and parcel of that Republic, something that could not be left to chance, as he remarked in a letter to William Michael Rossetti in which poetical practice is combined with political intent: ‘In these books the especial note of singularity, and to me the special point of attraction, is the unity and indivisibility (as of the Republic itself) of the two forms into which as into a single mould the author has cast his thought, and fused together throughout the whole work types used to express and set it forth.’16 Swinburne uses the material integrity of the Blakean text to illuminate the political ideal of nineteenth-century Republicanism. He is not necessarily telling the whole truth, but unsticking the selfishness of Blake’s Prophetic books. The business of nineteenth-century revolution is carried out through interpretative evolution concerning an unique form. The composite art of Blake’s work and thought becomes a reflection of the Universal Republic as envisioned by nineteenth-century radicals. Almost alone among the Pre-Raphaelite revivalists, Swinburne explicitly calls for the reproduction of Blake in a form conducive to the spiritual and democratic, to the Universal Republic: But I abstain, (for once) in print, because I want to see what I hope may yet be achieved by subscription – a complete or quasi-complete edition of Blake’s works; photographs thoroughly well done of his chief drawings; artistic engravings of his chief pictures or ‘frescos,’ to use his own term; and a full though critical edition of his writings. Then only one of the greatest of Englishmen – a poet when there was no poet – an artist when there was hardly an artist – a republican under the very shadow of the gibbet which George III (who flung Blake’s drawings away when they were laid before his miserable blind eyes) had prepared for all such men – a lover of America, of freedom, and of France from the first to the last – the one single man in London who dared go out with the red cap on his head (not through bravado, but simply as a matter of principle) – then only, I say, will this great man be understood. It seems to me that Walt Whitman belongs to the same race of men; and if so, I am certain he will understand the mystical heterodox ‘prophecies’ of Blake which the publishers of his biography and remains were afraid of, but which I intend to bring before the world.17 This is an important letter on several counts. It is prima facie evidence

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of the highly politicised nature of reproducing Blake in the mid-nineteenth century. Swinburne’s emphasis on the Republican Blake is part of a tradition he sees continued in the works of Walt Whitman. Swinburne’s comments, uniting the two against the orthodoxy of their respective ages, confirm Blake’s utter relevance to nineteenth-century literary and political radicalism. The self is thrown open to the Universal Republic in Swinburne’s Critical Essay, but really we are still shadow boxing. Swinburne had plenty of fire but very little bite. He was never really politically active or pragmatic, whether as Nationalist or Republican. William James Linton is another matter and it shows. Whereas Swinburne worshipped Mazzini as a Romantic figure of Republican verve, falling at his feet and reading poetry to him, Linton got Mazzini out of a sticky situation when he was a primary agent in the Graham affair, Victorian England’s own Watergate. As well as being a supporter and friend of Mazzini (Radical Artisan, pp. 52 ff), he was an advocate of both English and Irish Republicanism being the ‘only Englishman regularly to write for the Nation, the organ of Young Ireland’ (Radical Artisan, p. 67). Linton sees the self as a potentially anarchical force, mutating into the tyranny of dictatorship and Nationalism, when it strives only for individual freedom: ‘When the man would be free, it was for his own sake only . . . the freest kept slaves.’18 Linton articulates the danger of the secular individual: anarchy of self, unbalanced by a fractured and fragmented society, becomes a Urizenic force of nationalistic entrenchment and political despotism. However, this does not mean that Linton rejects the sovereignty of the individual in favour of a fatalistic reliance on a puppeteer God. Instead he suggests a marriage of Chuch and State that is based on social organisation, rather than blind subservience, the altar of worship being the political good rather than the theological command. Linton’s closing remarks to The Religion of Organization are shorn of mystical intonation, and the political theory espoused is based on social reality rather than mystical conundrums. The Universal Republic reaches an apex of articulation: One heart-word spoken by you would rend off the fetters of the kings and enable the freed nations to begin the universal republic. With us, with you, the new religion is political organization on a religious basis, a true marriage of Church and State. The first step toward that is a party bound together by the desire to learn what republicanism really is, how to make that the law of the land, and

