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, 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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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:

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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 Hirst and Alex James of Blur, joined by a 60piece orchestra and four choirs, announced in May 2000 that it would provide ‘Jerusalem’ as England’s official Euro 2000 song. As Allen said to the press, ‘Everyone has heard Jerusalem, most of us have sung it and all of us know some of the words. Frankly, it’s a cracking good hymn.’52 For a brief period of time at the end of the twentieth century, the hymn became less a question of the meaning of Blake’s words or Parry’s tune than as its status as an anthem, not merely of the game but of the country. The hysteria that gripped the nation over ‘Jerusalem’ could be reckoned in a Sun article headed ‘You have 31 days to learn these words for Euro 2000’, followed by ‘10 Things You Didn’t Know About William Blake’. Jarman’s prophetic sneer regarding the popularity of the ‘minor poet who wrote this popular football hymn’ had indeed come to pass. The aim of the Fat Les version, however, seemed to be more than to popularise just a football song: as several commentators in the press noted – indeed, took up the call – the real aim was to replace the national anthem. ‘Jerusalem’ was also seen by the group as having greater potential for radicalism than that old anti-anthem ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (bastard sibling to the Sex Pistol’s ‘God save the Queen’), in particular as ‘great big white fascist folks [would be] singing along’ with the London Gay Male Voice Choir.53 Keith Allen has spoken about reclaiming the song and that Fat Les has treated it with considerable respect as well as levity, placing it in a lineage from the Jarrow

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marchers and Labour Party, rather than Parry’s 1916 Last Nights at the Proms performance. Indeed, Parry strangely disappears from the Fat Les 2000 version. The sleeve notes privilege William Blake, so often missing from hymnal renditions of the song; the words of Jerusalem are printed inside the cover, and the credits read ‘Original words by: William Blake. Music by: Alex James – Keith Allen – Ben Hillier – Simon Boswell.’54 And yet although the arrangement of Jerusalem may be said to be by James, Allen, Hillier and Boswell, the music remains undoubtedly that of Parry (even to its unusual stress on the word ‘Jerusalem’), much more so, for example, than the diabolic deconstruction performed by Mark Stewart and the Mafia at the end of the 1980s. The London Gay Male Choir, New London Children’s Choir, London Community Gospel Choir, and Syncopeters receive a credit (quite rightly) yet the voice of Parry is silent, erased from this version of his hymn. Why? Because with Parry comes the attendant memory of all those Molesworths, Grabers and Fotherington-Thomases singing in Chapel. If Fat Les is right to recoup great Blake from the charge of nationalism and militarism, the group’s dubious good intentions cannot pave a way to a monologic hell: ‘Jerusalem’ must still be interpreted, and such interpretations struggled over in mental fight. For most people who know nothing of Blake (and less of Parry), it is not the vision of William Blake, nor of socialism or even the conservative women’s movement, but a cracking good hymn that cannot be separated from its music. At the same time, this struggle cannot be resolved by a simple repression of one part of the Jerusalemic dialogue. The hymn has been entirely de-contextualised – perhaps the greatest danger for great poetry – both from its immediate place in the context of the Preface to Milton and in the course of Blake’s life: in the mouths of socialists, it is a utopian hymn of the great society to come, in the mouths of the religious it is a glimpse of heaven in this world, in the mouths of bigots it is a paean to nationalism and exclusion. A similar point was made in a Steve Bell cartoon as part of his series for Euro 2000, ‘Steve Bell’s Jerusalem’. Stereotypical football hooligans who cannot understand the ‘mystic leftie weirdo poor crap’ of the Blake-Parry hymn instead retreat into the ‘Rule Britannia’ of Thomson (not the author of The City of Dreadful Night), the favourite of the terraces.55 And yet Bell is only partly right to recuperate ‘Jerusalem’ from the shame of English football violence. Although, as a left-wing commercial illustrator, he may share much with the Romantic engraver (and not infrequently invokes Blake in his cartoons),

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‘Jerusalem’ simply does not belong to Blake nor the Left any more: post-Parry, after the WI (established to preserve conservative values), its provenance in the twentieth century has been as much that of nationalism as internationalism and socialism. What did Blake mean by ‘England’? He uses the word some fifty times in his poetry, mainly in Jerusalem and Milton (three times in these stanzas alone) but also clustered within a few other poems, notably America and his early poetic drama, ‘King Edward the Third’. What is significant is that, in most cases, Blake’s use of the name is negative or at least ambivalent. In ‘Edward the Third’, for example, England is invoked as the source of martial glory in the hundred years war, but a glory that, as Erdman points out in Prophet Against Empire, will end in the disasters of eventual expulsion and the Black Death: France 2, England 1.56 Likewise, in America the King of England (George III) ‘trembles’ when he sees the American revolutionaries rise up across the Atlantic, while the Governors sent from England ‘grovel on the sand and writhing lie’ before Washington (America 13:4–5, E56). Such ambivalence continues in Jerusalem, where we are told that ‘England who is Brittannia divided into Jerusalem & Vala’, the motherland dividing into the Promised Land and the Babylon from which we must return. The question of whether the stanzas from Milton could become a suitable British, or even English anthem disappeared from the press as soon as England was knocked out of Euro 2000. Before this, however, nationalist fervour was dampened as the recurring spectre of English football-supporter violence returned at Charleroi, prompting UEFA to threaten removing England from the contest. As so many times before violence abroad instigated self-loathing in the public sphere at home, prompting the home secretary, Jack Straw, to push through emergency legislation to crack down on hooliganism against a backdrop of continuing hostility to Europe and immigrants (which faced another horror during Euro 2000 as fifty-eight Chinese men and women seeking to enter the country illegally died on their way to Britain). Indeed, Straw even classified the entire public sphere in Britain as institutionally racist, calling for a new definition of English patriotism that would leave behind the ‘baggage of empire’ even as he indulged in ‘tougher’ rhetoric against so-called bogus asylum seekers. What would have happened if England had not been knocked out of Euro 2000? What if, to stretch the bounds of plausibility even further, they had gone on to win against France or Italy as they nearly did against Germany in 1996? Would Blake’s words and Parry’s music have

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resounded at Rotterdam, and would Jerusalem have been created in the exultant minds and hearts of fans? If one assumes that national pride had triumphed over national self-loathing, could ‘Jerusalem’ even have become the national anthem? An anthem, whether national or in an Ibiza club, positions its audience as a community, posits at some level shared values. Just because ‘God Save the Queen’ has become too partisan, too tired to be treated with more than cynicism by an increasing number of the British public does not mean that the public does not desire an anthem, could not gain some relief from Euro-ambiguity that a vigorous new clarion call could provide: yet if an anthem interpellates its audience, so the loudest members of that audience very often signify its content. Just as Parry’s music no longer belongs to him, so Blake’s words are no longer his own and the loudest voices raised in proclamation of victory abroad would almost certainly make the poem a celebration of separation. The meaning of ‘Jerusalem’, if only for a moment, appeared significant at a time when confusion over Britishness, ‘another word for Englishness’,57 has been heightened by devolutionary resistance in Scotland and Wales. In Jerusalem, Albion and England once covered the earth: in the hands of another poet, this would perhaps be a celebration of British imperialism, and – to repeat – there are always problems in any utopian vision of unity that always threatens the erasure of difference. For Blake, however, the promise that Jerusalem will be builded here is the return to Eden before hereditary power, before tribalism and before nationalism. The odd power of Jerusalem to sustain nations beyond national borders, to counterpoint its own religious fervour with its belief in Enlightenment individualism and freedom, was demonstrated unexpectedly and tragically after the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001. ‘Jerusalem’ may have been stone-clad in the garb of the establishment, but it still has the power to change meaning, to re-envision what that establishment means. It still moves because, unspoken in most criticism, it both questions and affirms, and helps us to both question and re-affirm our humanity when that is all there is left to do: Much of the revised concert [of the Last Night of the Proms] was a striking affirmation of the enduring importance of the humanistic ideas of the 18th-century enlightenment in the modern world. Most of the words heard in the Albert Hall on Saturday night came from three poets of freedom – Blake, Burns and Schiller – who were all born between 1757 and 1759. The musical cornerstone was provided by another apostle of liberty, Beethoven, born in 1770.

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Quite a generation, by any standards. But the choices were utterly appropriate in another way too. The great generation that left the world Jerusalem and the Ode to Joy was also, after all, the generation that produced the Enlightenment’s most enduring monument of all: The United States of America itself.58

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I: The revolutionary Atlantic While Blake has been claimed by a variety of international readers, writers and artists in the twentieth century, most recently as part of the ‘revolutionary Atlantic’, the nineteenth-century ‘internationalism’ of William Blake is a seriously undervalued and undeveloped field. G. E. Bentley’s assertion that ‘William Blake is essentially an English phenomenon, strange and bewildering to his contemporaries, barely of interest beyond the English-speaking world until more than a century after his birth in 1757’ is generally taken to be straightforward and self-evident.1 But we should not underestimate the ability of Blake’s Universalism to translate into ‘Internationalism’, with different percolations of meaning. The English-speaking world was itself a strange phenomenon, in the main divided geographically by the Atlantic and connected by parallel journeys of self-discovery and popular self-determination against the background of the trans-continental slave trade. The nineteenth-century geographical diversity of Blake – particularly his American reception – needs to be reiterated. There is a Russian discussion of Blake as early as 1834 as part of an anonymous article on Blake in Teleskop, published by Nicolai Nazezhdin,2 a German reference in 18353 and the earliest Australian account, a review of Swinburne’s essay, is dated 1868,4 all of which place ‘Blake . . . in a much wider cultural and literary context’ than had previously been explored in English criticism.5 Some of the earliest reproductions of and references to Blake’s works are to be found in American publications.6 As with so many references to Blake in the English press of the 1830s and 1840s, these references owe a great deal to Allan 96

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Cunningham’s biographical notice of Blake in Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which itself is fashioned on John T. Smith’s account of Blake in Nollekens and his Time.7 From at least 1834 onwards, both Blake’s graphic and poetic work was being reproduced in the American republic. Illustrations taken from his designs to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam were ‘pirated’ in The People’s Almanac for 1834 and 1836.8 The narrative of the Revolted Negroes was originally conceived and executed in the 1790s as an elaborate cultural collaboration in the form of the book published by Joseph Johnson and was a luxury product: ‘two leatherbound, gold-toothed volumes with a total of eighty plates by well-known engravers’.9 The graphic intensity of Blake’s interpretation transcends the heaviness and near-pomposity of the artefact. The images possess an ambiguity between realism and idealism that cuts deep into cultural practices and prejudice. Anne Mellor refutes Rubenstein’s and Townsend’s description of Blake as a positive portrayer of the Surinam slaves’ humanity and instead sees Blake as concurring in a patriarchal assimilation of cultural and racial difference.10 Rubinstein and Townsend, however, argue that by going against the grain of author (J. G. Stedman) and product (the 1796 book), Blake produced a quality of design that fused photographic accuracy with imaginative impact: Captain Stedman’s political desire to see slavery continue (albeit in a gentler form) clashed with the goals of the slaves and rebels of whom he wrote; significantly it also clashed with the liberal world view of his publisher and the radical Christian imagination of his illustrator. Each of these was devoted to a different vision of the future, yet none succeeded in imposing his own vision on history.11 So profound was Blake’s vision that these designs could re-emerge in 1830s America as tourist trivia and, in late twentieth-century Britain, as signposts of a shared, multicultural history as in David Dabydeen’s Slave Song.12 Blake’s design is both cultural and political: the reception of his work echoes the inception of that work in subtle and unexpected ways. The Stedman Narrative illustrations have been used by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra to locate Blake as part of the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic.13 Linebaugh and Rediker’s account of the sailors, pirates, labourers and indentured servants of early European colonialism traces the acts of

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resistance and co-operation of this ‘motley crew’, necessarily hybrid and multicultural and informed by a range of cross-Atlantic radical activities such as the Putney debates and Spa Field riots. The significance of this study is that it does not assume that the multiple acts of rebellion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are isolated acts of disorder, but rather possess a ‘coherence and collective causal power’ that the authors describe as an ‘Atlantic Jubilee’. The Atlantic ocean, the seaway of trade in slaves, sugar and cotton, is also the freeway for an emerging revolutionary class consciousness: when the proletariat was rebellious and self-active, it was described as a monster, a many-headed hydra. Its heads included food rioters (according to Shakespeare); heretics (Thomas Edwards); army agitators (Thomas Fairfax); antinomians and independent women (Cotton Mather); maroons (Governor Mauricius); motley urban mobs (Peter Oliver); general strikers (J. Cunningham); rural barbarians of the commons (Thomas Malthus); aquatic laborers (Patrick Colquhoun); free thinkers (William Reid); and striking textile workers (Andrew Ure). Nameless commentators added peasant rebels, Levellers, pirates, and slave insurrectionists to the long list.14 While authorities invoked the might of Hercules to strike down this ‘unnatural beast’, Irish, Welsh, English and Africans alike strove to abolish the slavery to which they were expected to submit. For Linebaugh and Rediker, the American Revolution did not depend upon the leadership of a small, hegemonic class opposed to certain elements of British rule, but emerges from the ongoing struggle for self-determination that takes place in the fleets, ports and colonies of the Atlantic, the revolutionary energy of a proletariat symbolised for the authors by Blake’s Tyger. In Blake’s depiction of this first wave of revolution in the eighteenth century in his prophetic book America, they argue that Orc is an African American, and that it is hardly surprising that this motley figure springs from the Atlantic itself: As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea; Intense! Naked! A Human fire fierce glowing[.] (A 3:5–8, E53) What did in fact arise between the Atlantic separating Blake and

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Stedman, both conceptually and geographically, was the quietude of Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), an Afro-American who was kidnapped into slavery at around about the age of seven, and who, under the tutelage of her Boston mistress’s daughter, Mary Wheatley, demonstrated a prodigious poetic talent, sailing to London in 1773 on what would nowadays be seen as a promotional tour.15 Stedman included Wheatley’s ‘Thoughts on Imagination’ in his Narrative to illustrate that ‘these people are neither divested of a good ear nor poetical genius’ and concluded about her poetry ‘What could be more beautiful and sublime?’16 Indeed it is not the fires of Orc that initially connect the emancipatory elements of Blake with the American republic and the abolitionist cause, but Phillis Wheatley’s particular brand of pious and poetic politics. It has been argued that Wheatley’s ‘Hymn to the Morning’ may have influenced Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’, each negotiating Christian ideologies of subjugation and deferred reward through ‘sunshine and shady groves’.17 While Blake’s own active engagement in emancipatory politics may have been fairly slight, the Swedenborgian reception of Blake in America during the 1840s presages the marriage of mysticism and secular politics that would continue to resurface throughout the nineteenth century. The earliest known publication of Blake’s poetry in America has been identified in the abolitionist journal, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. The editor was Lydia Maria Child, who had an active interest in Swedenborgianism. The first Blake poem published in America was deliberately articulated within the abolitionist cause, prompting ‘investigation of the racial and cultural issues surrounding Blake’s introduction to an American readership’.18 Morton D. Paley has documented the relationship between the late eighteenth-century New Church and the first abolitionist society, who aimed to set up a free colony in Sierra Leone and ‘shared Blake’s deepest concerns – opposition to slavery.’19 Blake would have had the opportunity to meet some of these early emancipators at the New Church General Conference in 1789, something that Garth Wilkinson sought to resurrect in the idea of a Swedenborgian community in Africa in the 1890s.20 The transatlantic link between Blake and the abolitionist cause was preserved in the 1860s and 1870s by Moncure Conway (1832–1907). Conway, the son of a southern plantation owner, grew increasingly critical of the system of slavery that he was surrounded by as a child.21 His interest in Blake followed a review of Swinburne’s William Blake: a Critical Essay in the Fortnightly Review,22 and culminated in a serious appraisal of Blake’s consanguinity with Eastern mysticism, describing him as ‘one of the devoutest men of genius

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whom England has produced’.23 A point of interest in relation to the ‘racial and cultural issues’ of Swedenborgianism is Conway’s comment that slaves on his father’s plantation had ‘their own rudimental Swedenborgianism and Transcendentalism’.24 Conway’s own religious beliefs mirror the plurality of nineteenth-century theological enquiry, ranging from an interest in Eastern mysticism to the ‘spiritual architecture’ of a Secularist chapel. Moncure Conway demonstrates the plurality of both nineteenthcentury avant-garde aesthetics and political radicalism. He is displaced, contradictory and yet completely certain in the rightness and power of communal cause. He was the son of a Southern American plantation owner who grew up to be a leading figure in the fight to abolish slavery. He experienced intense periods of both faith and doubt. A brilliant orator, deeply committed to the abolitionist cause, he made a fateful error in approaching the Confederate envoy when they were both in London, offering terms to end both slavery and the American Civil War. This episode, known to posterity as the Mason affair (after James Murray Mason, the Confederate envoy), illustrates the strange allegiances and conflicts of nineteenth-century art and politics: ‘The contrast between the sympathy shown him by artists and the abuse heaped on him by politicians seemed stark. The artists accepted him: the politicians judged him. Conway quickly convinced himself that he stood for a higher morality than even other abolitionists, who seemed now more interested in conquest than emancipation.’25 Conway was also at the hub of the renaissance of South Place, a secular church in Finsbury, London, which became a focal point for intellectuals in the 1870s and 1880s under Conway’s tutelage. John d’Entremont’s brief précis of Conway’s life sums up the contradictions of his personality perfectly: ‘Moncure Conway, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, contained multitudes.’26 The Blake that Swinburne brought before the world in 1868 was in many ways ideally suited to Conway’s growing cynicism with revolution based purely on a material or moral idiom that exchanged one type of tyranny for another. In Conway’s review of Swinburne’s William Blake: a Critical Essay for the Fortnightly Review (February 1868), it is precisely the historical dialectic between mysticism and materialism that occupies the main tenet of the article: Neither the times at which the great mystics appear, nor the forms of their oracles, are accidental; the relation of these to the current age is a subject requiring far more investigation than it has yet received. As

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a general rule, they would seem to come at the end of sceptical generations, and to be representatives of advancing reactions against prevalent and inadequate materialism – itself a reaction against some previous inadequate mysticism. The human mind shares the general peristaltic movement of things, and like the span-worm, now lifts itself heavenward, now stretches itself along the earth.27 Conway’s metaphor of the worm reaching heavenward and then delving into the earth recalls something of Blake’s frontispiece to The Gates of Paradise (E259), as well as Ruskin’s The Eagle’s Nest. A common metaphor applied by the Secularists was that of looking earthward rather than towards the sky. George William Foote writes: ‘Religion points to the sky, common sense to the earth; religion is all imagination, common sense all reason.’28 It would, however, be a mistake to see Blake only as an emancipator of the ethereal world, as a spectral saviour weeping over the fettered spirit. Blake had a strong enough dose of Enlightenment reason in him to speak often of the earth and its injustice as he saw it around him, A good example of the ‘common sense’ emancipation that Blake could inspire in nineteenth-century social poetry is William James Linton’s Ireland for the Irish. Linton learnt tricks from Blake that he was to utilise in this overtly political poetry describing the Irish famine and condemning the Castlereigh regime. Linton’s poetry in Ireland for the Irish29 retains some of the allegorical playfulness of Bob-Thin, but the allegory itself is undercut by the social reality of specified individuals suffering in the grip of economic and social slavery, as in ‘The Contrast’: ‘Labour’s children, fevermurder’d, on a dung-heap lie; / Labour may be coffin’d in the poor-house by and bye’ (Ireland, p. 44). Linton is at great pains to inform us that the fever-murdered children lying on the dung heap are a social reality, an actual event, and not simply an image drawn by poetic licence. The symbolic has become aligned to a lyrical drama of voice, in which what is symbolic of a general social condition is expressed through individual voices: ‘Father! Mother! wake from sleeping!’ Ever hoarser with their weeping: – They will wake no more He is dead, and she death-nearing; And those little ones despairing – Father! save thy Poor (Ireland, p. 45)

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Although there are points in which the craft of this poem almost sinks beneath the weight of sentimentality, the controlled ambiguity of voice is reminiscent of Blake’s more skilful lyricism in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The swinging pendulum of objectivity and subjectivity reaches an apex of expression in the typographical sleight of hand that omits the quotation marks in the final stanza. The subjective voice of the children becomes the objective prayer, tinged by the irony of religious hypocrisy, of an impotent society – ‘Father! save thy Poor’. Blake uses almost exactly the same ploy in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Songs of Innocence, where the total omission of quotation marks makes the closure of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’s’ narration highly ambiguous and highly charged: ‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’ (Songs 12:24, E10). This is not simply the subjective voice of the naïve sweep, who has internalised religious ideology and dutifully murmurs the dogmas of deferred reward. It is a direct plea from the poet for the audience to do their social duty so that they, the sweeps, need not fear their present life. Both Linton and Blake toy with the ideal of a childish Utopia, putting the onus on the reader to actively engage in an imaginative act of emancipation, of seeing grim social reality in order to change it, to envision an emancipated world.

II: Blake and the Beats Emancipation via social imagining is one of the longest-burning torches of Blake’s fame. But the early twentieth century saw the desiccation of Blake as social emancipator, and the embracement of Blake as cultural rebel, liberator of self. The Anglo-American flux is still there. However, Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) was a scion of the Establishment: born in Godalming in Surrey and educated at Eton and Oxford, he was the grandson of the defender of Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and brother of the famous scientist, Julian. His early novels, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), reflected the nihilistic disposition of the 1920s but it was Brave New World (1932), his ironic vision of a Fordist utopia, which established his fame. During the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and France but, in 1937, emigrated to the US. It was at this time that he began his attempt to synthesise science and art, eastern and western philosophy and spirituality, which was later to have a huge impact on the west coast counter-culture following the publication of The Perennial Philosophy (1946) and The Doors of Perception (1954). The Doors of Perception and

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its sequel, Heaven and Hell (1956), deal with Huxley’s experiences of the hallucinogen mescaline and significantly took their titles from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake being key to the attempt by Huxley to describe what he had seen and felt: ‘Most visualizers are transformed by mescaline into visionaries . . . The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen.’30 What was significant for Huxley was Blake’s visionary quality, that he provided, like Buddhism, an unfamiliar view of the world in contrast to the scientifically myopic view of Huxley’s grandfather. With all its talk of boundaries to be crossed and its proverb that became the motto for Huxley’s text, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is, infinite’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell provided a remarkable model for these texts that broke the taboo surrounding hallucinogenic drugs. What Huxley took from Blake was visionary experience and free-thought: what he did not take from Blake, what had ironically disappeared from the work of the author of rebellion against Fordist Americanisation, was the idea of political protest. Post-war America was ready for the particular brand of Blakean mysticism that Huxley imported to its shores, particularly insofar as it appeared to celebrate the individual’s free will to create a universe in his or her own image. Blake is generally not the most important role model for idiosyncratic American fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, but he appears again and again. Tony Tanner has compared the desire of individualistic American writers to resist the ‘rubricizing’ tendency of the language they inherit to Los’s desire in Jerusalem to ‘Create a System, lest [they] be enslav’d by another Mans’: ‘Long before any American writer was bemoaning the fact that we inherit the “agreed pictures” of reality handed down by a past age, Blake had defined the process in “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”[.]’31 Robert Kiernan, for example, has noted the importance of Blake on Louise Glück’s poem The Garden (1976), as well as Jack Spicer, in works such as After Lorca (1957), Billy the Kid (1959) and The Holy Grail (1964).32 Blake is one of the many influences on the eclectic postmodern literature of Thomas Pynchon’s novels such as V (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), but a deeper relationship is to be found in Gregory Orr’s The Red House (1980), of which David Wyatt comments, ‘we begin with Experience, return to the memory of Innocence, and end with Organized Innocence, the nature man conferring with order

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and value as best he can’, as in poems such as ‘Morning Song’ and ‘A Buoyant Song’ and ‘Walking’.33 As we saw in Chapter 2 with particular reference to J. G. Ballard, science fiction has often presented itself as the inheritor of a Romantic visionary poetics, and this is as true of American SF as European, although the latter has stronger connections to Surrealism. Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), for example, invokes Blake and Roethke, as well as various science fiction novels, as instances of the genre that Vonnegut is attempting to create. Elsewhere, the gothic has featured heavily in Ray Bradbury’s work, for example, particularly novels such as The October Country (1955), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and The Halloween Tree (1972), a genre dominated by Poe in America but also greatly influenced by Coleridge, Fuseli and Blake.34 More significantly, Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ is a direct influence on Fahrenheit 451 (1953), his dystopian novel of the near future in which books are destroyed by sinister firemen. The title of part three, ‘Burning Bright’, invokes the opening lines of Blake’s poem: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (E24) According to Donald Watt, ‘Blake’s tiger is the generative force of the human imagination, the creative/destructive force which for him is the heart of man’s complex nature.’35 The novel’s protagonist, Montag, becomes Bradbury’s tiger as he flees an overly tame society and, at this point, finally burns with a psychic fire that he has failed to achieve in the alienated, materialistic world he has thus far inhabited. The most profound influence of Blake on post-war American literature, however, must be via the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg (1926–97). While Ginsberg made claims for social and political effects of the Beat movement, many of these influences really stem from Ginsberg alone, and, despite his early years in a politically conscious household, these emerged only slowly. The background of the Beat Generation was war abroad and division between communism and capitalism at home, with increasing tension between radicals and government – a state not dissimilar to that of England during the Napoleonic Wars. Despite the apparent affluence of 1950s America, the unconventional work and lives of figures such as Jack Kerouac,

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William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, of course, Ginsberg, reflected a deep disaffection with the increasingly restrictive mental society of the United States. Revolving around the twin suns of Greenwich Village, New York, and Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, the orbit of the Beats (a term first used with a double meaning of beatific and downbeat by Kerouac in the early 1950s36) was rhythmic and improvisational, eschewing traditional forms to discover its muse in jazz, drugs, sex and mysticism. The Bard as seen by Kerouac (particularly the ‘Zen lunacy bard’ of The Dharma Bums) and Ginsberg could be, as Huxley realised, a visionary and a freethinker, but his revolt against materialism was not simply an abstract revolt; rather, in the US of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a revolt against the materialist consumer culture that turned a blind eye to McCarthy and manufactured bombs to ravage Korea and Vietnam, all in the name of containing communism and preserving democracy. After an attempt to conform to middle-class normality and reject his homosexuality, Ginsberg became involved with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and devoted himself to the ideals of the Beat movement. Travelling widely (part of his experience including deportation from two socialist countries, Cuba and Czechoslovakia, in the same year), Ginsberg became deeply involved in the counter-culture movements of the 1960s. Although much of his politics could be seen as naïve at this time – he himself later remarked on his foolishness in insisting that issues of personal and sexual liberty took precedence over other concerns – it was precisely such idealism, and a huge amount of work, that helped to establish many of his nonconformist principles (such as an acceptance of homosexuality) as well as the reputation of the Beats. As his most recent biographer, Barry Miles, remarks, ‘Allen single-handedly willed the Beat Generation into being by his unshakeable belief that his friends were all geniuses.’37 Important influences on Ginsberg’s literary style were William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, but he said in a 1967 interview that Blake and Burroughs were most influential on his ‘method’. It was in the summer of 1948 that the Romantic artist changed the life of the Beat poet completely in a well-known incident. As he was reading ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ while masturbating, he heard what he felt to be ‘the voice of Blake himself’ and experienced a vision over the roofs of East Harlem: He suddenly had a deep understanding of the meaning of the poem and realised that he was the sunflower. Simultaneous with

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the auditory vision, came a heightened visual perception: the afternoon sunlight through the window took on an extraordinary clarity. The sky was ancient, the gateway to infinity, the same deep blue universe seen by Blake himself, and Allen knew this was the ‘sweet golden clime’ itself. He was already in it. ‘I suddenly realised that this existence was it!’ he said, ‘This was the moment I was born for. This imitation, this consciousness of being alive unto myself. The spirit of the universe was what I was born to realise.’38 A sense of universal attachment was repeated as this voice read ‘The Sick Rose’ and ‘The Little Girl Lost’ and Ginsberg was convinced that this was his calling to be a poet: ‘from now on I’m chosen, blessed, sacred poet’.39 As the vision faded (somewhat to the relief of his father, Louis, who was by this time estranged from Naomi), Ginsberg began to study Blake assiduously, looking for ways to recover the visionary gleam as in his poem, ‘Vision 1948’, published in Empty Mirror (1961). It was his attempt to recreate this encounter that led Ginsberg to experiment with sex, drugs and poetry. He later claimed that his attempt to grasp hold of Eternity led to fifteen years of ‘stupefaction’ until, during a visit to India, he was advised by a Tibetan lama, Dudjom Rinpoche, to stop clinging to his visions. When Ginsberg finally let go his attempts to recreate the Harlem experience he was, ironically, able to take Blake on as his guru, rejecting an overpowering and anxious influence for a more fruitful relationship. And yet, as John Muckle remarks: ‘His vision of Blake in Harlem . . . may have laid an intolerable burden on him, but it also provided him with permission: evidence that he was a visionary, a position from which to speak his political critique of America.’40 Ginsberg taught Blake extensively at the Buddhist Naropa Institute, analysing The Four Zoas in detail, as well as classes on William Carlos Williams and English literature, conjoining his old and new gurus as spiritual literature. In his 1988 text, Your Reason and Blake’s System, Ginsberg made explicit what he saw as the relationship between Blake and Buddhism, that ‘the imagery in Urizen is very similar to a lot of extraordinarily baroque Tibetan imagery describing the birth of ego or the appearance of ego in open space’.41 The influence of Blake on Ginsberg’s own poetry became less obvious as an influence in the 1970s and 1980s (although Franca Bellarsi has recently suggested that Ginsberg’s later, Buddhist poetry, remains close to the spirit of Blake’s work42). Nonetheless, that influence never disappeared: he had recorded William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience on the MGM/Verve label in 1970 shortly after being involved with Abbie

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Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies in Chicago, and many of his live performances over the next two-and-a-half decades were punctuated with Songs such as ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Sick Rose’. Towards the end of his life in 1994 he was moved when reading at St James in Picadilly, the church where Blake had worshipped. Of Ginsberg’s poetry, ‘Howl’ is, with ‘Sunflower Sutra’, the most Blakean: taken together, one is almost tempted to see them as his own songs of Experience and Innocence. The reading at the Six Gallery by six poets (Michael McLure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia and Kerouac – who did not read – as well as Ginsberg) on 7 October 1955 established both the reputation of Ginsberg as a poet and the nucleus of the Beat Generation on the west coast. Ginsberg’s performance of ‘Howl’ as primal scream electrified both the audience and his fellow poets: McLure later said that it marked Ginsberg’s transformation from ‘a quiet brilliant burning bohemian’ into ‘epic vocal bard’, while Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to him: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript.’43 I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . . who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war[.] (Collected Poems, p. 126) In Ginsberg’s rant, the powerful long line that rages with echoes of Jerusalem, Milton and The Four Zoas breaks down boundaries as he resounds the jeremiad of Los against the dark days of Albion: The banks of the Thames are clouded! the ancient porches of Albion are Darken’d! they are drawn thro’ unbounded space, scatter’d upon The Void in incoherent despair! Cambridge & Oxford & London, Are driven among the starry Wheels, rent away and dissipated, In Chasms & Abysses of sorrow, enlarg’d without dimension, terrible[.] (J 5:1–5, E147)

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Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! (Collected Poems, p. 131) One of the most remarkable features of ‘Howl’, and certainly that which marked the direction of Ginsberg’s poetic career, was a biographical and confessional mode of address. The combination of intimacy and prophecy was continued in ‘Kaddish’ (1959), for example, initiated as a funeral prayer for his mother, Naomi, when Ginsberg learnt that there had not been enough Jewish men present at her burial to sing the traditional descant for the dead. Much of his poetic technique came from the tutelage of William Carlos Williams, but as Ostriker points out there are many passages in Blake’s own poetry that are ‘transparently autobiographical’ particularly as he rages against the injustices of his time. What is more, the shamanic madness of the poem provides a violent yoking together of the sacred and profane, realistic and surrealistic, comic and tragic that castigates the obsessive sexual and human sacrifice of Moloch before arriving at the same conclusion as Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’.44 As Louis Simpson observes, the poem was an experiment in what could be done with the long line to build up a more expressionistic form of poetry that would expose the System of America in its ‘awful state, complete anarchy, violent chaos’.45 David Wyatt’s comments on Gregory Orr seem pertinent to Ginsberg at this point: we begin with Experience, return to the memory of Innocence, and end with Organised Innocence. In his vision of 1948, the annunciation of Ginsberg’s bardic vision was through the poem ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’, and it was an unlikely encounter with a sunflower on the banks of the San Francisco docks that led to one of Ginsberg’s most beautiful sketches, ‘Sunflower Sutra’ (1955): Look at the Sunflower, he [Kerouac] said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust – – I rushed up enchanted – it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake – my visions – Harlem . . .

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The echoes of this blast are clearest in part II of ‘Howl’:

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Similar to the dream of the young chimney sweep in Songs of Innocence in which enslaved children are freed from their ‘coffins of black’ (E10), Ginsberg’s illumination is that just as the sunflower is not the grimy, battered appearance alongside the tracks of the Southern Pacific locomotives, this being rather the atman of the brahman that is a sunflower, so ‘we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside’. Of the Beats, Ginsberg was the one closest to the hippie movement of the 1960s and the most politically active. His Blakean vision had always seen spiritual illumination as part of personal enlightenment, but as the Vietnam war bit ever more deeply into the consciousness of America, so this vision also became more overtly politicised in books such as The Fall of America (1972). ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, Ginsberg’s ‘most important single antiwar poem’, calls on Blake, Krishna and Whitman amongst others to empower him to end the Vietnam war and comes closest to Jerusalem, both loving and desperately attempting to save his country from its error.46 Although Ginsberg (as Ostriker observes) often misreads Blake and simply uses him for ‘space-filling throwaways’, Blake is also the model for Ginsberg of a poet who combines personal and political revelation with visionary power. This takes place not simply on the level of Ginsberg’s overt beliefs, but also within his poetic forms, enabling him to develop what Terence Diggory calls the ‘urban pastoral’, which ‘distinguishes his version of pastoral from the dominant and essentially conservative “post-revolutionary” mode’ typical to the genre.47 Ginsberg maintained a belief in the radicalism of innocence. Many of his beliefs – Buddhist chanting to deter the minions of the police state whether in Prague or Chicago, the quick fix of mind-expanding drugs (although, presumably, not the methadone that ruined his lover, Peter Orlovsky) – often appear foolish; nonetheless, Ginsberg also exemplified what Theodor Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), termed a line of protest that reached back to ‘the ecstatic radicalism of Blake’, one where ‘the issue is never as simple as social justice; rather the key words and images are those of time and eternity, madness and vision, heaven and the spirit’.48

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A perfect beauty of a sunflower! A perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! A sweet natural eye to the hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! (Collected Poems, pp. 138–9)

Radical Blake

The liberatory counter-culture of 1960s America espoused by Ginsberg was transmitted across the Atlantic via his participation in the first International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in June 1965 (shortly after he had been voted King of the May festival in Prague). That event crystallised the constellation of a ‘secret’ generation of British poets such as John Cotton, Dave Cunliffe and Michael Horovitz, proponents of jazz and oral poetry that had lain hidden during the critical atmosphere of the 1950s. Michael Horovitz (1935–) edited examples of this poetry in his 1969 collection Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, which he claimed as a ‘fresh renaissance’ of ‘the voice of the Bard’ and to which was appended a series of ‘Blakean’ Afterwords.49 Horovitz denounced the fact that experimental writings had been thrown aside by academics and professionals in the wake of an industrialising New Criticism and, with Anna Lovell, Cornelius Cardew, John McGrath and David Sladen established New Departures, a ‘Blakeheaded commedia dell’arte’ that was the first magazine in Britain to publish the work of William Burroughs. This group emphasised the importance of live performances in the wake of the International Poetry Incarnation (and doubtless recalling the mythology of the Six Poets at the Six Gallery), looking to bars, clubs and musical venues rather than literary festivals or colleges. The reading of Blake’s ‘heritance’ as the poetry of emancipation was not restricted to Ginsberg. John Cotton, for example, in ‘Tiger Caged’, reiterated Blake’s famous lyric as a power currently restrained but ready at any moment to break free in what Anne Cluysenaar has called ‘a harder form of innocence’ that rejects simplistic idealism: The tiger treads his cage. 400 lbs of muscle, bone And thwarted purpose rage.50 Cotton’s tiger of ‘thwarted purpose’ offers the link between the Blakean idealism of Ginsberg and Horowitz and a darker vision of Blake’s, that of ‘Poison Tree’ and ‘The Sick Rose’, as well as the visionary of the Dionysian massacres that end The Four Zoas. It was the infernal perception of Blake that attracted Ginsberg’s fellow traveller, William Seward Burroughs II (1914–98), grandson of the inventor of the adding machine. Born in St Louis, Missouri, Burroughs drifted after graduating from Harvard in 1936, travelling across the States, through Mexico, South America, Europe and Tangiers where, free to be queer