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Swinburne and Linton plead for freedom, for the volition of the self, but also for the communion of spirit. They both see these as prerequisites of the universal Republic, the final and complete union of humanity, regardless of Nation. But the fallout from what was to be ultimately a failed ideal is different for each. In his reception of Blake and Whitman, Swinburne was in some senses turning his social and political frustrations into the intimacy of artistic congeniality, communing man to man. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees the English reception of Whitman as such an unleashing of political comradeship.20 Swinburne suggests that a mystical communion would exist between Blake and Whitman as a shared language of interpretation, allowing Whitman to ‘understand the mystical heterodox “prophecies” of Blake’. The universal Republic begins to fade into a cult of mystic and mythic comradeship. There was a different expression of comradeship in Linton. The 1870s saw a consolidation of Blake’s ongoing influence upon Linton who, during the 1870s, produced Broadway Ballads and Famine, both of which contain work inspired by Blake. During this period Linton was trying to work through the relationship of communitarianism and individualism, the state and the republic. Following the fall of the Paris Commune, the fine balance of liberty obtained by violent sacrifice seemed not to produce the dreamed-of universal republic. Instead the sovereignty of the individual was translated into a politics of sovereign states. Individual republics and human individuals stood alone and were crushed mercilessly by the physical force of the state, and the ideological force of a reactionary and conservative media: The Commune is a failure. The men who attempted it are condemned. The great humanitarian question set by those ‘Communists’, the question of the abolition of misery through the organization of labor, is not to be solved that way. Is the Reaction therefore sure? This wager of battle has given no verdict for or against the issue. It says no more than this: Not by a single city, nor by a separate nation, shall that remodelling of society be accomplished through which the hire of the laborer shall no longer be

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how to help our brothers throughout the world. When you have such a party, the party of the full direct sovereignty of the people, the party of organization of religious duty, of dutifulness at home and abroad, no matter where, you will have founded the first Church of the Future.19

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kept back by fraud. The weakness of the Paris Commune lay in its isolation. Yet all that Blood has not been poured out in vain. One gain cannot escape us. While we note mistaken policy, let us not the less take this to heart: that once again these men of Paris have given to the world the ever-needed example of heroic daring and devotedness, have laid one more broad stone (though it be their own grave-stone) of that glorious causeway over which Humanity, defeated or triumphant, marches firmly to the Republic.21 It is at this point, in the retrospect of failed revolution and the blood of torn hopes, that the political radicalism of ‘mystical Blake’ re-asserts its presence in Linton’s transmission of Blake’s works. Linton rewrites the Republic through Blake. Broadway Ballads, composed to commemorate the centenary of the American Republic under Linton’s pseudonym, Abel Reid, is a work that from the first pages seems to be touched by the spirit of Blake.22 At the same time, the wound of the Paris commune had not yet closed for Linton, but the pain had turned into a reflective energy that produces what could be consider one of Linton’s finest poetic moments in ‘From A Lamp Iron’: I may add only this, which does not wrench The gist of his own words, here writ, in French. He fought in Paris for the Commune, fled Only when Hope was slain with Delescluze; In exile had not where to lay his head – Vagabond – Christ-like. They could not refuse A grave when he was dead (Broadway Ballads, p. 89) This is a poem where the Linton sentimentality is truly reborn as pathos, the judgement of each line holding the narrative of the poem in suspense, and thus painfully, slowly and without undue exclamation, teasing out the threads of tense alienation. It is the dialogue between the present and the absent, the speaking and the silent, which is the true beauty of the poem. This poem seems to be the living embodiment of the dialogic. The moment of crossing subjectivities is at its most poignant in the translation of the note, the use of the third person holding the narrator in the dialogue but the listener distant still, a distance emphasised in the cold reality of the end lines: ‘They could not refuse / A grave when he was dead’. Linton’s Republicanism is tinged by a certain fatalism, evident in