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and pursue his addiction to junk, he wrote The Naked Lunch (1959), the book that, with Ginsberg’s Howl, ended literary censorship in America.51 Tony Tanner has compared Burroughs attempts to create ‘a mythology appropriate to the new age and environment which has been brought about by modern inventions’ to Blake: just as Burroughs is something of a mystic, Blake’s mythology has been concerned with destructivity and control.52 Burroughs remarked of his mythographical writing: Heaven and hell exist in my mythology. Hell consists of falling into enemy hands, into the hands of the virus power, and heaven consists of freeing oneself from this power, of achieving inner freedom, freedom from conditioning. I may add that none of the characters in my mythology are free. If they were free they would not still be in the mythological system, that is, in the cycle of conditioned action.53 At first glance, the mythological project of Burroughs would appear to be directly antithetical to Blake’s, yet Blake’s shifting mythus in texts such as The Four Zoas offer what Peter Otto has referred to as a critique of transcendence. Post-modern emphases in criticism, as in the work of De Luca, have registered a ‘shift of attention . . . from the shaping imagination of the author to the reader’s creation of meaning’, which in turn ‘directs us to a human rather than transcendant reality’.54 We are not offered an objective reality, therefore, in the system of Blake’s Zoas, but rather an example of the systems that we must create as readers lest we be enslaved to those of others. Likewise, in works such as The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine (1961) and Nova Express (1965), Burroughs created crazy and counter-intuitive systems that obliterate the subject through cut-ups and fold-ins. In his final trilogy, Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1984) and The Western Lands (1987), Burroughs creates a much more overtly mythological system but one that still employs his earlier techniques to assign the reader the task of creating reality. As Angela Carter writes, his ‘project is to make time stand still for a while, one which is more frequently that of religion than of literature, and there are ways in which Burroughs’ work indeed resembles that of another William, the Blake of the self-crafted mythology of the Prophetic Books, although’, she adds, ‘it must be said that Burroughs is much funnier.’55 This, of course, assumes that one leaves aside such texts as The Marriage of

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Heaven and Hell, the work of a ‘confident, or more correctly cocky, republican Devil’ who took his pleasure in knocking angels.56 Through his mythology, then, Burroughs has sought, in the words of Jonathan Eburne, to evacuate ‘a bankrupt subject position by identifying with the “otherness” of the American cultural margins’.57 The endgame of this cultural deviation, this evil of the other, is a return to the ecstasy lost by modern, bankrupt man: I want to reach the Western Lands – right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It’s a frozen sewer. It’s known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy. How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’? You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair.58 In Jerusalem, Blake had located the ‘circumference of Eternity’ to the west, and it was from the west that Orc had risen, announcing the spirit of revolution. Like Blake, like the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks, Burroughs locates his eternity to the west, but where does one look from the shores of America? This, as we shall see, is precisely the question that is asked by Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, but Burroughs is also clear that the road to revolution leads through revulsion, the Duad, river of filth and shit in which our sins are washed away because, in the words of Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountains and patron saint of antinomians and assassins, we learn that there is no sin: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.’59

III: I was born a slave but I go to be free Like Ginsberg, then, Burroughs seeks spiritual satori, although his methods of slicing and dicing the alienation of control are very different to those of Ginsberg. If liberation from control is spiritual, however, this does not mean that Burroughs did not neglect its political aspect. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs begins with the very arena of maritime slavery and oppositional piracy that forms the backdrop to Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra:

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[Captain] Mission explored the Madagascar coast and found a bay ten leagues north of Diégo-Suaraz. It was resolved to establish here the shore quarters of the Republic – erect a town, build docks, and have a place they might call their own. The colony was called Libertaria and was placed under the Articles drawn up by Captain Mission. The Articles state, among other things: all decisions with regard to the colony to be submitted by vote by the colonists; the abolition of slavery for any reason including debt; the abolition of the death penalty; and freedom to follow any religious beliefs or practices without sanction or molestation.60 The language of Libertaria is that of Jubilee, its constitution that of a multiracial, motley crew that ‘helped to win numerous victories for the revolution’.61 As we have already seen, Linebaugh and Rediker present Blake as a spokesman for the Jubilee of the Atlantic, and it is also significant how at the end of the twentieth century others have taken up Blake as a spokesman for slaves in the lands of the free, of whom the writer David Dabydeen and film maker Jim Jarmusch provide two exceptional examples. David Dabydeen (1955– ) was born and raised on a sugar plantation in Guyana before studying in England. As well as lecturing at the University of Warwick, Dabydeen has published several novels and collections of poetry, as well as two studies of eighteenth-century art, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century British Art (1985) and Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain (1987). Slave Song (1984), a book described by the Caribbean Times as ‘pioneering’ in its use of Creole to explore the angry and crude energy of Guyanan slaves and labourers, uses the illustrations of the Stedman narrative, two of them engraved by Blake, two more by Bartolozzi. Dabydeen himself refers to Creole as a ‘naturally tragic language’ formed by slavery, indentured labour and brutality, full of obscenities ‘like fresh faeces’: ‘If one has learnt and used Queen’s English for some years, the return to Creole is painful, almost nauseous for the language is uncomfortably raw . . . like a wound. One has to shed one’s protective sheath of abstracts and let the tongue move freely in blood again. One has to get accustomed to the unsheathing of the tongue and the contact with raw matter’ (Slave Song, p. 14). The songs and poems contained in this collection are of a world where pain and labour are the norm, as in ‘Song of the Creole Gang Women’ and ‘The Servant’s Song’, where rape, murder and violence are commonplace and casual (‘For Mala’, ‘Slave Song’). Dabydeen does not wallow in the dejection of forced, brutish labour,

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however: the slave of the title poem retaliates against his condition, and there are moments of tenderness and beauty in the collection, as in ‘Guyana Pastoral’ or ‘The Canecutter’s Song’. Of the illustrations included in the text, four are taken from Stedman’s Narrative: a slave being broken on the rack, a rebel Negro, a female slave with a weight chained to her ankle, and a Surinam planter in his morning dress. The first of these is the most shocking, depicting a prostrate slave bound to a wooden frame, one hand hacked off and his body covered with welts as another slave beats him to death. In the background is a gallows, reiterating the ultimate sanction of the white man in this desolate colony. In Slave Song, this image is placed against the title poem, making it much more violent: the song itself ends with a rude rejection of oppression – ‘Me still gat life!’ – as the beaten slave fantasises what his ‘gold flooding’ cock can do, that as long as men live they still desire (Slave Song, pp. 28–30). This almost Orcish desire comes to the fore in the second poem to use a Stedman illustration, ‘Nightmare’. Dabydeen claims in his translation of the Creole that the canecutter’s voice is ironic as he repeats the white woman’s fantasy of being raped: this, frankly, is not evident in the poem itself, and his claim that the poem rejects the animalistic portrayal of black or Indian slaves seems to come more from the illustration of a rebel Negro, portrayed as a Rousseauesque noble savage. More appropriate are the illustrations of a chained slavewoman and the Surinam landowner. The former image accompanies the poem ‘Slavewoman’s Song’ at the centre of which is inarticulate grief, the slavewoman of the title (addressed by another slave) howling but unable to explain why: Ya howl – Hear how ya howl – Tell me wha ya howl foh Tell me noh? (Slave Song, p. 38) In the accompanying image, the woman is bowed beneath an object that she carries as though it is water or laundry while one hand covers her grieving head. The chain from her ankle indicates that the thing crushing her head is a weight, of no help to her, its value simply that it maintains her in bondage. In the final image taken from Blake, that of the Surinam planter that accompanies ‘Brown Skin Girl’, an arrogant slaver is served drinks by a semi-naked woman, a simple illustration of the prostitution attendant on colonialism.

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Rather surprisingly, Dabydeen does not offer an analysis of these images, amongst the most powerful of early anti-slavery propaganda, in Hogarth’s Blacks, although his main aim there is to demonstrate that black people ‘had become very much a part of white society’.62 The subject of slavery is more explicitly dealt with in his 1996 novel, The Counting House, the story of the significantly named ‘Albion Plantation’ in Guyana, which was owned by William Gladstone’s uncle before his death in 1889. Through the story of Rohini and Vidia, Dabydeen explores the incidents surrounding the transatlantic trade in ‘coolies’, indentured labourers from India who were transported to Guyana to replace African slaves freed in 1838, particularly after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Within the sphere of the Albion Plantation, African and Indian exist at best in an uneasy coalition dramatised in the narrative as a struggle between the black woman servant Miriam and Rohini for the affections of Gladstone. As Miriam asks: Albion is we land, we man and we story and I tell it how I want . . . What right you have to make baby for Glandstone? Albion is a nigger, we slave and slaughter her, Albion is we story, and you coolie who only land this morning best keep quiet till you can deserve to claim a piece. (Counting House, pp. 170–1) Working in the sugarcane factories of the Albion Plantation, dark satanic mills of labour, Vidia, Rohini, Miriam and all the wage slaves are brutalised and made vicious in the service of the hard taskmaster, King Cane; provided with nothing better, they will fight for every piece of their slavery they can. Even Gladstone and the British are brutalised by the trade, as they realise. In the face of rebellion, mutiny, the ease with which British soldiers can rape, mutilate and murder reveals how shallow are the foundations of civilisation: Such evolution [of cruelty] could not be tolerated for it represented a threat to England itself. The solder would eventually return home with the habits of a spontaneous brute. The crime and disorder of the colony, which he carried with him like a virus, would sicken England. (Counting House, p. 138) The Plantation, then, mirrors Blake’s vision of Albion in his fall: Plantation Albion was a single factory with only so many thousand

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The nascent worldwide economy that would flourish into full-scale globalisation in the late twentieth century is a machine that grinds the souls of its citizens down in ‘the mills of Satan’. (M 11:6, E104) It is in just such a mill, or, more precisely, the Dickinson Metalworks of Machine, that William Blake finds himself in Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful film Dead Man (1995). Jarmusch (1953– ) was born in Akron, Ohio, and educated at Columbia University and the Institute of Film and TV, New York University, before going on to become one of America’s best independent directors, making comic and touching films such as Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991) and Ghost Dog (1999), as well as performing in genuinely bizarre features such as Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989). In Dead Man, William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland, travels to the frontier town of Machine where he is to take up a new position in the Dickinson Metalworks. As the train on which he travels crosses the state borders, he is approached by the engine fireman (Crispin Glover), who appears in the carriage as a diabolical messenger: this devil tells him, prophetic, that there is no job in Machine – which is indeed the case and, after an encounter in which he shoots dead Charles Dickinson (Gabriel Byrne), Blake is forced to flee the violent and sordid town into the backwoods. Here he encounters Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native American who saves his life and takes him on a journey through the wilderness.63 The film, in beautiful monochrome, is heavily symbolic: the entrance into another world is marked by the engine fireman, who announces that Machine is the end of the line, the frontier, the border of hell. As with the just man in the Argument to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake will plant ‘the perilous path’, followed by villains, who leave ‘the paths of ease, / To walk in perilous paths, and drive / The just man into barren climes’ (Marriage, 2:14–6, E33). Almost from the moment of his arrival in Machine, Blake is a dead man, a bounty on his head, but he has also been dead long before this moment, living in a world of ‘mathematical proportion’ mocked by naked, human beauty. Dickinson Metalworks, presided over by John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), is the first circle of Blake’s hell, physical in its furnaces and anvils, metaphysical as a Kafkaesque comedy of meaninglessness where Blake finds himself with no job, no purpose and no

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acres of cane, but whole continents were drawn into its creation – slaves from Africa, coolies from India, managers from England, tools from America.’ (Counting House, pp. 117–8).

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succour. His encounter with a flower-seller and prostitute, Thel Russell (Mili Avatal) initiates his entrance into the second circle of hell, one where potential love is destroyed by her murder and Blake’s accidental killing of Charles Dickinson. Like Francesco and Paolo in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno, they meet briefly and are torn apart, Thel an innocent who has left the vales of Har and fallen into a world of violent experience, carrying a gun ‘because this is America’. Blake’s flight into the wilderness appears to begin the third circle of hell, one of loneliness and eventual death, but his salvation comes in the form of Nobody, a foul-mouthed Native American who uses English as do the Creole slaves in Dabydeen’s poetry. Nobody, captured as a child by the English, has learnt the ‘powerful words’ of Blake’s poetry and becomes a spiritual guide to the very much diminished figure of the accountant, revealing his former life as a poet and painter as well as his current role, a killer of white men, one whose ‘poetry will now be written with blood’. As part of this role, the first words Nobody speaks to Blake when he hears his name are taken from ‘Auguries of Innocence’: Every Night & every Morn Some to Misery are Born Every Morn & every Night Some are Born to sweet delight Some are Born to sweet delight Some are Born to Endless Night (E492) Blake’s baffled reply to this is, ‘I don’t understand’ and, in an interview with Jayne Margetts, Jarmusch comments on his use of Blake: I can’t honestly cite a specific, concrete reason why he entered the script, except that while I was reading books by Native American Indians on Native American thought, it struck me that many of Blake’s (the character) ideas and writings sounded particularly true of Blake’s Proverbs From Hell, which, along with other fragments of poetry, are quoted by the character Nobody throughout the film.64 In contrast to Nobody, the three guns hired to murder Blake bicker, quarrel and eventually murder each other until only one is left. Motivated by the same greed that drove the railroads west, they commit horrors upon each other that imitate the atrocities rained

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down on the Amerindians. Whereas Nobody protects Blake, using all his senses to keep them ahead of the hired guns, Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen) is a stripped-down, hollowed-out and spectral murderer, driven by a murderous lust and the desire for money. Following the simplest conventions of the Western, he is dressed in black against Nobody’s white: as Blake’s dying body sails to the west in the final frames of the film, this dark-clad spectre kills, and is in turn killed by, his benevolent emanation. Dead Man is a meditation, a spiritual journey from the heart of darkness that lies not in the wilderness but the wild west of Machine. William Blake is dead, from the bullet in his heart, because he has forgotten all his poetry, and because he has lost the means to communicate with the spirit world and other men. Blake is not, however, as fallen as the hypocritical trading post missionary (Alfred Molina) who, when he sees Nobody, counts himself as one of the Elect and calls upon Christ to wash the world of heathens and Philistines, to which Nobody replies with a line from ‘The Everlasting Gospel’: ‘The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my Visions Greatest Enemy’ (E524). Blake is not one of the Elect, hard of heart and secure in his complacent single vision: he is, rather, one of the Redeemed who can even become a Reprobate, taking on the sins of others as when he tells the missionary that he is not a Christian but ‘damned to hell’. When Blake is briefly abandoned by Nobody (who cannot travel through certain tribal lands), he encounters the corpse of a deer and lies down next to it; this is Blake’s first vision: looking up at the sky, as the engine fireman had told him, he recognises that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ (Marriage 25, E45). Dead Man is one example, then, of the ways in which American literature and art has attempted to reconcile a Blakean dilemma between vision and materialism, that the imaginative perception of the world is the first step to its transformation. There is much more, then, to Blake’s endurance in America than simply the embodiment of individualism: his voice is, rather, a creole voice, intermediary between the canon of British culture in which he sits so oddly and those dispossessed slaves to whom he so often speaks, providing words that they take up as their own. As Linebaugh and Rediker observe, the Orc who rises from the depths of the Atlantic is red-skinned and also ‘the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa’: with that ecstatic shout, Blake began his praise-song of the American Revolution, in which the meaning of ‘America’ was no

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While Mellor and other critics may argue that Blake has erased difference in his visions of liberty, the fact remains that few other poets have so celebrated opposition to slavery. His text abounds with deep sympathy for the misery of slaves in bondage, and joy in their release: Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs The Ohio shall wash his stains from me I was born a slave but I go to be free (‘Merlins prophecy’, E473)

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more restricted to the thirteen states of the U.S.A. than the meaning of ‘revolution’ was restricted to the mutilating Constitution, which treated each African American as three fifths of a human being. Blake’s America was an African America, and his revolution included the emancipation of the whole person.65

5

I: Self enjoyings or self denial? William Blake is the bête noire of feminist reappropriation, the great English poet of unleashed sexual energy, who reduced his wife to tears by suggestions of extra-marital sex (probably backed up by the ‘sexual magic’ of the Swedenborgian church). He is the contradictory decrier of women’s sexual repression – ‘The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion? / Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude, / Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire’ (VDA 7:9–11, E50) – who also insisted that Catherine got down on her knees and begged his brother Robert’s forgiveness in an argument between the two (Life, pp. 50–1). Similarly, a celebrator of the human form divine – almost never missing an opportunity to sneak in a gargantuan penis or macro-clitoris – Blake portrayed the female as a conniving knitter of veils and gossamer chains, poised to entrap the naked male psyche: Now comes the night of Enitharmon’s joy! Who shall I call? Who shall I send? That Woman, lovely Woman! May have dominion? Arise O Rintrah thee I call! & Palambron thee! Go! Tell the human race that Woman’s love is Sin! That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come: Forbid all Joy, & from her childhood shall the little female Spread nets in every secret path. (E 5:1–9, E62) 120

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Before the mandatory sharp intake of breath, followed by the denunciation of Blake as a patriarchal wimp who cannot face female independence, it is imperative that we return to first principles. It is all too easy to portray Blake as a metaphysician of masculinity. Blake’s critique is no such thing: rather his critique is struggle, nothing more and nothing less. Helen Bruder, for example, has argued that Enitharmon is not portrayed as the real power behind the throne, as many critics have assumed, but rather as a patsy to patriarchy, and that Europe deals with the ‘ironic unmasking’ of a myth of female dominance.1 Throughout the twentieth century, Blake has often been seen as a repressive figure for feminism, particularly as his critical reputation expanded after the Second World War, his most trenchant critic being Anne Mellor.2 As another dead white male, one of the ‘big six’ of Romanticism, his romantic rebellion against authoritarian Enlightenment culture has been less palatable to feminism than to other theoretical movements such as Marxism and post-structuralism, his case not being helped by apparently misogynist proclamations. Typical of critical approaches to Blake’s writings is Myra Glazer’s comparison of Blake to Lawrence: ‘the female chosen by Blake and Lawrence for a hieros gamos with the male is one whose psychic energy is born of male spiritual, imaginative power.’3 It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that Blake has indeed been a source of inspiration to women artists. At the same time that his vision appears to reify the distinctions between the sexes into all-too-familiar forms, essences of human nature that allow no room for manoeuvre, his combative, confrontational stance encourages dialogue and dialectic. As Helen Bruder remarks: Blake is of value in feminism not because he maintained an exemplary and unwavering feminist commitment but rather because he took sexual power seriously and engaged with many of the contemporary discourses and contexts in which it was being exercised or resisted. Moreover, and perhaps more important still, Blake’s real ‘feminist’ gesture is that he constructs a notion of femininity centred upon the concept of dissent.4 Why should we expect that the one constant, sustaining relationship in his life for over forty years – his relationship with Catherine as partner, workmate, conspirator, lover, inspirer – should any less be part and parcel of that struggle and not be entailed and entangled with dissent? Ignoring the nature of how Blake produced those startling,

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illuminating, disturbing works, working shoulder to shoulder with the one person who was really privy to the process and product of his genius, is too often a compound error, ignoring her role in the process and product of that genius. The sheer effort to produce those works in the particular social, political, artistic, economic and domestic space that the Blake’s occupied is too often written off before we even reach the starting blocks. Thus feminist criticism is too often deprived of the most potent inspirational verve that Blake’s work has given to women writers and critics: a space of articulated struggle. Before suggesting an alternative reading to ‘down-trodden wife/ patriarchial producer’, our case is bolstered by evidence in Blake’s own work indicating his acute sensitivity to feminist ideals struggling within the grind of reality. Nelson Hilton has persuasively suggested that there is internal evidence in Visions of the Daughters of Albion attesting to Blake’s knowledge of Mary Wollstonecraft’s disastrous infatuation with Henry Fuseli. If Hilton is right, then Blake is engaged in carving a subtle space in which to articulate not just female desire, or the Female Will, but the struggle of the female will and female desire in a closed society. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a catalyst of closure, from the initial closing of the Marygold in ‘her golden shrine’ (VDA 1:10, E46) to the skull-cave endplate where the three protagonists are bound in a triangular relationship. And this is the point. It is social relationships that create the enclosed caverns of the mind, socio-political necessity and expediency that provide the devious threads with which females make their nets of entrapment: How different the eye and ear! How different the world to them! With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer? What are his nets & gins & traps. & how does he surround him With cold folds of abstraction, and with forests of solitude, To build his castles and spires high, where kings & priests may dwell. Till she who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound In spells of law to one she loaths, and must she drag the chain Of life in weary lust! Must chilling murderous thoughts obscure The clear heaven of her eternal spring? To bear the wintry rage Of harsh terror driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night (VDA 5:16–26, E49) Amidst the gnashing of teeth, there is subtle encryption at work in

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these lines. The spinners of social discord, the ‘cold abstractors’ of religious and monarchical privilege are easily identified but their influence is pernicious within the lines of the text itself. The punctuation of the text flowing out from the ‘cold floods of abstraction’, trailing from the ‘forests of solitude’, serves to cleave the female – to the social status quo and from her own sexual identity. Innocent experience is stamped out by a nefarious and nebulous knowledge of social worth : ‘Till she burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound’. The period following ‘youth’ is the textual equivalent of an iron boot pressing down on the face of humanity, the conjunction following being almost cruel in its insistence on the continuum and contrivance of that youth with its own oppression. And if the period is the steel toecap of subjugation, and the conjunction the iron link in a tyrannical chain, then the semi-colon in the same line is the auctioneer’s hammer at a slave market. If ever proof is needed not just of Blake’s exuberant flourish, seen in lines such as ‘Energy is Eternal delight’, but of the shimmering subtlety of Blake’s syntax, here it is. When it is pared right back to its core syntactic and semantic meaning it is transfixing in its lexical, political and social precision: ‘fixed lot; is bound’. There is no mythological shirking here. This is the transaction of chattel slavery, economic slavery and social-domestic slavery. Oothoon has absolutely nowhere to go in this enclosing space: is it any wonder that female energy becomes expended on concocting ‘silken nets and traps of adamant’ to catch ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’ (E50), or that ‘Then com’st thou forth a modest virgin knowing to dissemble / With nets found under the night pillow, to catch virgin joy’? Such weaving and plotting is a necessity of the social market place. Read any Jane Austen novel to see that this is the reality of eighteenth-century social bartering and social manipulation where women are concerned. Blake has simply stripped it naked of its niceties. The nets and gins and traps of marriage certainly seem to have caught Catherine Blake: no one in Blake studies has suffered more from patronising critics. How often – and it seems both futile and frustrating to list the usual suspects here – is she portrayed as the illiterate wife who signed her name with a cross on the marriage register, and, under the Svengali-like influence of Blake, was eventually trained to colour-wash the printed plates (often unintentionally presented as a child being encouraged to fill in a colouring in a book)? This is often padded out with those stories we love to delight in where Blake is concerned – Adam and Eve gleefully naked in their bower of bliss; the

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empty plate that informed Blake it was time to get jobbing again; Catherine submissively reciting Blake’s defence at Chichester against the charge of sedition. Gilchrist’s Life is guilty of propagating a lot of these cheery, pious snippets, and there is a great irony here, as we shall see later. And yet, as the Tate Britain 2001 exhibition of Blake’s work showed, Catherine had considerable artistic talent and expression of her own. Her Agnes and head of William as a young man have been described as being so alike Blake’s own work that they are pale imitations of his style. Why can we not turn this round and begin to consider a little bibliographical heresy? Why can’t we consider the fact that when we talk of Blake’s work we should be talking about the Blakes’ work? Much of this is due to the fact that there is so little space in which to turn. Catherine’s early illiteracy cut her bibliographical vocal chords, and has allowed others to speak for her. The only really effective voice of Catherine may well be (mixed metaphor intended) staring us in the face, and understanding her contribution to the plates of the illuminated books comes back to the core articulation of struggle. Think of Blake’s mythic females and they will often be silent or howling. They struggle literally to speak: ‘For never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise; / But dumb till that dread day when Orc assay’d his fierce embrace’ (A 1:9–10, E51). No invitations can be accepted here to enter a deconstructive debate about difference. This is too well trodden ground, and helps little in understanding the very real struggle that a woman such as Catherine would have had in finding and sustaining a publicly articulated voice. It is more illuminating to compare another lost female in the Blake’s history, one who managed to sustain both a space for herself and for Blake: the aptly named Rebekah Bliss, one of Blake’s earliest collectors. A different kind of struggle was undertaken in relation to Rebekah, the struggle of Keri Davies’s scholarship to recover her from both being a ‘Mrs’ or a ‘Mr’.5 She never married and she maintained a homosocial relationship with a close friend, Ann Whitaker and, because she had what Catherine Blake did not have, money and education, she sustained a large and luscious library, an eighteenth-century women’s ‘room of one’s own’, which included original Blakes. Unfortunately for us (but, we may conjecture, fortunately for Rebekah) because she so effectively maintained that domestic space without patriarchal intrusion her relationship as a reader with Blake’s works remains a private matter. This is a pity but also a potential because both Catherine and Rebekah pose interesting questions as to the female role in producing and

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II: A woman’s estimate Anne Gilchrist (1828–85) is a silent and subtle ball-breaker in literary history. She is a crucial and unrecognised broker between the private and public space of female expression, a woman who embraced professional and poetic struggle and won quiet, important victories for the literary reputations of three men: Walt Whitman, William Blake and her husband, Alexander Gilchrist. Her ‘A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman’ is one of the frankest pieces of immediate criticism written in the nineteenth century. It is a piece that should be taboo, effective because it sells electricity as gentility and it tells us a lot about the ‘subtle nets’ of, arguably, the most important editor Blake (never) had. ‘A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman’ started life as a series of letters written to William Michael Rossetti after he had given her the unedited copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is infusive reading, and was published publicly in The Radical in May 1870. There is firm indication of sound editorial intuition in Anne: Here, at all events, ‘poetic diction’ would not serve – not pretty, soft, colorless words, laid by in lavender for the special life; but such as have had none of the wear and tear of daily life; but such as have stood most, as tell of human heart-beats, as fit closest to the sense, and have taken deep hues of association from the varied experiences of life – those are the words wanted here.6 The editorial mind evinced here was of service to the 1863 edition of Gilchrist’s Life. When Alexander Gilchrist died of scarlet fever in 1861, the uncompleted The Life of William Blake was finished by a working party consisting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and his widow, Anne Gilchrist. Algernon Charles Swinburne had a finger in the pie, which later emerged as William Blake: a Critical Essay, while William James Linton was the facsimilist. There are some telling anomalies between the editorial hands at work in the original twovolume Gilchrist Life. The male fraternity of poet-editors ‘frigging their imagination’ leads to Blake’s poetry being changed wholesale by

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reading Blake’s works, about the private as opposed to the public space of women’s reading, writing, producing. One woman who does provide the space to illuminate some intriguing answers is Anne Gilchrist, who was to reproduce, recover and retain the Blake books in a quite different way to Rebekah and Catherine.

Radical Blake

Rossetti in the selections of Volume II, slipping in the odd new word, snapping up line endings in the name of poetic form. However, the reproduction of Blake’s text in the body of the biographical text, Jerusalem, for example, is not emended apart from grammatical ‘corrections’ and modernisation of spelling. And, tellingly, where amendments are made, they are signalled. For example a quotation on page 190 from Jerusalem, plate 77 (‘To the Christians’) reads in Gilchrist thus: ‘Imagination [is] the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow: and in which we shall live, in our eternal or imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more’ (Life 1863, I, p. 190). The editorial emendation – ‘[is]’ – is clearly bracketed and the creative editing of Rossetti in the selections is certainly not in evidence. The conclusion is that Gilchrist edited the quotations in Volume I. But there is evidence to suggest that it is the forgotten editor and collaborator in the Gilchrist Life who is responsible: Anne, the quietly formidable widow. The effacement of Anne from the Life’s editorial roll of honour had to be corrected by William Michael Rossetti: ‘Mrs Gilchrist has edited it, and (if I may be permitted to say so) very efficiently.’7 If we take Anne’s influence as a rational possibility given this strong and self-effacing comment by William Rossetti, as indeed we must, then what is going on in the textual/sexual spectrum of reproducing Blake at this critical moment in the nineteenth century? Anne Gilchrist displays acute sensitivity to this play of the poet-editor in her comments to Dante Gabriel Rossetti regarding his editorship of Blake’s work in the 1863 edition of The Life of William Blake: ‘I have received since I last wrote you the proofs of the poetical portion of Volume II, and indeed I hardly know how to speak adequately of the satisfaction and delight with which I read them; never, I think, was the task of editorship so admirably performed, if the aim of editorship be to quicken the reader’s insight and enjoyment [our emphasis].’8 Blake, perhaps more than any other Romantic poet, was subject to editorial intrusion. The reason for this is two-fold and ironic. As Jerome McGann points out, there is a problem with Blake’s intense appropriation of the means of textual production: ‘Unfortunately, he could not also assume the role of one crucial component of that institution as it existed in his period: the reviewer.’9 When the critics did begin to take notice of Blake, their critical position on his life and works influenced decisions regarding the reproduction of his text: ‘Blake’s singular personal reputation also made him a subject for editorial liberties. The problems in Shelley’s manuscript poems were

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complex, and there were biographical complications too; but Shelley did not labor under the double disadvantage of self-education and alleged insanity’ (Nineteenth Century, p. 108). With the publication of Gilchrist’s Life, these disadvantages enter into a deal with the nineteenth-century literary establishment, the 1863 edition becoming, in this sense, both the institutionalising and castrating moment of Blake’s reputation. Was it Anne wielding the knife? The critical/institutional mediation of the 1863 Life is a story of control, reaction and revolt; it is also a story of how patriarchal notions of authorship become knitted into the editorial process. However, this does not mean the iron-stamp of manhood is jackbooted all over Blake’s works and reputation without redemption. The textual condition is, as McGann’s describes, a dialectic between author and institution. The publication dialectic as regards the Life occurred not only diachronically between Romantic author and Victorian editor, but also synchronically between female editor and male rebelliousness. Anne Gilchrist is the mother of the text, herself cauterised and cut out by the peacock knives of male performance. But the Oedipal poet-editor doesn’t get it always quite his own way. Swinburne can barely contain his sneering at a cut he would not have made and jabbing a vice-sucked thumb at the ‘virtuous editor’, Anne Gilchrist: ‘Much more I think might have been done at starting without any handling of the hot cinder or treading on the quagmire which a virtuous editor seems so abjectly afraid of.’10 Despite this sneer, Anne Gilchrist appears to be a pure publishing professional, using every ploy, from printers’ schedules to pious publisher, to get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction: I am afraid you will be vexed with me that I was afraid to adopt entirely that most vigorous and admirable little bit a propos of the ‘Daughters of Albion.’ But it was no use to put in what I was perfectly certain Macmillan (who reads all the Proofs) would take out again. I am certain of this from past experiences . . . It might be well perhaps to mention to Mr Swinburne, if he is so kind as to do what was proposed, that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to handle this side of Blake’s writings – that Mr. Macmillan is far more inexorable against any shade of heterodoxy in morals than religion – and that in fact, poor ‘flustered propriety’ would have to be most tenderly and indulgently dealt with.’ (Anne Gilchrist, pp. 127–8) It would be far too easy to accuse Anne Gilchrist of queasiness in the face of breaking taboos, and of misrepresenting Blake to the

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book-reading public. Anne, however, had to strike a balance between the social values of publication (defined and delimited by Macmillan the publisher) and the poetic value of the original work (centred in Blake the author). On one level, this is simply the practicalities of publication. Macmillan would not publish what he saw as morally renegade work. Anne needed to negotiate around this position by ‘smoothing over’ what she herself calls the ‘most vigorous and admirable little bit’ of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. But Swinburne saw the question of Blake’s moral transgression quite differently and wanted to engage with it head on. However, in private, in those letters written later to William Michael Rossetti concerning Leaves of Grass, the Visions of the Daughters of Albion seems to reach a gentle fruition: Always for a woman, a veil woven out of her own soul – never touched upon even, with a rough hand, by this poet. But, for a man, daring, fearless pride in himself, not a mock-modesty woven out of delusions – a very poor imitation of woman’s. Do they not see that this fearless pride, this complete acceptance of themselves, is needful for her pride, her justification? What! is it all so ignoble, so base, that it will not bear the honest light of speech from lips so gifted with ‘the divine power to use words?’ Then what hateful, bitter humiliation for her, to have to give herself up to the reality! (Anne Gilchrist, p. 354) As T. S. Eliot would say, these seem to be ‘Private words spoken to you in public’. The problem associated with the mid-century revival of Blake is how to rehabilitate a radical thinker and visionary mystic into conventional society and canonical literature. Travelling alongside this problem is the struggle of a woman such as Anne Gilchrist to break loose from that convention, from that confining canon. Her investment in the idea of the book is both extraordinary and contradictory. Anne Gilchrist’s vision of what a book is, how a book may mean and convey meaning, is at the heart of her correspondence with Walt Whitman: & the Book that is so dear – my life-giving treasure . . . Your book does indeed say all – book that is not a book, for the first time a man complete, godlike, august, standing revealed the only way possible.11

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Touchingly, and perhaps uniquely, Samuel Palmer describes the Life as belonging to Anne Gilchrist (Anne Gilchrist, pp. 143–5). But in this possession there is, as Palmer himself says, a doubleness. The book in the possession of Anne Gilchrist is both dead and alive, inspired and expired. It is a monument to her dead husband which she devoted her life to completing, infusing the book with her own creativity, her own editorial and authoritative power. Rather than the printed page signalling the oblique space of a ‘tissue of [arbitrary] signs’,12 the publication of the author’s work is an act of preservation for the late Romantics and early Victorians. In Donald Reiman’s description of the Golden Age of editing, the editor is co-creator with the dead author, reconstructing works out of the obscurity of manuscript fragments, or as Thomas Carlyle would put it, creating order out of chaos: ‘where the author’s own publications and manuscripts seemed obscured, the editor or publisher often “clarified”.’13 Gilchrist’s Life is a very peculiar example of the power and force of the book in the realm of mourning and memorial. The Life of William Blake (1863), is a double memorial, commemorating both William Blake and Alexander Gilchrist. Anne Gilchrist is not only concerned with the textual editing of Blake’s works, but with the creation of a book that will be a memorial to her husband. Donald Reiman chooses well in placing the widow first in the line of possible ‘mourning’ editors. Anne Gilchrist is a gentle but formidable character, passive and active, persuasive and aggressive. There is a feeling in much of the correspondence concerning the 1863 edition of the Life that the book exists in a strange twilight zone between the living and the dead. In a letter written to a relative in 1863 Anne Gilchrist describes the labour of love that the Life became after Alexander Gilchrist’s death: That beloved task (the Blake) kept my head above water in the deep sea of affliction, and now it is ended I sometimes feel like to sink – to sink, that is, into pining discontent – and a relaxing of the hold upon all high aims. I find it so hard to get on at anything beyond the inevitable daily routine, deprived of that beloved and genial Presence, which so benignantly and tenderly fostered all good, strengthening the hands, cheering the heart, quickening the intellect even. (Anne Gilchrist, p. 142) There is an uncanny sense in reading this letter that the ‘beloved and genial Presence’ Anne speaks of may be either the ghostly presence of

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Radical Blake

Alexander Gilchrist or the material presence of the book, The Life of William Blake, remembered in terms of physical and mental labour and volition. Anne’s words reflect Ruskin’s comments on the book in Sesame and Lilies: ‘But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it’.14 Anne’s own voice, unfortunately, has been buried for a long time. The twentieth century, however, produced other female voices, agitated, inspired and articulated by William Blake.