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Linton’s re-inscribing of the visual harbingers of Blake’s apocalypse in Europe. The title page of Famine: a Masque23 is a synthesis of conventional typographic reproduction (Linton’s masque, Famine) and the design for Plate 9 of Blake’s Europe. This synthesis forms one of the most spectacular examples of radical textual transmission in the history of Blake in the nineteenth century. Smith suggests that the beauty of the figures, together with Linton’s apocalyptic verse, points towards Linton’s interest in the fragile and fatal balance of a Lamennaisian universe.24 The graphics and the text are suitably apocalyptic: Across the huddled clouds where Famine standeth See the Rainbow in its double splendour! The Storm’s sign of surrender Unto him who Gloom and Light commandeth. Who is it that demandeth sight beyond? So! – Look thou forth, and see The Doom of the Risen Workman in the wide realms of the Free! (Famine, p. 17) What possible volition can the individual have against such arraigned forces of doom? Death would seem to be the door opened by a malevolent God or a detached nature. Linton’s reproduction of the ‘Death’s Door’ design as the frontispiece to William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, seems to reflect this final fate of the believer and the atheist alike. The poem opens with a soporific communion with nature, where beauty: . . . glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware.25 William Cullen Bryant’s poem seems not to be so much concerned with consciousness raising, as the hypnotising of consciousness. But we should not align Linton with this sentiment. Neither Linton nor Blake would abide by this, despite the use of Blake’s works by Linton in contexts that suggest human fragility and loss. The very presence of Blake’s visual art in such innovative and unexpected settings is a silent testimony to artisan volition and the political power of the made (and re-made) symbol. Linton’s ‘Blakes’ are not dead but resurrected: they

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are the ‘choir invisible’ of hope beyond nation. Blake and Linton take the metaphysical and ontological angst of death and produce symbols of a new world. They turn religious apocalypse into social and political apocalypse. Linton’s use of Blake’s designs in his work creates a continuum of political symbolism, which has specific meaning for the secular, particularly Republican, politics of the 1870s. In Linton’s work, the material presence of the book recognises the indivisibility of art from politics. The bibliographical re-encoding of Blake’s visual art in the pages of Broadway Ballads is Linton’s recognition of the continuum of Republican art and the possibility (still) of the Universal Republic. But no Republic was forthcoming for Linton. As Empire expanded, it was little England, not the universal Republic that took precedent, a little nation for which Blake was enlisted as an unofficial poet laureate.

III: Queer nation The beginning of the end for England as an imperial power began with the First World War. As Maureen Duffy has remarked of the Great War in her recent book on England, ‘The myth of England always being in the right and the myth of our invincibility, that we would always win through, when we had so often been defeated in battle, had been shown up as an illusion.’26 The First World War demonstrated that the empire had feet of clay; the Second shattered them with a hammer. Loss of empire has often been seen as the United Kingdom’s (or at least England’s) trauma of the twentieth century, but as many eloquent soldiers bore witness, the apocalyptic slaughter laid bare the brutal power of colonial domination and ‘The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.’27 One such soldier-poet was David Jones (1895–1974), whose experience of the violence of the First World War, the collapse of a civilisation, led him to explore the longer causes of that catastrophe. For him, ‘The Break’ had occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century with industrialisation and a new global imperium that divided communities from their histories, social, cultural and mythological. As he remarked in his epic poem, The Anathemata, from that time until the 1930s, Western man crossed a Rubicon that brought material benefits but left the traces of a spiritual longing for the ‘mythus’ that was discarded: ‘there is, in the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matière, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product’ (Anathemata, p. 20). The fraternity of art was central to the recovery of this mythus by a