III: Beckoning like the hands of Blake Important to such women writers, who have responded to Blake’s perception of the female condition in texts such as Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion in positive ways, is the recovery a prophetic mode that plugs into a space of legitimate female dissent. Tony Trigilio, for example, has argued for a modern apocalyptic ‘tradition’ of prophecy that extends through the work of Blake, Ginsberg and H. D.15 Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who wrote under the pen-name H. D. and became part of the group known as the Imagists, was psychoanalysed by Freud in 1933–4, which, alongside her experiences of the Blitz, contributed to her long poem Trilogy, comprising The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). It is this trilogy that, Trigilio argues, draws closest to Blake, particularly as H. D employs the language of Moravianism, the dissenting sect that did not follow codified systems of authority and which, fleeing persecution in England, established the community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where she was born: ‘Like Blake in Milton, H. D. seeks to transform biblical verity into variant through a method that reaches backwards for authorized models of prophetic language that can be deployed as representations of futurist, apocalyptic modes of consciousness.’16 A more direct response by a female writer who found in Blake a source of self-determinacy at the margins was that of the poet and critic Kathleen Raine (1908– ). Raised for much of her childhood in the rural community of Bavington, Northumberland, an experience related in the first volume of her Autobiographies, Farewell Happy Fields (1973), Raine’s early encounters with the world were pagan in an almost Wordsworthian sense. Whilst studying science at Girton College, Cambridge, however, Raine found herself in the midst of a series of positivist and materialist (Marxist or logical postivist) ‘experiments’, ideological positions that dominated much intellectual life in

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Cambridge during the 1930s with patron saints such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was as part of a slow reaction to this intellectual world, as well as a series of failed marriages, that Raine returned to the paganism of her childhood; unlike Wordsworth, however, this was not to be the glimpse of a far-off visionary gleam that would never be recaptured in the world of adult duty; rather, in volumes such as Stone and Flower (1943), The Lost Country (1971) and The Oracle in the Heart (1980), Raine’s models were instead W. B. Yeats, Edwin Muir and Blake. The influence of Blake on Raine’s work and thinking is most obvious in her critical work, notably the huge, two-volume study, Blake and Tradition (1968), but also her short study on Blake’s art, William Blake (1970) and Golgonooza, City of Imagination (1991) as well as a large number of essays and occasional pieces. Blake has also remained important, however, to Raine’s creative life. In the second volume of her autobiography, The Land Unknown (1975), she describes how, after a period of spiritual depletion during and immediately after the Second World War, she took up ‘The End of a Golden String’ that led her to Blake and a personal renaissance: Little by little, I found how great is that literature of exact spiritual knowledge, unheeded by literary critics and literary historians alike; and gradually it became clear to me that not only did Blake possess this knowledge and speak that royal language, but that this learning of the imagination is the mainstream from which poets and artists from Orpheus to W. B. Yeats have drawn life . . . When long after I visited Mrs. Yeats in Dublin, she confirmed my view of Blake as a supreme teacher within an age-old tradition as that to which Yeats had also come. (Autobiographies, pp. 257–8) This passage encapsulates Raine’s view of Blake, as a follower in a hidden tradition that could be traced by willing eyes from Hermes Trismegistus through the works of Plato and Enneads of Plotinus to the English Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor and thence to Blake, and this is indeed the work of Blake and Tradition.17 It is also indicative of how very far William and Catherine’s workshop striving had come, when the space that is being fought for hardly touches reality, and resides so very firmly in intellectual abstraction. Despite the incredible scholarly work undertaken in Blake and Tradition, for example, the end view of Blake presented in that book remakes Blake into a gentleman occultist (not unlike a Cambridge don), leisurely pursuing studies of an ancient

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‘knowledge absolute’, rather than an intellectual radical and bricoleur, joining organisations such as the Swedenborgians only when they appeared to offer some insight into the religious and political conflagration that appeared about to overwhelm the world in the 1790s. Nonetheless, if Raine often appears to repeat the cultural conservatism of T. S. Eliot whom she greatly admired, there are differences in her search for ‘tradition’: some of these she points out herself in her Autobiographies, and she deserves credit for standing up to Eliot’s particular brand of refined bullying by remarking that there were peculiar poetic approaches to which he was neither sympathetic nor entirely capable of comprehending. In the passage cited above, however, what is most striking is the source that validates Raine’s opinions: while her poetry and critical theory draw greatly upon W. B. Yeats, it is Bertha Yeats who offers confirmation and who, notes Raine, gave her husband both the knowledge of Taylor’s Neoplatonism and the automatic writings that formed the basis of A Vision. When offered a gift by Mrs Yeats, it is to The Book of Thel that her thoughts turn and she asks for a rare anemone pulsatilla, ‘the flower at which Thel, in Blake’s title-page, looks so thoughtfully as she considers mutability’ (Autobiographies, p. 258). Kathleen Raine cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a radical feminist, and her reaction against the materialism that she encountered at Cambridge in the late 1920s and thirties seems to have resulted in an atrophied social sense. At the same time, she is much more sensitive than many critics to Blake’s depictions of women and female states (she was, for example, one of the first critics to credit Blake’s development of Songs of Innocence to the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft18) and has devoted her writing to stating the central importance of the imagination, whether in founding Temenos as ‘a review devoted to the arts of the imagination’, or in poems such as ‘Book of Hours’ that demonstrate her debt to Yeats and Blake. As she remarks in the final volume of her autobiography, The Lion’s Mouth (1977), ‘Blake knew that knowledge belongs to the state of innocence’ (Autobiographies, p. 344). Raine’s view is not entirely true: it is, after all, in the declamations of Songs of Experience such as ‘London’ and ‘The Poison Tree’ that Blake most clearly demonstrates a profound perception of human psychology, politics and society, without which innocence must always be merely ignorance and retreat. Nonetheless, Raine is quite correct to observe that Blake looked beyond experience to ‘organised innocence’, that he saw experience not as the terminus of existence but merely one stage in a life in which childhood experience

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was as important as adult knowingness. What Blake allowed Raine to do is articulate her own intriguing journey into Neoplatonism. This is both nadir and zenith of a feminist Blake: a female critic, one of the most influential writers on Blake in the twentieth century, could extend her vision beyond the machismo of many male contemporaries but was also quite happy to put aside Blake’s political and social struggle in order to gaze at Agrippa. The extension of a similar visionary experience into a more overtly political – particularly feminist – context was undertaken by a near contemporary of Raine’s, the novelist and dramatist Doris Lessing (1919– ). Her second novel, Martha Quest (1952), developed into the five-book series The Children of Violence that, in the final volume, The Four-Gated City (1969), as Susan Levin has observed, demonstrates the influence of Blake most clearly alongside another experimental novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell. The drive towards an imaginative fiction is also evident in her other work, notably the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, a science fiction quintet that demonstrated (as with the work of other writers influenced by Blake such as Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs) the usefulness of science fiction as a vehicle to explore visionary modes of literature. ‘Most obviously in the Blakean phrases placed throughout and in the Blakean structures of [her] books, most importantly in a vision of integrated personality, Lessing’s texts intersect with those of Blake.’19 The similarity in terms of structure is most obvious in The Four-Gated City which, as Levin points out, is a prophetic book that traces a history of London from the aftermath of the Second World War and ends with a brief and bitter account of nuclear destruction on the eve of the twenty-first century. Against this backdrop of ruin (in which Britain is destroyed), one character, Mark Coleridge ironically dreams of new utopias: We said Ninevah and Tyre, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and Rome, Carthage, Balkh and Cordoba – but that never meant anything. A desert which was a graveyard becomes a place where cities are not built. That is all. We live on the edge, or in the fertile seams of the Sahara and the Gobi and the Arabian deserts that once held gardens and cities and orchards. We say, there were once civilizations here . . . I’ve heard that people are creeping back to live in the great dead buildings where the Thames ran once. They say it is silted up from its source to the sea with weed like a giant seaweed . . . We have no enemy. The human race is united at last.20

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Mark is, by this time, tired and sarcastic, tested by the loss of children to plague and the mutations that he witnesses in the camps he runs, parodies of his ideal. Despite this he still writes, ‘I cannot help dreaming of that perfect city’. The four-gated city of London of which he dreams is, like Blake’s fourfold world, representative of unity against military machismo: ‘for in brain and heart and loins / Gates open behind Satans Seat to the City of Golgonooza / Which is the spiritual fourfold London, in the loins of Albion’ (M 20:38–40, E114). Lessing provides a prophecy of Albion destroyed, wiped out, to clarify contemporary vision: when much of the world is gone, most of its inhabitants dead, to have no enemies then will be too late. Like many writers concerned by the threat of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, Lessing sought to nullify the mechanical either-or thinking of both capitalism and communism that depicted the other as a mortal enemy. Lessing’s debt to Blake is not as pervasive as Kathleen Raine’s, but the two women’s use of Blake is similar in some respects. Both are interested in a psychological, even mystical, use of Blake that agrees in some respects with Jungian or Laingian notions of a divided self in need of reintegration, although Lessing has often been more openly critical of a western dominating selfhood as very often a masculinist definition of the ego. Both authors are also inspired by Blake’s visionary experience as providing a new mode and technique of writing, although Raine’s poetry and scholarship is much more conventional than Lessing who, in her experimental and idiosyncratic phantasies, is reminiscent of the work of Angela Carter. For Lessing, and to a lesser degree Raine and H. D., part of the appeal of Blake is that he recognised that when his Zoas reject the female, as does Milton in heaven, they become ‘soul-shuddring vacuums’, hermaphroditic spectres incapable of love or life but living instead a sick shadow of desire. The singer, songwriter and poet, Patti Smith (1946– ) has expressed a warm regard for Blake, particularly his visionary qualities. Born in Chicago, albums such as Horses (1975) and Radio Ethiopia (1976) established her as an important part of New York punk and New Wave but also, particularly through her friendships with figures such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, as a late flowering of the American Beat Movement. In an interview with Burroughs (who described her as a ‘shaman’) in 1979, Smith explained the energy and vitality of her work in terms very similar to those used by Jack Kerouac twenty years before, as a call to ‘Wake up!’ 21 As such, at the time of her own participation in the counter-cultures of the 1960s and seventies, Blake and

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[Blake] wasn’t an anarchist or revolutionary, he was an artist. You can’t be a total pure revolutionary if you’re an artist, because an artist produces material things. And I usually think that, for me, a revolutionary is like Christ, who shed and despised all material things. Christ didn’t write down his ideas, nor did he own anything or live anywhere, and that, for me, is a pure revolutionary . . . So I don’t feel that I am like Blake in that respect, but I can comprehend and relate to the idea of his being described – as he is by one writer – as a conservative revolutionary. I don’t think Blake wanted to die for a political ideology, and that’s because he is an artist first and foremost. Perhaps certain people will die for an idea, but artists are called to realise ideas in work. And, to me, if you have a gift as an artist, you’re supposed to nurture it, and care for it and do something with it.22 It is not that Smith rejects Blake as a radical, but that, as with many of the women authors discussed here, this radicalism originates outside the machismo that is more typical of many male champions of Blake’s work. Smith adopted the style of New Wave androgyny that, like punk, played with the contradictions of masculine and feminine. At the same time, her interest in Blake can be seen as arising, perhaps surprisingly, from an interest in the neglected reality of female experience that Helen Bruder has traced in Blake’s early work such as Thel, Songs of Innocence and, of course, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Smith’s unsympathetic biographers concentrate on her as engaged in a sort of adolescent, rebellious posturing, neglecting the fact that even in her earliest work her words were not some form of gangsta guntoting but a call to wake up. In her 1975 lyric ‘Birdland’, for example, she invokes Blake as visionary and artist, not nihilist: Nobody there except for the birds around the New England farm And they gathered in all directions, like roses they scattered, And they were like compass grass coming together into the head of a Shaman bouquet. Slit in his nose and all the others went shooting And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck, all his limbs.23 For Smith, Blake is the artist who ‘looked at his experiences from many

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Shelley were particularly important as symbols of rebellion, a view which has slowly changed and transformed in her later writings:

Radical Blake

different angles – the perfect and the imperfect aspects of humanity’,24 and she is most interested in him as a poet of contradictions who, while wrestling with conflict, sees the human form divine everywhere as radiant: ‘Every one a translucent Wonder: a Universe within’ (Jerusalem, 14:17, E158). This is the light that shines from Mapplethorpe’s astonishing portrait of her for the cover of Horses: when she met Mapplethorpe in 1967, he had not yet begun to experiment with the photography that was to make him famous but, as a painter, he had studied Blake and sought to create ‘a palette which seemed to throw out light’, a translucent palette which, in The Coral Sea (1996), Smith compared to the work of Turner. It is such light, such vision, beyond the rhetoric and aesthetic machismo that passes for revolution, that Blake offers Smith, Mapplethorpe and other artistic radicals, male and female, straight and queer: William Burroughs and I used to talk about this. Burroughs was fond of Blake, and it was just so simple to him. He said that Blake just saw what others did not – and that it seemed like a good answer. I mean, Blake was so generous with his angels that even we can look at them now.25

IV: Where contrarieties are equally true Although writers and artists such as Raine, Lessing and Smith appear to engage in a relatively unproblematic relationship with Blake, apparently neglecting his difficult pronouncements on the female will and subservience of the female to the male, there are other writers who engage in a much more antagonist dialogue. A good example of this ambiguous relationship can be found in the work of Angela Carter (1940–92) who, as well as travelling and working in Japan, Australia and the US, produced a number of award-winning novels and collections of stories, including The Magic Toyshop (1967), The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), and Wise Children (1991), as well as critical works such as the collection of essays Nothing Sacred (1982) and The Sadeian Woman (1979). Combining social concern with magical realism, Carter as both critic and author was concerned to merge feminism and left-wing politics. As a recent biographer and critical commentator, Sarah Gamble observes, Carter’s reputation had ‘passed into academic urban legend’ by the time of her death so that according to familiar folklore there were more applications to study her work at doctoral level than for the entire eighteenth century.26

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Extremely well-read, Carter’s particular brand of feminism offered a provocative take on violent women, what Merja Makinen has called (after Toril Moi) ‘textual and sexual aggression’.27 While drawing extensively upon feminist writers and theorists such as Cixous, Irigiray and Margaret Attwood, Carter combined their ideas with a fascination for fairy tales, decadent writers such as Baudelaire, and de Sade. In The Sadeian Woman she examines ‘Citizen Sade’s’ assertion that ‘Sexuality is power’ and claims to end with a vision of ‘limitless joy’ (in the words of Emma Goldman) that serves as a reply to the madman of Charenton. Frankly, Carter appears to have enjoyed de Sade’s assault on civilisation a little too much, indulged his apocalyptic uncovering of the hypocrisies of society’s dress, particularly via the character of Juliette, to such a degree that any simple declaration against sadism in the final chapter is insufficient to banish the will to pleasure at almost any costs. Nonetheless, Sade cuts a ridiculous figure as the Count in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), although he also drives – along with Blake – the desire machines of the novel. Carter’s use of Blake is intermittent but extremely important: in The Infernal Desire Machines for example, Albertina, disguised as the Count’s manservant Lafleur, tells the Desiderio that the Count’s ‘fatal error was to mistake his will for his desire . . . Desire can never be coerced.’28 In his war to abolish reason and liberate man, the ambivalent Doctor Hoffman is closest to one of Blake’s devils from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and if Carter often fights with Blake as too clearly a figure of patriarchal succession nonetheless she has learned from him to read society’s bibles in the ‘infernal sense’, celebrating energy as Hoffman rides ‘the pyrotechnic tiger that eats nothing but fire’.29 The Passion of New Eve (1977) although not her best novel is her most directly Blakean, a story of the Eternal Woman as opposed to the Eternal Man of The Four Zoas. Several critics have noted the importance of de Sade to the novel (she was working at the same time on ideas that led to The Sadeian Woman), but Blake is equally significant. It begins in a post-apocalyptic New York where Evelyn, a dissolute Englishman, lives as a pimp on the earnings of the black dancer Leilah. Abandoning her ‘to the dying city’, he is captured in Beulah, ‘the place where contrarieties exist together’ and transformed into a stereotypically beautiful woman, the new Eve of the title. Before she can be used as the brood mare for a new race, Eve escapes but is captured by a typically Carteresque sadistic anti-hero, Zero the poet, who has declared war on women in the form of the mysterious

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Tristessa. The links between this novel and Blake’s writings, particularly the philosophy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and a struggle with the sexual politics of Milton, the source of Beulah, are begun by a Czech alchemist in New York who tells Evelyn, ‘Chaos . . . embraces all opposing forms in a state of undifferentiated dissolution’ (Passion, p. 14). As the voice of the devil announces in The Marriage, ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (E33). Within the novel are multiple repetitions, reversals of sexuality and the performance of gender as a violent masquerade that reads rather like Blake’s series of spectres and emanations that emerge throughout his final three epics, as well as the vile role-playing of Carter’s principal male precursor, de Sade. However, rather than accept Blake’s rather downbeat assessment of Vala in those texts (principally The Four Zoas – originally entitled Vala – and Jerusalem), Carter plays with Nature in the figures of Mother, Tristessa and even Eve herself. While Blake tends to see Vala as a monstrous phallic mother, however, Carter positively revels in the atavistic nature of Mother: And now Mother was armed. The monstrous being brandished an obsidian knife as black as she was. I found it very difficult to see, in that abattoir light, and remember, now, an atmosphere rather than an event – a lowering sense of antique ritual; of the presence, also, of stern adults who knew what was best for me better than I did myself; the full panoply of human sacrifice, in fact. Yet a perfectly twentieth-century enamelled trolley stood beside Mother, containing a covered tray which, hopefully, held syringes with anaesthetics inside them. (Passion, p. 70) Sarah Sceats comments that Mother ‘figures the oppressive maternal’,30 but Carter takes considerable pleasure in this victimising figure. In The Sadeian Woman, she had warned against the dangers of a prophylactic myth of motherhood as a ward against the ravages of masculine savagery. She is also careful in The Passion of New Eve to prevent Mother becoming a myth, satirising radical feminism of the 1970s at the same time she frolics in the fear it generated in many men (hence the ‘perfectly twentieth-century enamelled trolley’). The novel, however, reads the primal family romance of Adam, Eve and Lilith (Adam’s first wife whom he cast off because she refused to lie beneath him) infernally: Adam casts of the independent Lilith because he wants a woman made in his own image; Evelyn casts off Lilith and is

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made into the image of the ‘perfect’ woman himself. Evelyn as Eve, however, as well as Tristessa at the end of the novel, are false ideals of female sexuality because both are figured as the virgin-whore of male fantasy. The novel is full of Blakean allusions, particularly to Rahab and the Covering Cherub, and combines alchemical, biblical and apocalyptic language, particularly via the conflict in California which is the revelation of final days, an Armageddon in the West. Carter recuperates, but also refutes and rescinds certain Blakean tropes, most notably Beulah: ‘there is a place where contrarieties are equally true. This place is called Beulah’ (Passion, p. 48). Blake’s ideal of Beulah, for example, is constituted by him as a less perfect state where weak women may retire from the full conflict of manly Eden: There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come . . . Beulah is evermore Created around Eternity; appearing To the Inhabitants of Eden, around them on all sides. But Beulah to its Inhabitants appears within each district As the beloved infant in his mothers bosom round incircled With arms of love & pity & sweet compassion. But to The Sons of Eden the moony habitations of Beulah, Are from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant Rest . . . Into this pleasant Shadow all the weak & weary Like Women & Children were taken away as on wings Of dovelike softness, & shadowy habitations prepared for them But every Man returnd & went still going forward thro’ The Bosom of the Father in Eternity on Eternity (M 30:1–31:5, E129–30) For all the gentle appeal of Beulah this is not Carter’s idea of heaven: if anything, the lure of Blake’s Beulah is precisely that, a trap for women to ensnare them in a masculine vision of what perfect marriage may be like, a mental state in which women become no more than the passive objects of male sexual observance. After all, Blake is also the author who could write, ‘In a wife I would desire / What in whores is always found / The lineaments of Gratified desire’ (E474). While several male critics have read in this observation an example of sexual liberation, it is difficult to discover anything positive in this for women: while Carter may archly suggest that ‘Prostitutes are at least

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decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability’,31 prostitution is not much of a career move if, as she continues, more women are becoming an easier – and freer – lay. In Blake’s aphorism, woman is delineated by her masculine draughtsman, silhouetted and evacuated until she is no more than an outline that can be filled with the satisfaction of male possession. There is an ambiguity, perhaps, in that ‘gratified desire’ could be her own self-fulfilling pleasure, but the context of the sentence makes this unlikely: the hollow outline of woman does not pleasure herself but her man (who would also prefer not to pay for the experience). Carter’s Beulah is a very different place: ‘Beulah is a profane place. It is a crucible. It is the home of the woman who calls herself the Great Parricide, also glories in the title of Grand Emasculator’ (Passion, p. 49). In The Passion of New Eve Beulah is, as Gamble notes, a realm of the hyperreal, of kitsch simulation.32 It is still distinct from Eden which, in Carter’s cosmology, is not the place of ‘the great Wars of Eternity’ but the womb, not the womb as a simple return to security, to safety, but as the matrix of possibilities, of life, into which we are born as in the final line of the novel: ‘Ocean, ocean, mother of mysteries, bear me to the place of birth’ (Passion, p. 191). Perhaps the most ironic inversion of a Blakean ideology, however, comes from Carter’s slight to the principal character of the later works. Los is Blake’s prophet, and is usually read as his alter ego in texts such as Jerusalem (although this neglects the problematic and anxious nature of Los in earlier texts such as The Book of Los). It is extremely tempting to read Zero the Poet in The Passion of New Eve as Carter’s incendiary version of Los the Prophet: whereas Los may appeal to the memory of paradise lost, Zero is a Charlie Manson impersonator with a wooden leg, a single eye and no interest other than in number one. Los may be a symbol of the hidden sun, but Zero amounts to no more than a big, fat nothing: ‘Zero the poet adored the desert because he hated humanity. He had only the one eye and that was of an insatiable blue . . . he was one-legged, to match, and would poke his women with the artificial member when the mood took him’ (Passion, p. 85). Having declared himself the enemy of women, his prime antagonist is the Hollywood movie star Tristessa, who had previously been Evelyn’s female ideal. When Zero, Eve and the bacchae that follow Zero invade Tristessa’s palace, ‘she’ is revealed as actually a man, the inverse of Evelyn-as-Eve, an unbegotten woman who made no concessions to humanity (Passion, p. 129). Tristessa here is closest to

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the imago of Vala as imagined by Albion, a projected falsehood of masculine lust. Eve and Tristessa are trapped in false images of the feminine, empty outlines delineated by the desire of the male which Leilah escapes, according to Linden Peach, by transforming into the guerrilla leader, Lilith: she realises that this male desire is nothing.33 As Makinen points out, for all that Carter called The Passion of New Eve an ‘anti-mythic novel’, she invokes myths in the same ironic fashion that fairy tales inform such stories as The Bloody Chamber and The Company of Wolves: ‘in demystifying archetypes of femininity [The Passion of New Eve] invokes myths in a number of contradictory ways – ones that are pulled towards yet push against both feminism and patriarchy’.34 A not dissimilar process can be observed in Blake, whereby the demystification of politically dominant myths are accompanied, as Leopold Damrosch has observed, by the overwhelming tendency to create a personal mythology.35 While we have become used to castigating such mythologies as ideological blind spots, there is also a sense in which they may be used infernally, to blow up the edifices of grander narratives. For all his failures and faults, certain feminist writers – Carter in particular – return again and again to Blake. They may not like him; they may even actively despise his undoubtedly misogynist passages, yet Blake actively encourages confrontation, resistance, opposition. The artist for whom ‘without contraries is no progression’, for whom ‘opposition is true friendship’, who arrogantly pointed out the flaws in Milton and the Bible does not encourage servile flattery and submission. Blake is obviously wrong in many ways, just as he pointed out the wrong-headedness of many authorities in his own day, but he invites a dialogue with the reader that is truly dialogic, in the sense that Voloshinov uses the term, that encourages conflict and struggle over meaning. The strife and opposition that one encounters in Blake’s writings and art is very different to the polite and polished dialectic of Plato’s later dialogues where, after a token antithesis the audience is meant simply to absorb the wisdom of Socrates. A critic such as Anne Mellor is correct to attack Blake for subsuming the female into the male,36 but there is also a sense, for example in her article on Blake’s illustrations for Stedman’s Narrative and Mary Wollstonecraft, that she is also attacking him as a representative of a dead, white, European, male canon. Many of the ideological uses that Blake has been put to by critics, particularly that generation following Northrop Frye, are despicable. Just because he was taken up by a generation of élitist male scholars, however, does not mean that Blake himself was part of such

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an élite during his lifetime: anything but. Blake may occupy a seat in the canon but it is a diabolical one. By the standards of his day he was wrong, and his own pig-headed obstinacy, his refusal to submit to a standard set by a hypocritical establishment is what has most appealed as a model to other artists, radical feminists included.

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I: Blasphemy and free speech Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. (Matthew 26:65) My Sin thou hast forgiven me Canst thou forgive my Blasphemy (The Everlasting Gospel, F.75–6, E522) Blasphemy is a matter of freethinking and free speech. Blasphemy, from the Greek βλασφηµια, evil-speaking or profane language, is typically considered a sin against God: in Matthew 12.31, Christ speaks of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as the only sin that cannot be forgiven, but it remains a sin that is hidden from men and punished by God. However, as we can see from both Matthew 26 and Blake’s The Everlasting Gospel, this freedom is often only realised or infringed in public: it must be witnessed – it is a crime as well as a sin. The Western conception of blasphemy took root in the Mosaic Law of the Bible, particularly the Book of Leviticus where the son of Shelomith is condemned to death for blaspheming the name of the Lord. It is not, however, restricted to Judaic law. Socrates, for example, was condemned to death for recognising his own gods rather than those of the state. Imperial Rome demonstrated the contradictions of such state-sponsored crime: Tiberius regarded blasphemy against the gods as the affairs of the gods, but citizens faced punishment by death for refusing to worship the deified Emperor himself.1 The history of blasphemy demonstrates the transformation of sin into crime, the 143

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shift from a theological relationship between man and god to a juridical one between subject and state. For Christianity, the contradictory roles of sin and crime are emphasised by the fact that it is a religion based on the crucifixion of Christ for blasphemy. The question of blasphemy arose around Blake’s work in the early decades after his death, but has also emerged as a source of inspiration surprisingly at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas heresy emphasises a school of thought (from the Greek α ´ ´ιρεσις, ‘choosing’), the roots of the word blasphemy emphasise that it is ‘bad-mouthing’: it is not simply a question of holding a different opinion (politically difficult as that may be) but is intended as an affront to authority. For Christianity, profane speech assaults the fundamentals of a religion based upon the logos, particularly when that word is invoked as the word of temporal as well as spiritual law. Blasphemy marks the transition from freethinking ideology – heresy, as it were – to the free form of political practice. Blake’s starkest depiction of the crime of blasphemy is a pen and watercolour painting produced circa 1800 and entitled The Blasphemer. It depicts a bound, virile Promethean figure, Shelomith’s son from the Leviticus story, surrounded by ancient patriarchs, fists raised and clenched about rocks with which they stone the victim’s body. The patriarchs are arranged in symmetrical rows, like the bars of a prison cell, and smoke rises from the holocaust of the blasphemer’s possessions (not described in Leviticus, but adapted from Joshua vii.18–25).2 The story in Leviticus emphasises that the crime of blasphemy must be witnessed and punished by the entire congregation, and the importance of blaspheming is indicated by the fact that it is the second of the prohibitions that form the Ten Commandments. Despite the oppressive stance of the patriarchs, it is the figure of the blasphemer that dominates the painting, emanating light and energy. His nakedness does not seem to humiliate him – on the contrary, it seems to venerate him before his robed oppressors, providing him an almost angelic quality. The viewer does not see his face while the faces of the elders seem to be possessed by fear and confusion, and there is an ambiguity in the painting, that he seems to offer his body to the rocks, a sacrifice that typifies the later crucifixion of Christ the blasphemer. Likewise, the smoke that rises from a sacrificial fire could itself be promethean, like the flames that cover the proud form of another blasphemer depicted by Blake, Capaneus, who derided the power of Jupiter and was bound in flames in Canto fourteen of Dante’s Divinia commedia. Rather than dismembering the body and the memory of the

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blasphemer, Blake provides us with a whole, unified vision of humanity: in contrast, the elders are themselves dismembered into hands of unrooted authority, blinded by the smoke of their own sacrifices. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the ultimate blasphemy was a denial of god, an atheism that emerged from Enlightenment critiques of religion such as deism. Locke, in his A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) had denied toleration to atheists on the grounds that the bonds of human society had their basis in the belief of God as the foundation of moral law: the word of an atheist simply could not be trusted, and so the evil speech of the blasphemer denied not only the word of God but the grounds of the subject before the law. Furthermore, any toleration of nonconformity, which seemed on the increase in Britain during the 1780s, depended very much on a stable and confident status quo. As long as deism, and even atheism, coursed through refined veins, so its pollution could be restricted and even ignored. Atheism was a particular horror following the deChristianising missions of the revolutionary armies across France and Europe, and the Festival of Reason in Notre-Dame on 20 Brumaire (10 November 1793), in which the Hébertist Antoine-François Momoro declared that ‘Liberty, reason, truth are only abstract beings. They are not gods, for properly speaking, they are part of ourselves.’3 Following publication of Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794–5), it was no longer safe to assume that the dangerous infection would not spread as a pandemic through society. It had been in the interests of gentleman deists such as Voltaire to accept the distinction between an esoteric truth and exoteric superstition for the purposes of social engineering. This was not the concern of the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man. ‘I know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it upon that account. The times and the subject demand that it be done.’4 The Age of Reason, the first part of which was published while Paine was imprisoned, earned its author the reputation of atheism: the book was prosecuted as a blasphemous libel in Britain, and when a cheap edition was printed by Francis Place and the bookseller Thomas Williams in 1796 its success led Williams to publish another edition, for which he was prosecuted by the Proclamation Society in 1797 and spent a year in jail.5 For the British government, while cases of seditious libel brought with them the possibility of eliciting public sympathy for radicals, blasphemy made explicit the horrors of French, revolutionary atheism. Yet if The Age of Reason was an underground success, for

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many republican dissenters it was, in the words of E. P. Thompson, ‘a sword sent to divide’, a raging fire that was more destructive to those faithful to both God and revolution than the defenders of orthodoxy such as Bishop Watson who denounced the circulation of Paine’s ‘deistical writings’ amongst ‘the unlearned part of the community, especially in large manufacturing towns’.6 The notorious tendency to irreligion amongst the new, urban ‘unlearned’, remarked two generations later by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, was a source of crisis even to those refined sceptics who required a little religion for the good of the masses. During the early years of the nineteenth century, the first avowals of public disbelief were fragile in the British, bourgeois public sphere, and atheism, like Jacobinism, was the doubt that dared not speak its name. This was true, as David Berman notes, at least until the time of Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism in 1811 and, more significantly, Richard Carlile, the radical journalist who edited publications such as the The Republican and The Lion (sometimes from prison) in the 1820s to pursue a Painite critique of religion tied to social change, but one advocating atheism rather than deism.7 While Blake refuted the deism of Tom Paine, his understanding of religion was still closer in many ways to Paine’s than to orthodoxy. His annotations to Watson’s Apology denounce the use of the Bible alone as the ‘peculiar’ word of God as an ‘abomination’, confirming it as ‘a State Trick’ (E615–6). Although Blake defends Paine against the Bishop that does not mean that he agreed with The Age of Reason in the final years of the 1790s. ‘It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines attack’ he writes, ‘but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible.’ As Thompson remarks, ‘Both Paine and the Bishops were wrong . . . But Paine (in Blake’s view) has much the best argument, since his polemics are directed, not at the Everlasting Gospel (which he does not understand) but at the Moral Law of Antichrist.’8 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in its self-declared form, is the ultimate abomination: ‘The Bible of Hell’ (E44). Was Blake’s blasphemy intentional? The question has to be answered within the context of what Blake saw as blasphemy: Blake was no atheist, but he denied the hegemony of the ‘God of this World’. This worldly god, evoked repeatedly in Jerusalem, The Ghost of Abel and The Everlasting Gospel, is the brute force of natural morality and natural religion, the apparently self-evident and binding material ideology of Bacon, Locke and Newton. In such a world, Blake’s everlasting gospel is indeed blasphemous, denying the right of empirical philosophers to dictate how the world is. This denial of worldly ‘truth’, the denial of the world

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as a given, unravels a chain of being and loosens the grip of arbitrary authority that grasps that chain. Compared to merely venal sins such as murder and adultery this blasphemy cannot be forgiven. Blake’s Lutheran and Pauline conception of man bound in sin, much more evident in later works such as Milton and Jerusalem, would seem more abhorrent than the apparent benevolence of Enlightenment natural theology, in which the munificence of God is bestowed upon all mankind regardless of creed or history. This would indeed be the case if Blake followed a hard-line Calvinist distinction between the Elect and Reprobate, but instead he seems to draw upon an ambiguity in the Pauline message of salvation through faith which, as E. P. Thompson has pointed out, has inspired much antinomian thought – that salvation is free to all, even the most sinful of men, as Blake describes himself in Jerusalem (E145).9 The horror of this for established religion was that it denied a role for the traditional gatekeepers of salvation: the church, the synagogue, the interpreted Bible.

II: Scepticism and sedition What Blake’s often-radical religious beliefs were is hard to tie down to a specific religious group or theological stance. We know that the figure of Jesus Christ had significance for him, but whether he believed or blasphemed as Muggletonian, Swedenborgian, Anabaptist or other, no conclusive proof has yet been furnished, though this was also a man who, at different times in his life, proclaimed the Bible of Hell and the Everlasting Gospel, that the body’s energy was ‘eternal delight’ and that Jesus was born of Mary’s adultery.10 What his nineteenthcentury critics believed he believed on the other hand, is a different story. Blake is a blasphemer in the eyes of his nineteenth-century critics. Their consequent interpretation of Blake’s works depended on whether they thought this was a good or bad thing. Swinburne, for example, links Blake’s notion of blasphemy to the defamation and repression of the Paris Commune: ‘Those minute and multitudinous creatures who revile and defame the great – and thereby, says Blake, “blaspheme God, for there is no other God” – have no more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence against it have the power to undo its work . . . It is to judge the crimes of the sunrise that these judges sit in session.’11 For Swinburne, blasphemy here is blind justice, Swinburne’s interpretation focusing on the arbitrary bad mouthing of

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the courageous communards. Swinburne roots Blake’s blasphemy deep within a secular political struggle. Blasphemy in Blake was seldom celebrated with such open approval, but blasphemous intrigue trickles through even the earliest biographies. Blake’s first posthumous biographer, John Thomas Smith, insisted on the devotion of Blake to the Bible. There is undoubtedly truth in this assertion. But Smith curtails Blake’s radical or blasphemous reading of the ‘Good Book’, going out of his way to quell rumours of sympathy with a specific atheistic group: ‘I have unspeakable pleasure in being able to state that though I admit he [Blake] did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine worship yet he was not a Freethinker as some invidious detractors have thought proper to assert, nor was he ever in any degree irreligious. Through life his Bible was everything with him’ (BR, p. 458). Smith’s pompous ‘unspeakable pleasure’ in refuting any naughty aberrations in Blake’s thought or speech, illustrates the tug-of-war over Blake’s memory, between convention and radicalism. The rumour that has most persistently dogged Blake’s reputation is that of madness. The ‘mad’ label began the slow osmosis of attachment to Blake’s name during his own lifetime. In his 1806 biographical notice, the sympathetic Benjamin Heath Malkin felt forced to quell the whispers of lunatic: ‘The sceptic and the rational believer, uniting their forces against the visionary, pursue and scare a warm and brilliant imagination with the hue and cry of madness.’12 The image that Malkin leaves us with is that of the philistine crucifixion of a generous and gentle genius. That is the image we are supposed to be left with. But if we step back from Blake, for one moment, to look at the persecutors described in Malkin’s piece, we see that behind the mad Blake story is a far more dangerous discourse. That discourse is belief and unbelief: the chapter and verse of blasphemy. If we look closely at major biographical studies of Blake in the 1830s and 1840s, Blake’s madness, more often than not, goes hand in hand with lingering doubts over his doubt, rather than his sanity. Blake himself would have had little patience with this ambivalence: ‘Doubt Self Jealous Watry folly’ (E268). Frederick Tatham works hard to portray Blake as an orthodox believer who only strays into blasphemous ways when doubt is compounded into madness, and madness into doubt: He [Blake] detested priestcraft & religious cant. He wrote much upon controversial subjects, & like all controversies these writings

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As G. E. Bentley notes, ‘[i]t is difficult to know what Tatham, who later became an Irvingite and burnt Blake’s works in an excess of piety, may have meant by orthodoxy’ (BR, p. 530, n.). What we can tell is that Tatham is using ‘orthodoxy’ as a defining label, in which he can contain the wild extravagancies of Blake’s ‘doubt’. In early posthumous Blake criticism, the notion of blasphemy emerges as, in the words of David Nash, ‘a place where narratives contract’.14 Rather than broach the difficult, fraught layers of doubt and belief that had apocalyptic undertones in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and that were to haunt nineteenth-century Victorian society, it became politic to paint Blake’s personality in Jekyll and Hyde monotone: the inspired artisan who produced The Book of Job versus the unholy fanatic of the later prophetic books. Even though Allan Cunningham seems capable of entering into the complexity of Blake’s designs, describing them as ‘religious, political and spiritual’, seeing them as linking contemporary concerns to antediluvian myth (BR, p. 492), when it came to the crunch, Blake’s most influential biographer before Alexander Gilchrist nailed Blake’s memory to madness: A work – whether from poet or painter – conceived in the fiery extasy of imagination lives through every limb; while one elaborated out by skill and taste only will look, in comparison, like a withered and sapless tree beside one green and flourishing. Blake’s misfortune was that of possessing this precious gift in excess. His fancy overmastered him – until he at length confounded ‘the mind’s eye’ with the corporeal organ, and dreamed himself out of sympathies with the actual world. (BR, p. 503) In Cunningham, the potential dynamism of Blake’s contemporary concerns became silted up by the minutia of domestic detail. Madness is dissolved by the absolution of a pious death, Cunningham dissipating the political controversy of Blake in a sepia-tinged martyrdom. The scene (described more fully in Chapter 1) reads like a death bed recantation: ‘I glory . . . in dying, and have no grief but in leaving you, Catherine[.]’