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bardic act, promoted by his encounter with Eric Gill and the Ruskinian community of craftsmen at Capel-y-ffin in the 1920s, as well as his Catholicism which also provided him with a vision of the world ‘as the theatre of encoded, but decipherable, significance’.28 Science, technology and politics had sacrificed the British communality for military victory and offered in its place a shallow material isolation. As Anne Price-Owen comments, ‘Jones believed that the advance in technology with its consequent effect on consumerism and materialism encouraged people to shun the past, and thereby create a society impoverished of its meritorious heritage.’29 Recuperation was the task of a republic of art and Jones, as Seamus Heaney remarked in 1974, set himself, ‘singlehanded, the task of creating a British counter-culture’.30 Hence The Anathemata, the seeking out of what Corcoran calls ‘valid signs’ of humanity. Jones, who was also a painter and calligrapher, explained in his Preface to the book how these ‘fragments of an attempted writing’ began as an experiment in 1938 and were worked upon from time to time until 1951. Anathema originally meant that which was holy but came, in the New Testament, to be associated with its opposite; anathemata, by contrast, retained something of the original meaning even in English. These are the delights and ornaments of our lives, ‘the blessed things that have taken on what is cursed and the profane things that somehow are redeemed’ (Anathemata, pp. 28–9). Part of the experiment, never completed, was to combine word and visual arts in a form of illuminated manuscript. The past, therefore, was not to be illustrated, explained, instructed, but illuminated, a very Blakean project. Rather than a simple history, The Anathemata is a writing about Jones’s ‘thing’, his res, ‘contingent upon his being a Londoner, of Welsh and English parentage, of Protestant upbringing, of Catholic subscription’ (Anathemata, p. 11). Thus he is as heterogeneous as the British and, although an English monoglot, Welsh and Latin form part of his ‘Realien’, his culture and material existence. What Jones attempts to do, then, is draw together the elements of Bible, British history and classical mythology in a manner reminiscent of Blake’s Jerusalem. Thus, for example, the poem begins with reference to Troy and Priam, the origins of the British race according to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius. More than a history of the Britons, however, this is a history of mankind, or, more specifically, Western, European man, though one in which the signs of Celticity and Wales, a Wales that has been plundered by colonial occupation, are extremely important. Jones’s task, as bardic poet, is to revalidate the diminished culture by revalidating the signs of its lost

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mythus. Where better to focus than the Celtic Wallia where, by a process of internal colonisation, Western man first became alienated from himself? In his task of restoring the British counter-culture Jones follows the tradition of mythographers, linking Wales not only with the Bible but with the Roman civitas and, via Priam and Brutus, archaic Hellenic civilisation, so that the country is seen as the fulcrum of Britain and its languages (Brythonic, Latin and even Greek as well as English). And yet, comments René Hague, ‘for all his love of Wales, he is eminently an English poet. The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, medieval English lyrics, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, folk-song, Malory, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Smart, Coleridge, Browning, Hopkins – these and the classical world behind them, are the homelands of his tradition.’31 Nonetheless, as Corcoran notes, this Welsh inheritance was important to Jones, embodied in language as it struggled with the imperial and colonial heritages of England and Rome, linguistic as well as political, the res materia as well as the thing. 32 A major difference between Jones and Blake is the former’s privileging of classical civilisation and the chthonic mother religions that, for Blake, would be the false religion of Vala. However, the similariries between Blake and Jones are significant, particularly the mapping of the body of Albion, a sacred geography that indicates the spatial element of forming identities in a mythographical landscape: Did Albion put down his screen of brume at: forty-nine fifty-seven thirty-four north five twelve four west to white-out the sea-margin east of northwards to confluent Fal, and west over Mark’s main towards where Trystan’s sands run out to land’s last end? (Anathemata, p. 98) Mapping, topography and the mythic delineation of space is equally important to Blake, who outlines the arena of the Briton’s existence from Lands End to John o’ Groats: There are Two Gates thro which all Souls descend. One Southward From Dover Cliff to Lizard Point. The other toward the North Caithness & rocky Durness, Pentland & John Groats House. The Souls descending to the Body, wail on the right hand Of Los; & those deliverd from the Body, on the left hand. (M 26:13–17, E123)

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Blake’s idiosyncratic description of the geography of Albion links the national and universal to the particulars of his own life, the almostalien elemental figure of Albion preventing his vision of Britain from becoming some glib, easily assimilated generality. Such prophetic voices in the wilderness, then, describe a place we do not understand, yet the recovery of the mythus on a personal level in The Anathemata echoes to half-familiar songs. The Anathemata, then, is an epic that attempts to return the volk, the cymru, the foedus, the tribe to its mythical ‘tillage’, its history, legends and religion. While it would be tempting to dismiss this conservative return, Jones’s attempted fragments were the result of his entry into the First World War and the consciousness amongst many in the twentieth century of a culture en route to suicide. There are important differences between Protestant, English Blake and Catholic, AngloWelsh Jones, but what differentiates them does not lessen their shared concerns in re-inscribing and re-dedicating nationalism. For both, writing during a time of bitter, total warfare, one against a French enemy, the other German, tracing the roots of the tribe is important to find a common origin, part of European and worldwide culture. For Blake the Atlantean origins of Albion that begin in America and run through all his prophetic books until Jerusalem are equally concerned with unity over enmity: this is why for writers such as Blake and Jones the roots of the volk are not restrictive, withered shoots but rather the rhizomes of other peoples, healing the rift of nationalist fragmentation to create the Universal republic.33 This is precisely the issue addressed by Blake in his anti-colonial image of Albion before the fall: They came up to Jerusalem; they walked before Albion In the Exchanges of London every Nation walkd And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony Albion coverd the whole Earth, England encompassd the Nations, Mutual each within others bosom in Visions of Regeneration; Jerusalem coverd the Atlantic Mountains & the Erythrean, From bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England. Mount Zion lifted his head in every Nation under heaven: And the Mount of Olives was beheld over the whole Earth: The footsteps of the Lamb of God were there: but now no more No more shall I behold him[.] (J 25:41–51, E170)