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are inspired by doubt & made up of vain conceits & whimsical Extravagancies . . . He was in all essential points orthodox, but he put forth ramifications of doubt, that by his vigorous & creative mind, were watered into the empty enormities of Extravagant & rebellious thoughts[.]13

Radical Blake

To cast doubt on this speech and the whole sentimental comfort quilt of Blake’s death may be to blaspheme Blake’s memory amongst some devotees. But we need to give precedence to the sixty-year life, not the sixty-second departure of a very sick man portrayed by a pious biographer. The nice, neat tying together in the Christian bosom of Blake’s fiery, unorthodox ideology is possibly too neat and too nice. Such a tidy death is an apex for the biographer attempting to curtail the visionary life in poetic and child-like other-worldliness instead of revolutionary and blasphemer-like this-worldliness. Even the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti amongst them,15 were, in many respects polite blasphemers. William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) – probably the most sober of the Pre-Raphaelites – weighs Blake’s unorthodoxy against the heavy-hitting freethinkers and deists of Blake’s day. The result is a balanced appraisal lacking the bite of Blake’s gnawing, anti-Church poetics: He was (as Mr Swinburne has well pointed out) a heretic, not an infidel. He would zealously and vigorously confute the freethinkers, such as Paine and Godwin, whom he met at the table of the bookseller Mr Johnson; and would constantly in later years uphold revelation and Christianity, and argue in a very incensed tone against materialism. But, if his companion were a Christian of any ordinary type, he would regard Blake himself as the freethinker and unbeliever, cut off by impassable lines of demarcation from the communion of the faithful.16 However, others attached to the Pre-Raphaelite movement were more open and more willing to blaspheme and hold Blake up as a fellow defiler. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) published William Blake: a Critical Essay in the wake of a storm over the salacious and blasphemous Poems and Ballads. The story up until 1868 has been well documented by Swinburne’s biographers. Jean Overton Fuller picks up the thread in 1866, describing the anxiety that the fantastical combination of erotica and blasphemy in some of Swinburne’s poems caused the publishers: The publishers were extremely nervous, not entirely without reason, since they had the year previously, been prosecuted for issuing a reprint of Shelley’s atheistic poem Queen Mab. Because of this nervousness, they had insisted on the prior issue of a limited edition, as a test, of Laus Veneris . . . Swinburne’s treatment of the

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But it was not so much a single poem as the bibliographical company it was keeping, that tipped the balance against Poems and Ballads: ‘When the poem appeared as a small separate pamphlet, little notice was taken, but when it reappeared, in the company of so many other startling poems, in the more sizeable Poems and Ballads, the reaction was immediate. On August 4, the Saturday Review, in a long and deprecating notice of the book, referred to the author as ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’. On the same date hostile reviews appeared also in the London Review and The Athenæum. The critical discourse circulating at the time unsettled the publishing house even more: During the next week events moved to a climax. Word became current that a worse review yet was to appear in The Times and that the publisher as well as the author would be held up to execration. According to the memoirs of a certain Sir William Hardman, the article was actually set up in type when a ‘private hint was given to Moxon, in order that he might, if so inclined, disconnect himself from the bawdry’. Rossetti calling at Moxon’s, found Payne, now the general manager, in a state of panic and only too anxious to dissociate himself from the publication.18 For Swinburne, the bibliographical sanctity of Poems and Ballads had to stand in all its blasphemous glory: But now to alter my course or mutilate my published work, seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours. One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms except under compulsion, remains intolerable. Even if I did not feel the matter in this way, my withdrawal would not undo what has been done, nor unsay what has been said.19 Swinburne describes the integrity of Poems and Ballads in terms of a holy war, with the publisher fulfilling the role of a whore of Babylon, perverting and suppressing authorial word in publication. It was at this point of crisis that John Camden Hotten presented himself as an alternative publisher.20 In the autumn of 1866, Swinburne transferred all

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legend, however, contained some dangerous lines: ‘Lo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticed / All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ’.17

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In a time of critical reason and definite division, he was possessed by a fervour and fury of belief; among sane men who had disproved most things and proved the rest, here was an evident madman who believed a thing, one may say, only insomuch as it was incapable of proof. He lived and worked out of all rule, and yet by law. He had a devil, and its name was Faith. No materialist has such belief in bread and meat as Blake had in the substance underlying appearance which he christened god or spectre, devil or angel, as the fit took him; or rather as he saw it from one side or the other side . . . His outcries on various matters of art or morals were in effect the mere expression, not of reasonable dissent, but of violent belief. No artist of equal power had ever a keener and deeper regard for the meaning and teaching – what one may call the moral – of art. He sang and painted as men write or preach. Indifference was impossible to him. Thus every shred of his work has some life, some blood, infused or woven into it. (AS, pp. 4–5) Swinburne’s ‘flesh and blood’ Blake is a tangle of mysticism, aestheticism and secularism. Whereas Gilchrist aims to gently clear a space in which the reader can approach Blake, Swinburne summons up iconoclastic bravura, aiming to shock the reader into recognising Blake’s daring uniqueness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in William Blake: a Critical Essay. For Swinburne, critical iconoclasm is a poetic act. And William Blake is his rebellious mentor: ‘He was born and baptized into the church of rebels; we can hardly imagine a time or scheme of things in which he could have lived and worked without some interval of revolt. All that was accepted for art, all that was taken for poetry, he rejected as barren symbols, and would fain have broken up as mendacious idols’ (AS, p. 3). Swinburne opens the essay with the smashing of aesthetic idols. In doing so Aestheticism comes of age as criticism. It enters the sociopolitical discourse of history and historical difference. Swinburne talks of Blake’s theology in terms of imaginative and poetic revolution, relishing Blake’s potential as a heretic against the scientific rationalism and ‘quasi-secular clericalism’ of the mid-nineteenth century.22 Swinburne’s aestheticism – his ‘Art for Art’s sake’ manifesto – tears

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his publishing interests to Hotten, including William Blake: a Critical Essay.21 Swinburne opens William Blake: a Critical Essay with a polemic on Blake’s belief:

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down the material and theological ‘edifices’ that construct a teleological fate for humanity, whether that fate is evolutionary or theocentric. Swinburne’s aestheticism is the most politically charged of the postRomantics. For M. K. Louis, Swinburne recapitulates, in an English idiom, the vehemence of continental sedition: ‘Such poets as Walter Savage Landor or Algernon Charles Swinburne, allying themselves with the forces of continental liberalism, helped to sustain a theologically and politically radical tradition within English literature throughout the Victorian period’.23 Twentieth-century critical appraisal of Swinburne’s political radicalism has tended to ally the political impetus of the poetry with the theological insurgence of Swinburne’s thought. An elegant argument by M. K. Louis postulates that there is a fundamental transfer in Swinburne’s writing between the Eucharist as sacred symbol, and the Eucharist as a symbol of political and aesthetic communion.24 The Biblical lexicon of Redemption and Sacrifice becomes in Swinburne’s work, as it does in Blake’s, recognisant of political volition. In Jerome McGann’s critical dialogue, Swinburne, the Book of Revelation is a template for politically apocalyptic verse and the metaphorical slaying of didactic Gods.25 Swinburne sees history as configured out of epiphanic moments. But for Swinburne, these moments are revolutionary in their potential. The theological path he traces in Blake’s prophetic books moves from apocalypse to revolution: ‘As their first word had been Revelation, their last was Revolution’ (AS, p. 258). Swinburne’s heralding of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ in William Blake is emphatically not the creation of an aesthetic monument where ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’26 Swinburne’s aestheticism – particularly where Blake is concerned – is not ideology gone to seed in a wasteland of bourgeois decadence, emptied of political or social content. The ‘Art for Art’s sake’ exposition in William Blake is explicitly a reaction against ‘the great moral heresy’. In using this expression, Swinburne refers to Baudelaire’s ‘the heresy of instruction’ or ‘l’hérésie de l’enseignment’. Swinburne elaborates upon this moral heresy, terming it the ‘flatulent assumptions of quasi-secular clericalism’ (AS, p. 92). Swinburne is clarifying confusion concerning art’s role in a secular society. Rather than a simple denial of art as social or political commentary, Swinburne’s aestheticism attacks art that is orthodox, hegemonic and morally prescriptive:

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Priest and poet, all those times through, were proverbially on terms of reciprocal biting and striking. That magnificent invention of making ‘Art the handmaid of Religion’ had not been stumbled upon in the darkness of those days. Neither minstrel nor monk would have caught up the idea with any rapture. As indeed they would have been unwise to do; for the thing is impossible. Art is not like fire or water, a good servant and bad master; rather the reverse. She will help in nothing of her own knowledge or freewill: upon terms of service you will get worse than nothing out of her. Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way become; she would be none of these things though you were to bray her in a mortar. (AS, p. 90) Swinburne says that his exposition of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is crucial as a prelude to the study of Blake’s poetry: ‘Error on this point would be ruinous to any student’ (AS, p. 93). Swinburne reads Blake’s theology through Blake’s poetry. Blake’s poetry is not divested of ethical or political comment in Swinburne’s interpretation, but ‘faith or principle’ is redesigned through poetic imagination. Swinburne’s aestheticism in William Blake is a triumph of the imagination over the ‘material’ and the ‘moral’. Swinburne, in a hardline attack on morality in art, talks about ‘reversing the principle of moral or material duty’ (AS, p. 87). The parallelism between the material and the moral aligns the empirical world with a world of religious orthodoxy. In this sense, the moral and the material are both coefficients in an aesthetic economy. They combine to position art in an empty exchange between absolutes. In his public polemic on Art for Art’s sake, Swinburne aims to divest art of all value systems. All that matters is that art is motivated by ‘imaginative work and insight’ as the ‘first principle’ (AS, p. 94). Swinburne’s project is ultimately a curtailment of morality in art: art becomes political effluence, sweeping away moral cause in a beautiful, blasphemous sewer of what polite society cannot and will not say. Such pollution, however, was only for the finest flesh in Swinburne’s conception. His reading and interpretation of Blake is blighted by élitism. Although, the build-up to the publication of William Blake was political and public, Swinburne was led to aesthetic and élitist conclusions. Swinburne starts as a prophet of the political profane and ends as a defender of the mystical Absolute, holed-up in an aesthetic temple, beseiged by the masses. Swinburne’s relationship with Blake’s poetry mutates, tragically, into one of material possession and religious orthodoxy:

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After two readings of ‘Tiriel’ in print I am inclined to regret his public appearance. It is not nearly so ‘mad’ as many spectres and emanations of the author’s mind, but it is much more liable to the term which I cannot get out of my head in reading it – ‘silly’ – than any. It should have been preserved, certainly, but strictly for the inspection of esoteric Blakists – never to be exposed to the eyes of Saducees, neophytes, weak brethren, – worshippers in the court of the Gentiles; whose faith may (not improbably) be shaken by its perusal, and their poor souls in consequence eternally lost; which result I do think you were bound in common Blakian charity (He would have said Christian, but I won’t) to take into consideration. Speaking from the severely orthodox (not to say High Church or even Ultra-montane) point of view which I humbly presume the first (apostolic or patristic) commentator on Jerusalem has a right to take, I cannot but say I would rather this book had remained in the Apocrypha than been inscribed in the canon – that is, in the roll of those books ‘which whosoever believeth not, without doubt’ etc. etc.27 Swinburne reverts to the language of moral law, and designates Blake’s works as Apocrypha, before relinquishing a work such as Tiriel to the unbelieving public. Swinburne’s tongue is probably quite firmly in his cheek when he appropriates biblical dictums, but his desire to censor the publication of Blake’s works is driven by a religious fervour, bordering on fanatical devotion to the ‘relics of another man’s work’. Swinburne positions himself as a prophet in the Blake revival – ‘the first (apostolic or patristic) commentator’, St John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. To engage with Blake’s works is to engage with a religion of dissent, to become the blasphemer, the transgressor. For Swinburne, this state of engagement requires the reader to enter the inner experience of the work, to become a ‘student of Bowlahoola’ rather than simply a reader. Swinburne’s distrust of the public in reading Blake is rooted in part in a distrust of communal literature, rather than a disbelief in a literary community. However, the low culture of the masses, the bawdry blasphemy of direct parody, was not bypassed in the Victorian reception of Blake. Blake’s utter relevance and wit were recognised by cultural and political agent provocateurs. Amidst the cut and thrust of Secularism’s political and anti-religious publishing, the mystical figure of Blake is memorialised by one of blasphemy’s cause célèbres, George William Foote, the editor of the Freethinker. In his atheistic agitation, Foote

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deployed a mode of ‘cultural terrorism’28 which was a direct amalgam of his secular beliefs and his literary pursuit. His 1875 article on Blake in the National Reformer, as we have seen in the chapter on Blake and nationalism, continued to challenge the cultural status quo, bringing literary vision into contact with political expediency. Foote’s political acumen was finely attuned to Blake’s potential as an immediate and accessible populariser of iconoclastic imagination. Foote was an ardent freethinker and Secularist. He was tried in 1883 for blasphemy, in what was to become one of the most notorious blasphemy cases of the day. The issue was the Freethinker, a satirical vehicle of freethought, which used the respectability of the established church as a lampoon. Foote was indicted, as editor, together with Ramsey as publisher, and Kemp as printer in 1882.29 When George William Foote was sentenced for blasphemy on 26 February 1883 to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour, the severity of the sentence caused outrage. Foote became a secular martyr. It was particularly the inflammatory nature of the visual designs that caught the popular imagination. These follow the best traditions of radical satire, and David Nash has suggested that one of them, ‘I do set my bow in the cloud’ – Genesis 9.13, is a parody of Blake’s Ancient of Days.30 Foote actually quoted from Swinburne’s poetry at his trial.31 However, unlike Foote in the 1880s, Swinburne’s blasphemous utterances were conducted in a specified aesthetic book form rather than an explicitly political periodical form. Foote’s 1880s explicit appropriation of Blake is a reverse refinement of Blake’s early posthumous reception. Blasphemy is a cultural pressure point in Blake’s reception history, conserving prejudice and exciting radicalism.

III: The left-hand path The association of reason and blasphemy attracted strange allies at the end of the nineteenth century. Aleister Crowley issued books such as The God Eater through associates of the Rationalist Press Association, but considered the adherents of rationalism as ‘no less narrow-minded sectarians than the Evangelicals’ (Confessions, p. 446). Crowley, a spiritual gourmand rather than gourmet, dined on most of the world’s religions, but claimed that only magick (the additional ‘k’ was all his own) combined the best ingredients of science and spirituality. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington Spa, the son of Edward Crowley and Emily Bertha Crowley, née Bishop, members of the Plymouth Brethren movement

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founded in 1828 by Nelson Darby. Darby, who had quit the established Anglican Church because of its decadence, believed that any interpretation of the Bible as other than literal truth was blasphemous and engaged on an evangelical crusade, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had attracted a number of respectable, and relatively wealthy, converts. The most famous son of this pious sect (whose father left him a considerable inheritance based on brewing despite the temperance of the brethren) was one who preferred the company of devils. Lambasted by the Daily Express as ‘the wickedest man in the world’, though he had the misfortune to live in the era of Hitler and Stalin, Crowley chose for himself the epithet of ‘The Great Beast’ after Revelation 13.18. After a career spent in profligacy, mountaineering, ego-mania, sado-masochism, publishing, self-promotion and his beloved magick beginning with ordination into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley seemed a spent force at the time of his death in 1947. And yet, within twenty years, he had become an important influence on counter-cultural movements and individuals as diverse as the Beatles (who included his image as one of their heroes on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), the film-maker Kenneth Anger in experimental works such as Lucifer Rising and the Magick Lantern cycle, the Beats and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin (who also briefly worked on the soundtrack to Anger’s Lucifer Rising). Opinion on Crowley has been witness to a sword sent to divide. His first biographer, John Symonds, who published The Great Beast in 1951, sought to debunk Crowley’s self-ordained task of bringing Oriental wisdom to Europe and restoring ‘paganism in a purer form’.32 Mario Praz dismissed him in his list of decadent romantics for poetry written ‘in slavish imitation of Swinburne’ (a very fair assessment).33 At the other end of the scale, admirers such as Kenneth Grant have seen pure revelation even in Crowley’s most mediocre moments.34 Between these two extremes, recent biographers have sought to understand Crowley as a cultural phenomenon: Roger Hutchinson’s rather derivative The Beast Demystified (1998) claims to concentrate on Crowley not as ‘incomprehensible mystic’ but as ‘comprehensible man’, while Martin Booth’s entertaining and disturbing A Magick Life (2000) sees a potentially brilliant polymath brought low by his greater talent for self-destruction.35 Crowley’s magical system of Thelema, or will, has far from rivalled the Christianity he blasphemed, but his talents were considerable: his knowledge of yoga was extensive long before such systems became fashionable in the west and his experiments with sexual magic and drugs were no more futile than those

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derangements of the senses pursued by writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and William Burroughs. Crowley’s relationship with Blake was suitably bizarre for such an eclectic figure. In 1906, as he was crossing China with his first wife, Rose Kelly, and daughter, Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith (who was to die later that year from typhoid), Crowley had been attempting to cultivate the technique of ‘magical memory’ whereby he would communicate with his former lives and the living souls of ancient mystics. Amidst his magical invocations, the Augoiedes (or ‘dawning’, after De Mysteriis of Iamblichus), he summoned the great men of the esoteric tradition to communicate with them, a line that began with Pythagoras and ended with William Blake.36 Blake was one of the figures with whom Crowley felt considerable empathy, although such sympathies were extremely limited. Poetically closer to Swinburne and Shelley (and far inferior as a poet to both), Crowley nonetheless shared something of Blake’s visionary quality for all Christopher Isherwood’s assessment that he ‘didn’t really believe in anything’. The besotted disciples of the Mega Therion, or Great Will, recognised the connection, as when Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller (noting that it had taken a hundred million years to produce Aleister Crowley) remarked him ‘more than a new-born Dionysius . . . more than a Blake.’37 References to Blake are scattered throughout Crowley’s writings, but there is no evidence that he read anything other than The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in any detail (which was more than enough for the Great Beast). Thus, for example, in his finest work, the ‘autohagiographical’ Confessions he cites a number of proverbs from The Marriage, such as ‘The lust of the goat is the glory of God’ (Confessions, p. 257) and ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’ (Confessions, p. 843). Another function of Blake is as a metonym for the unfathomable nature of apocalyptic writing: the visions revealed to him after his repetition of the Enochian Keys recited by Edward Kelly to John Dee were ‘as unintelligible to me as Blake to a Baptist’ (Confessions, p. 613). Blake, then, is the type of the Holy Fool, akin to the first card of the Tarot with no thought of this world but protected by divine agencies. Crowley who, as much as any man in the twentieth century, sought to discover the palace of wisdom at the end of the road of excess, believed that his own folly had led him to the true nature of these divine agencies, holy but diabolic powers that could possess him with malicious intent, such as the demon Choronzon, or reveal the mysteries of the

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ancients, as the angel Aiwas was to do several times throughout his life. Crowley, then, was much less interested in Blake as poet and artist than as mystic and one particular reference to Blake reveals the context in which Blake was invoked at this time. In Liber Aleph vel CXI: The Book of Wisdom and Folly, a Blakean title written in 1918 but not published until 1962, Crowley cites another proverb from The Marriage, ‘Everything that lives is holy’, as well as the lines from the Auguries of Innocence, ‘If the Sun and Moon should doubt / They’d immediately go out’. The book, addressed as an epistle from the Great Beast to his son, refers these ‘sacred words’ to the child’s uncle, ‘called upon Earth William O’Neill, or Blake’.38 W. B. Yeats, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn with Crowley, and Edwin J. Ellis had adopted a spurious Irish genealogy for Blake, and the reference in The Book of Wisdom and Folly indicates that Crowley’s invocation of Blake as a mystic was hardly surprising in the first decades of the new century, fashionable even, as the vogue for non-Christian faiths amongst the upper and middle classes initiated a search for spiritual precursors. Yet Crowley’s use of William Blake (or O’Neill as he preferred) was much more specific. In his astrological writings, Crowley invoked the painter-poet frequently as an exemplar of the mystic guided by Uranus in Pisces, utilising the horoscope drawn up by John Varley and published in Urania or the Astrologer’s Chronicle (1825). Crowley’s own mysticism was predicated on blasphemy, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was one of his fundamental texts, imitating it, for example, in the proverbs of The Heart of the Master by ‘Khaled Khan’ (1938) or incorporating it into his systematic dissertation on Magick in Theory and Practice (1929). In many respects, it is easy to see Crowley’s studies of comparative religion as part of a reaction by imperial subjects to the callous and materialistic Christian colonialism that opened up the religions of the east as it simultaneously sought to proselytise them out of existence. While many of his actions were simply the spoilt responses of infantile egotism, perhaps, as some biographers have noted, an attempt to shock the public into a recognition that would serve in place of the love he had not received as a child, Crowley was also too smart to submit to second-rate psychoanalysis. Rather, as Bataille argues, the sovereign value of evil is that it demands of us a ‘hypermorality’.39 Put simply, conventional religion can never be spiritual because through it we can never question, never experience, the shock of the divine felt by Job. As Blake had written a century before