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Albion covers the earth because he is truly international, holding all other nations as ‘mutual’ friends rather than enemy territories to be colonised. Likewise, other enemies of British imperialism have found the possible foundation stones of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, none perhaps more surprisingly than Derek Jarman (1942–94). Jarman, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in February 1994, was a painter, writer, set designer and, most famously, independent and avant-garde film-maker. Jarman’s early childhood, visiting Pakistan and Suez with his RAF father, attending public school at Hordle, was a colonial experience in every sense of the word at a time when the British empire was passing away. For this commonwealth to be replaced by something finer, it would require a sexual as well as political renaissance: after his realisation that he was homosexual in the late 1950s and early sixties, Jarman’s sexuality was criminal in Britain until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and even after decriminalisation confined him to a second-class existence, particularly after he was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987. While the politicisation of the Slade-school art student was a relatively slow process, the life of a gay man was, as he wrote in his first autobiography, Dancing Ledge, ‘una vita violenta’. With reference to Pasolini, the revolutionary film-maker whose sexuality was made a ‘tortured confusion’ by the ‘bourgeois restraint’ of the Communist Party, Jarman details the intolerable catalogue of rape, domestic violence and police raids tolerated in England when directed against the ‘perverse’ and ‘queer’.34 While Dancing Ledge provided an account of the making of films such as Sebastiane and Caravaggio in the late 1970s and early eighties, the situation did not improve as the decade progressed: indeed, to be gay in Britain in the 1980s was to be ‘the virus in the body politic’. Jarman was also keen to see himself as something of a prophet. In this role, an early note to Jubilee dedicated the film to ‘all those who secretly work against the tyranny of Marxists fascists trade unionists maoists capitalists socialists etc . . . who have conspired together to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism . . . For William Blake.’35 Michael O’Pray noted the similarities between Blake and Jarman, that both were Londoners ‘who believed the city physically embodied the woes of its times – [that] in sixteenthcentury terms, it was a microcosm’ and that both ‘created mythological systems spanning the personal and the national’.36 Jarman’s most recent biographer, Tony Peake, has also remarked that the film-maker, writer and artist saw himself as a ‘Blakean leveller’, a

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divine man ‘who smashed the old gods’, while Time Out saluted the author of The Last of England as ‘the sort of troublemaking visionary who may one day be compared with Blake’.37 Jarman, as a writer in particular but also in many of his films, was self-consciously English at the same time that he sought to mock the aspirations of the English bourgeoisie; he may have been queer but he was also very much a product of the fag end of imperial Britain. As Mark Douglas has argued, Jarman’s films such as Jubilee and The Last of England have recuperated ‘iconic representations of hegemonic English historical narrative and motifs of the English pastoral in pursuit of a new cultural identity, a new Englishness’.38 There are, of course, notable differences between Blake and Jarman, particularly the latter’s connections with the British cultural élite. For both, however, freedom is – as for many radicals – a return to lost liberties as opposed to the poisonous land in which the painter, director and writer found himself at the end of the eighties, decade of greed: Young bigots flaunting an excess of ignorance. Little England. Criminal behaviour in the police force. Little England. Jingoism at Westminster. Little England. Small town folk gutted by ring roads. Little England. Distressed housing estates cosmeticised in historicism. Little England. The greedy destruction of the countryside. Little England. (Last of England, p. 81) As Peake observes, much of Jarman’s work ‘sprang equally (and arguably more pressingly) from contemporary politics and Jarman’s Blakean vision of the Conservative Party as greedy despoilers and belittlers of his beloved Albion.’39 There is a poignant compassion to Jarman’s diatribes against England, a recognition that – despite his love affair with America as the source of his sexual awakening – this England was, after all, his England. Amidst the criminal police forces and destruction of the countryside are the forgotten ‘small town folk’, the lost tribes of Albion in bondage to Babylon: ‘Here is Jerusalem bound in chains, in the Dens of Babylon’ (M 38:27, E139). At the same time, Jarman laments that Blake the subverter has been suborned to a right-wing, sexually repressed, greedy media for whom the stanzas more commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’ are read as black where Jarman would read white, and whose ‘product’ is ‘some muscular Christianism and jingo, crypto-faggy Cambridge stuff set to William Blake’s “Jerusalem” – a minor poet who wrote this popular football hymn’ (Last of England, p. 112). Jarman is, perhaps unsurprisingly, critical of

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Blake and Nationalism

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Blake, or, more accurately, what Blake has become. At first glance, this passage appears to mock the author of ‘Jerusalem’, though its context is a denunciation of a media establishment that believes it can buy up all art and switch its floating signifiers for any post-modern gloss that sells. Yet Jarman’s relationship with Blake, the minor poet and (prophetic, this), writer of the popular football hymn, remains problematic. The connotations of Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ are too powerful to ignore – Last Night of the Proms, Union Jacks and down with the Queer Nation. In 1987, ‘Jerusalem’ was too close to reactionary nationalism for Jarman; instead, he turned to other Blakean lyrics to explore his antagonisms to England. In Imaging October, for example, one scene is of the poem, ‘The Sick Rose’, accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s setting of the poem to music, while in The Last of England he writes of the ‘Slate Blue Rose’ as a perfect but unnatural hybrid, the Tory dream of Thatcher that sickens and bankrupts the country. Such corruption is the theme of the film The Last of England, made in 1987 and starring Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh. In his diary, Jarman quotes a speech by Cromwell to parliament in 1654 to indicate the film’s meaning: ‘And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them drunk in my fury’ (Isaiah 63:1–3). Like Milton’s History of Britain, this film presents a jeremiad against the faithless Britons, drawing also on the Bible, Pearl, Piers Plowman and the Ford Madox Brown painting from which it takes its name (having originally been entitled Victorian Values), a cry against harsh, cynical hypocrisy. In the words of Tilda Swinton, and echoing Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, it depicts ‘The landscape in crisis’ (The Last of England, p. 242). Including footage from the 1920s filmed by his grandfather, Harry Puttock, and from the 1940s by his father, Lance Jarman, it is the patriotism and petty temper of the latter that Jarman blames for his ‘aversion to all authority’. Jarman does see himself as a patriot, in the style (rather melodramatically) of Wilfred Owen rejecting the powers that destroy Europe. Last of England, then, is a film about ‘imperial embers’, the failure of the British monarchy’s attempt to centralise the earth under its paterfamilias just as his father, the neglected colonial, had sought ‘to nurture an idealised and fiercely conservative vision of the country to which he pretended’.40 Against this conservative Britannia, Jarman espoused his own version of Albion: as Christopher Hobbs commented in a BBC documentary on Jarman, ‘Derek was passionate about a Britain that perhaps never existed but is always present.’41 Jarman’s alternative Eden, his portion of Jerusalem, was found not in

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the busy portals of London nor the green fields of England, but in the bleak shadow of the nuclear mills of Dungeness. Here, in an apparent wasteland, Jarman spent his final years at Prospect Cottage creating his own pastoral from the shingle soil and sparse vegetation, an inspiration for the film The Garden and one of his final books, Modern Nature. This text, a herbal anthology, diaries his involvement in making The Garden and Edward II, as well as describing lovingly his garden of flowers and plants, sea kale and poppies found amidst the detritus of cold bonfires, broken china and old bedsteads. It is in such a garden (with gratifying irony) that Jarman saw himself and his friends as the angels turned back by the Sodomites from a mean, narrow world, Sodom being ‘a tight little suburban dormitory mortgaged out to the hardhearted, somewhere beyond Epsom’ (Modern Nature, p. 54). Jarman’s garden is a sexual one, the alfresco fuck before we hid our nakedness in Eden, a universal commonwealth of sensual liberties before heterosexual restriction, and indeed it is ‘Mr. and Mrs. William Blake playing Adam and Eve nude in their London garden’, the earthly Paradise longed for by Morris, to which Jarman alludes (Modern Nature, p. 25). Christopher Hobson has recently argued that Blake’s texts, particularly Milton, demonstrate an awareness of the ‘moral cruelties’ of his day as directed against homosexuals, for example the execution of John Newball Hepburn and Thomas White for ‘an abominable offence’; Blake’s response, suggests Hobson, was to celebrate a ‘sexual commonwealth’.42 While Jarman may not have recognised Blake as specifically sympathetic to homosexuality, he would certainly have seen that the author of Milton and Jerusalem opposed a Moral Law. As with so many of his biographical texts, Modern Nature is an attack on repressed sexuality, claiming a spiritual realm where his Jesus would march with other gay men and lesbians in pride alongside his beloved disciple. In the meantime, however, Jarman laments the conversion of England into the dead lands of Sodom: The land of England was once the home of dryads and nymphs, every now and again you can feel the last of them lurking around a corner: at Dancing Ledge, at Winspit. But much of the land is desolate. Cornwall is a wasteland. Sad Goonhilly with its tracking disks. Lands End. (Modern Nature, p. 59) Such declamations are familiar to the reader of Jerusalem as Los laments the land that Albion has become in the night of the repressive Napoleonic wars:

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Blake and Nationalism

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Such is the Ancient World of Urizen in the Satanic Void Created from the Valley of Middlesex by Londons River From Stone-henge and from London Stone, from Cornwall to Cathnes The Four Zoa’s rush around on all sides in dire ruin Furious in pride of Selfhood the terrible Spectres of Albion Rear their dark Rocks among the Stars of God (J 58:44–9, E208) And yet this is not the final dream of England: for Jarman, as for Blake, Cornwall may be a wasteland, Albion desolate, yet the sexual nymphs and dryads, pansexual all, still inhabit his loins.

IV: Jerusalem 2000 While many radicals and internationalists reject the myth of nationhood, others such as Cobbett, Orwell, Jarman and, of course, Blake have sought to rescue a very different vision of England. For these figures, nations should not be left in the hands of reactionary nationalists. Despite the apparent successes of globalisation and perhaps because of the equally apparent failure of international communism (the first blows against which date back to 1917 at least) the nation state retains a pernicious hold on citizens from very different ideological backgrounds. In Britain in particular, facing devolutionary dissolution within its borders and economic integration into an external EU, the chattering classes of the old empire increasingly talk up a crisis of English identity. David Cressy has remarked that ‘unlike new nations that celebrate their independence, or old nations that commemorate their revolutions, the English observe no national anniversary to focus and express their patriotism.’43 As such, festive micro-commemorations such as the Fifth of November, or Last Night of the Proms, have offered a slightly embarrassed and embarrassing arena for a patriotism that almost by definition cannot be all-encompassing (excluding Catholics on the one hand, confusing Britishness and Englishness on the other). Forged in Victoriana, tempered in the Great War, the Proms does not offer the most obvious context for Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and yet there it remains, year after year. Indeed, there is an abrasion at the heart of Blake’s original poem which, when decontextualised from its original setting, smoothes away its primary meanings, scours and rubs Blake’s complex and mystifying content to allow a new and slippery mythological signifier to emerge.

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The occasion was Last Night at the Proms, the place the Albert Hall and date, 1916, whizz bang in the middle of the Great War. Since then, the rhetorical question ‘And did those feet in ancient times / Walk upon England’s mountains green?’ has been woefully annexed by politicians of right, left and whaddyagot. King George V was so transported by what he heard that he wanted ‘Jerusalem’ to replace the dirge-like ‘God save the King’ as the national anthem. Blake’s battle cry, against the God of the established Church, against conventional morality in the political system of his day and any day since, had become, overnight, a nationalist hymn for the generations of Mollesworths, Grabers and Fotherington-Thomases to sing in chapel (chiz, chiz), its meaning utterly lost.44 It is hardly surprising, as Glancey notes, that this is Tony Blair’s hymn of choice, and yet, in order to become such a favourite of the nation’s élite, how can the meaning of such a poem be ‘lost’, utterly or otherwise? It is obvious, for example, that the meaning of the stanzas from Milton were not lost for Parry who immediately recognised ‘Jerusalem’ in Blake’s obscure verses. If Blake provided the words of the poem, it was Parry who transformed these into the hymn taken up by the Women’s Movement in 1917 and later sung by Jarrow marchers and Fabian Society socialists, as noted by two of the hymn’s historians, Nancy Goslee and Michael Ferber.45 Billy Bragg has remarked that his ‘belief that “Jerusalem” is a left-wing anthem has got me into arguments with public schoolboys at Eton and Trotskyist newspaper sellers in Trafalgar Square. I remain convinced that the song does not belong alongside “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” at the last night of the Proms.’46 What, then, of the ur-text of Parry’s hymn? As the most recent editors of Milton, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, observe, the poem known as ‘Jerusalem’ was originally included in the Preface published at the beginning of Blake’s epic poem. The Preface opposes classical writing to the Bible, suggesting that Shakespeare and Milton have been corrupted by the militarism of ancient classical culture which had been revived in the so-called ‘Augustan’ age of Britain: ‘Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the

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Sir Charles Hubert Parry, as Jonathan Glancey noted in a review of Songs of Celebrity Praise, set the stanzas from the Preface to Milton to music in 1916, two years before his death, at the encouragement of Robert Bridges:

Radical Blake

silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.’47 In contrast to this glorification of political and military might Blake addresses his Preface to be ‘Young Men of the New Age!’, calling upon them to engage in mental as opposed to corporeal war. The stanzas known as ‘Jerusalem’ must be seen as a pacifist here, calling upon the people of Britain to be prophets (citing Numbers 11:29). Yet this, probably Blake’s bestknown poem, also appears in only two of the four extant copies of Milton and may have been omitted in later editions because its ‘stridency . . . contradicts the attitude of forgiveness and conversion that informs the poem itself’ or because its appeal to the ‘Young Men of the New Age!’ implied a ‘confidence in finding a wide readership for his poem, a confidence that Blake may have lost by the time he collated the two later copies’.48 Regardless of Blake’s reasons for removing the Preface, the fact that most people’s knowledge of his poetry is restricted to this one lyric does not mean that Blake considered it central to his own work; on the contrary, those four stanzas which appear to provide the most lucid and evocative summary of his later visions of British history were, on the evidence of bibliographic facts, entirely expendable. Regarding the lyric itself, the common interpretation of ‘And did those feet’ is that they belonged to Jesus. William of Malmesbury had recorded the legend of Christian missionaries discovering a church in Glastonbury when they first arrived, apparently constructed by God himself. In turn, this may have given rise to the myth of Christ having visited England himself accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea.49 The ‘dark Satanic Mills’ at the end of stanza two are usually taken to mean industrial factories that were beginning to shoot up around Britain as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Viscomi and Essick admit the possibility of this, particularly around London, but also refer to the beginning of Milton, where Blake talks of the ‘Starry Mills of Satan’, the material universe that grind down the forms of living creatures, reducing them to soulless atoms. The poem ends celebrating ‘Mental Fight’ at the expense of material and corporeal war that devastated the lives of the common people who fight and suffer for the glory of Kings. The misinterpretation of Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’, which has become part of the popular idiom, is a microtextual example of the process of dialogic struggle that surrounds the stanzas from Milton. Without a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Blake’s (often incomprehensible) prophetic works, it is hardly surprising that readers should place this phrase within what seems to be a perfectly reasonable and coherent historical context, that of opposition to industrial

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revolution at a time when frame-breakers in Nottingham, amongst others, were beginning to articulate artisanal and working-class resistance.50 What is of interest is how such re-contextualisation and re-coding of the text takes place, that if readers trace the lines between those starry words that constellate a text the invisible grooves they overwrite function upon a historical and material palimpsest. One example of this struggle for meaning came from a leader column in The Observer in 1996, remarking: For the faithful, it is a vision of that better world to which the departed has gone allied to the hope that, by living better lives, we might come to reflect more of that world in this one. For the nonbeliever, it is the affirmation (which sadly, usually fade soon after leaving the Church) of the nobler society that could be built here. And for everyone, it’s a thumping good tune.51 So thumpingly good, in fact, that Fat Les, comprised of actor Keith Allen, the artist Damien