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Radical Blake

Crowley’s experiments, hell is the imposition of ideological reason, for the mistakes of the religious such as Swedenborg was that they ‘conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion’ (E43). Crowley’s use of Blake was limited, then, and the twentieth-century magician distinguished in his Confessions between those mystics whose authority depends on the ‘interior certainty’ of the seer and his own method (compared by Crowley to that of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu) which remained ‘essentially sceptical’, knowing nothing but always questioning experience (Confessions, p. 396). To repeat, however, blasphemy was a useful technique for Crowley and he indulged it in a number of ways: by being banned from delivering a lecture on the fifteenth-century Satanist and child murderer, Gilles de Rais (who also attracted a biography from Bataille); by mixing religion with pornography and obscenity, as in Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden (1904). At his most Rabelaisian, Crowley sought to circumvent Christianity with a paganism that alternated between the sublime and ridiculous, and in such a task he was more than happy to misread a Christian mystic such as Blake as the diabolic author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a 1910 essay, ‘Concerning “Blasphemy” in General and the “Rites of Eleusis” in Particular’, Crowley distinguished between the abuse of the gutter and the music hall (which he considered harmless) and compared his own performance of the Rites of Eleusis to the atheism of Bradlaugh and Foote, arguing that to question theistic convention in England required a greater morality.40 Unlike the case of his predecessors, however, blasphemy was not part of a social and overtly politicised struggle (which would not have satisfied Crowley’s crypto-fascistic aristocratic affectation), but more of a means of selfpublicity. At worst, denunciation of God was a dilettante diversion for the Great Beast, although at its most effective his pagan magick can be seen as a ‘firm perswasion’ that placed him on the side of the devils even though, as revealed in perhaps his best poem, ‘Hymn to Pan’, his religion was not so much diabolic as daemonic: And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend Everlasting, world without end, Mannikin, maiden, mænad, man, In the might of Pan. Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan.41 While Crowley saw Blake as a mystic whose religious vision provided

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a door into the spirit world incomprehensible to conventional Christianity, a closer parallel exists between the work of the Romantic engraver and another artist who had connections with Crowley. Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was another Londoner, born at Snowhill, the son of a City of London policeman. Spare’s early success as an artist (he exhibited at the Royal Academy at sixteen and edited Form: A Quarterly of the Arts with Francis Marsden and later W. H. Davies from 1916–17 and 1921–2, as well as The Golden Hind with Clifford Bax from 1922–4) was obscured in later life as he immersed himself in idiosyncratic occult and aesthetic practices. Spare lived most of his life around Southwark, with studios at the Elephant and Castle and, when that was destroyed during the Second World War, at Brixton, holding small exhibitions of his work. Like Blake, he also published his own books, collections of illustrations and prose-poems or automatic writings which were initially printed by the Co-Operative Printing Society in Tudor Street. One work, The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of Aâos (1921), was published by the Morland Press, while his last printed volume, The Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites, was privately published in 1927. Spare also illustrated several books, such as James Bertram’s and F. Russell’s The Starlit Mire (1911) and J. C. Squire’s Twelve Poems (1916) and The Gold Tree (1917), as well as contributing articles and artwork to Form, The Golden Hind, and Typographia. The artist also listed several unpublished works in The Anathema of Zos, and continued to produce artistic-occult works some of which, such as Axiomata and The Witches’ Sabbath, were published from manuscript after his death.42 A review of a solo exhibition in 1927 noted that although Spare’s art did not explicitly imitate Blake’s ‘he might be reminded of Blake’s extremely matter-of-fact provisions of pictorial machinery for the promptings of an unconscious mind at least as rich as his own’.43 Spare needed no reminding, and was well aware of the similarities – and differences – between his work and that of Blake. Claiming to have lived before as an Englishman who was born around 1750, ‘he vehemently denied any suggestions that he might have been William Blake, whose work he greatly admired and with which his own has sometimes been compared’.44 Spare’s first work, Earth Inferno (1905), published in a limited edition of two hundred and sixty-five copies when he was eighteen, was in many ways very derivative, stylistically similar to Aubrey Beardsley and art nouveau in visual terms and drawing heavily on symbolist and decadent poetry, as well as the late Victorian and Edwardian craze for esoterica propagated by movements such as the Hermetic Order of the

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Blake and Blasphemy

Radical Blake

Golden Dawn and Theosophy. Nonetheless, Earth Inferno indicated already the direction that Spare’s art was to take, outlining ‘Destiny, Humanity and The Chaos of Creation’ that would develop into a personal mythology similar to that of Blake, W. B. Yeats (who was a contributor to Form) or even Max Ernst’s Loplop. His Book of Satyrs (1907) expanded his allegorical and visual dictionary, but it was with The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love) (1909–13) that Spare demonstrated his real originality. Subtitled The Psychology of Ecstasy, The Book of Pleasure is both a manual and demonstration of his artistic-occult practice, establishing a magical system based upon the emerging science of psychology and psychoanalysis in which the practitioner would achieve a state of transcendence through meditative practices. The illustrations for The Book of Pleasure are remarkable: in the preceding decade, Spare had begun to experiment with automatic drawing and pseudo-collage techniques, this book providing the culmination of these early trials. Spare’s mythology, as outlined in The Book of Pleasure, The Focus of Life and The Anathema of Zos, centred his artistic-occult practices on the body. The earlier text is concerned with technique rather than mythopoesis, the achievement of Kïa, or the freedom of self beyond belief systems (including belief in the limited self) which had its origins in Crowley’s Thelema, Taoism and Tantra: ‘The Kïa which can be expressed by conceivable ideas, is not the eternal Kïa . . . Its emanation is its own intensity[.]’45 Spare’s system of witchcraft denied any god beyond the self, the source of godhead. Similar to Blake’s zoas, Spare’s daemons emanate from the psyche, are ‘atavastic resurgences’, desires released through art and black magic; the fractured self refuses a coherent ego that can worship its own spectral projection as a monotheistic god. The Book of Pleasure is probably the most important book produced by Spare, and is filled with invocations to desire and aphorisms reminiscent of Blake, for example that ‘Art supplies all the material which Science exploits. Formula is subsequent to Inspiration.’46 Nonetheless, it is in his two subsequent works that his mythology appears closest to Blake’s. The Focus of Life begins with an address by the Kïa to Zos, which includes the lines: True wisdom cannot be expressed by articulate sounds . . . Confined within the limits of rationalism; no guess has yet answered. O Zos, thou art fallen into the involuntary accident of birth and rebirth into the incarnating ideas of women.47

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Although Spare does not explain the origin of the term Zos, it is clearly a fictionalised form of himself (as is Aos, or Aâos, obviously an acronym of his own initials), and The Focus of Life consists of a dialogue between four figures, Zos, Kïa, Ikkâh and Zod-Ka which bear a remarkable similarity to the four Zoas of Blake’s poem of the same name, published by Yeats and Ellis in 1893. Zos, described elsewhere by Spare as ‘the body considered as a whole’48 has, like Albion, forgotten the freedom of his desires and fallen into a dull round of reincarnation, his redemption being initiated by Aâos who dies himself to reawaken to true desires (after being tempted by a very Enitharmon-like figure, his virgin sister Tzula). In The Anathema of Zos, the last book published in Spare’s lifetime, the liberated Zos denounces the religious hypocrisy around him: O Self my God, foreign is thy name except in blasphemy, for I am thy iconoclast . . . Let me forget righteousness. Free me of morals. Lead me into the temptation of myself, for I am a tottering kingdom of good and evil.49 Where Blake annihilates self, Spare seeks fulfilment in self. While this difference appears irreconcilable, the self that Spare actually seeks to fulfil is blasphemous, anything but the mundane, post-Enlightenment ego propped up by the injunctions of moral law. For Blake, as for Spare, the indulgence of this ego formed through repression is a living death: And now the Spectres of the Dead awake in Beulah: all The Jealousies become Murderous: uniting together in Rahab A Religion of Chastity, forming a Commerce to sell Loves With Moral Law, an Equal Balance, not going down with decision Therefore the Male severe & cruel filld with stern Revenge: Mutual Hate returns & mutual Deceit & mutual Fear. (J 69:32–7, E223) As with Crowley, there are significant differences between Spare and Blake. Spare, like Crowley, was not so much a Satanist (as opponents termed them) as a pagan, operating within a dualistic cosmos of heaven and hell or, more accurately, heaven and earth, a world of literal pantheism (Crowley) and witchcraft (Spare). Blake, by contrast, was a radical Christian, blaspheming not Christ but the god of this world. Nonetheless, both shared much of Blake’s antinomianism,

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drawing from a common source if not directly inherited from their Romantic precursor. Spare in particular adopted a Blakean tone in his work, something which Crowley (rather pompously) remarked: ‘My disciple has learnt much from The Book of the Law; for the rest, he has drawn from The Book of Lies [another work by Crowley] and William Blake, also Nietzsche and the Tao Teh King.’50

IV: The excremental vision After Spare’s death in 1956, British society underwent a series of changes that affected the progress of a multicultural and ‘permissive’ society. The atheism of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and John Ellis McTaggart, while never necessarily accepted into the mainstream of British thought, certainly indicated a respectable thoroughgoing branch of British academic opinion. Russell’s Why I am not a Christian (1927) was republished in 1957 in a version that has been frequently reprinted since, a work ‘interesting less for its intrinsic merits than as the work of Russell, a great philosopher and human being’.51 The 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and later trial of the school issue of Oz seemed to indicate that censorship was an inefficient means of regulating public mores, while censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain ended in 1968. With increased immigration from the West Indies, but also – and more significantly in this instance – from the former colonies of the near east and Indian subcontinent, any notion of Britain as a clearly Christian country (which in itself ignored centuries of nonconformist dissent) began to blur. And yet, as Nicolas Walter remarks, although Britain became increasingly multicultural and secularised, blasphemy laws were never repealed, so that the release of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle was frequently delayed throughout the 1970s while Gay News was prosecuted in 1976 for publication of James Kirkup’s poem, ‘The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name’, a homosexual fantasy enacted by the Roman centurion piercing the side of Christ with his spear.52 With diversity in culture, however, even the idea that blasphemy can be safely jettisoned as part of an Enlightenment progress of reason is increasingly suspect as merely one opinion amongst many, and religions such as Islam, newly established in Britain, do not necessarily wish for a weakening of blasphemy laws but their extension to protect other faiths. The conflict between secular and religious thought along these new battle lines was illustrated most dramatically with the issue of a fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie, for his book The Satanic Verses after it won the

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Whitbread Prize in 1988. Reports of the death of religion, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated: rather, as that Bataillean excess which only finds satisfaction when released from the pressure of repression, blasphemies, when taboo, simply mutate into new forms. By the end of the century, Blake had come to signify in the popular imagination a shorthand for a particular type of evil: a demented, perverse but highly intelligent, even empathetic, evil associated particularly with psychopaths and serial killers. Two short examples will demonstrate this specific excess. In the film Hannibal, a postcard of ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ serves as a pithy illustration of the mind of the eponymous evil genius; Thomas Harris, the author of Hannibal had explored the potential relationship between Blake and a serial killer in the first novel of the Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon (1981). Another killer, Dolarhyde, feels himself possessed by the image of Blake’s Red Dragon from the Book of Revelation, an image of nightmarish sexual intensity which (in one of the more amusing and preposterous incidents for students of Blake) Dolarhyde devours, rather as the author of Revelation is commanded to swallow. ‘There it was. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun – the Man-Dragon rampant over the prostrate pleading woman caught in a coil of his tail.’53 The second example comes from Michael Dibdin’s novel Dark Spectre (1995), in which another serial killer, Sam, takes up Blake’s works as the revelation of a new religion with himself as an antinomian prophet, Los, one who would truly sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. As Sam explains to the protagonist, Phil, God would not allow us to destroy such creations if they were real: That’s why the Secret can only be revealed to a few chosen individuals. You understand what it means? It means you can do what the fuck you want! You can beat people, shoot them, torture them, anything at all! Because if God allows you to do it, the victim was never really there in the first place. He was what Blake calls a spectre. An emanation, a mere shadow. ‘Why wilt thou give to her a body whose life is but a shade?’, Jerusalem, chapter twelve, verse one.54 Dibdin (and Harris) do not use Blake simply as some insane but twisted genius: as Phil comments of Sam in Dark Spectre, it is really the macho serial killer who is a spectre in Blakean terms, having cut himself off

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Blake and Blasphemy

Radical Blake

from any female aspects of himself. What is significant in these two examples, however, is the frisson that Blake’s art creates in the reader nearly two centuries after his death, that the visionary religious artist could speak of evil, could blaspheme, so clearly. Elsewhere, the appeal of Blake to a new generation of British artists demonstrates some of the ways in which Blake functions outside typical academic traditions, and nowhere is this more notable than the work of Chris Ofili, winner of the 1998 Turner art prize. Born in Manchester to Nigerian parents in 1968 and educated at the Chelsea School of Art and Royal College of Art, Ofili, described as an artist whose ‘audacity seems to know no bounds’,55 lists a number of contemporary black cultural influences, from the Notting Hill Carnival to New York rapper Lil’ Kim and The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace), indicating the ways that such influences have permeated popular culture and can inform the visual arts. As well as the important impact of rap and hip hop which, as Godfrey Worsdale remarks, is similar to the way that previous musical movements such as Jazz have influenced painters, Ofili has been affected by his own Catholic upbringing, African art techniques such as Batik, and artists such as David Hammons (who made a series of sculptures from elephant shit and sold snow balls to an unsuspecting public in 1983) and, more surprising, William Blake. As Worsdale comments: a connection with the late eighteenth-century English painter, printmaker and poet William Blake might seem less easily explained. Despite this, Blake’s position in British art history is of considerable interest to his latter-day admirer. As a contemporary of both Turner and Constable, Blake, who Gombrich described as a mystic, was clearly seen as being distinct from the main stream within British art history. Like Ofili, Blake was extremely well versed in biblical matters and used his knowledge to inform his art practice. In visual terms, Blake was also able to sacrifice his great delicacy of touch to make way for a cacophony of expression.56 Two paintings from 1995, Satan and Seven Bitches, are inspired directly from Blake. Satan is the sequel to Blake’s Satan in all his Original Glory (c.1805), a watercolour that depicts the angel in his original, delicate translucence before the discovery of his iniquity in heaven. In Ofili’s painting, Satan’s human form divine is lost; fallen, Satan is a startling (and, indeed, still beautiful) chaos of red, gold and black, a blood-clot body scattered with Ofili’s trademark elephant dung and a pair of

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yellow cat eyes staring mischievously from this explosion of colour. Seven Bitches Tossing their Pussies before the Divine Dung is an acrylic, oil and resin collage, with pictures of black women’s heads and genitalia scattered around a central turd, a mocking comment on Blake’s The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne (c.1803–5) occupied in its centre by the image of God. Worsdale notes that the title for the later piece probably comes from the seven heads at the base of Blake’s painting which Ofili had previously seen at the Tate, and Lisa Corrin describes Ofili’s paintings as a series of playful dialogues with artists such as Blake, Picabia and Mike Kelley.57 Ofili’s success in the Turner Prize was commented upon at several levels: as the only painter to win for many years, he is also interesting as a figurative artist whose paintings offer a very different human form divine to that of the classical Western canon. Excrement and scatological imagery are important to his work and figures in two ways: first of all, his paintings are nearly always balanced on elephant dung, their fundament, so to speak, and secondly, that this prima materia is also used as a textural medium within the paintings themselves. As David Beech remarks, ‘Shit is an incongruous presence in painting. Elephant shit, more so, because not only does it not belong in painting, it does not belong in the West[.]’58 Shit, then, is a figure of the culturally repressed, a ‘great signifier’ that Ofili discovered on a British Council travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe in 1992.59 But as well as a return of the colonial body, the excrescence of a world power that would exclude colonised bodies from its purified centre (the subject of one of Ofili’s most powerful paintings, No Woman No Cry, in tribute to Stephen Lawrence), shit is the taboo dynamo of the sexual body, most clearly seen in his extremely funny Captain Shit series, but also other provocative and offensive pieces such as Pimpin’ ain’t Easy (1997) and The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), the latter of which was included in the aptly titled Sensation exhibition in 1997. While Sensation made something of a cynical splash in London and the rest of Europe in 1997–8, its most dramatic moment centred on The Holy Virgin Mary when the exhibition opened in New York in Autumn 1999. The notoriously media-hungry mayor, Giuliani, denounced what he saw as an anti-Christian and blasphemous painting, concentrating on the conjunction of elephant dung (one bolus of which forms a nipple on the virgin’s breast) and exposed genitalia scattered around her figure. What is more, for a Western Catholic such as Giuliani the potentially sacrilegious physicality of the body of the virgin Mary is signified not simply by the sexual collage around her (reflected in her

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Blake and Blasphemy

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vaginal mouth), but also her facial features and skin colour: the sexuality of the virgin, idealised and sublimated in a long tradition of European Madonna painting, is here foregrounded in a body that cannot be ignored as, literally, a black Madonna. This is the blasphemy of such a painting, that energy, which is of the body, will always squeeze through the sphincters of reason, whether as shit or sex. Such penetrations are, of course, not without their problems, and as Ofili’s canvases are frequently dominated by pornographic images and occasionally by eight-foot phalluses this could indicate an extreme of the stereotypically virile, black, macho pimp surrounded by ho’s. But this is to ignore the gleeful laughter of the phallus, and more significant is the fact that such childish exoticism, what Stuart Morgan refers to as Ofili’s own brand of Dadaism, should at all threaten the remnants of a bourgeois public sphere that has apparently disappeared under the excrescence of late capitalism and post-modern irony.60 The problem is that we have played the Cartesian trick of forgetting the body far too long, and this is why Ofili’s blasphemy works so well: he does not simply return sex to us, which is far too convenient a tool for commodification of art as well as other products, but the problem of hygiene, the effluent of the cultural and cultured body that we too easily expel and suppress in the hope that it will never return, Bataille’s dejecta or Kristeva’s abject. As Blake announced in The Marriage, ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of that Energy’ (E34). Ofili elects shit to the throne of the deity in his painting Seven Bitches, puerile obscenity and scatology that always works so well as sacrilege even though one would assume God to be above that sort of thing. If the deity cannot cope, however, then Satan is the dissolution of the bounding horizon of the human body, the disintegration of the Western self that enjoys playing in its own blood and shit, a recognition of the anal-sadistic the rejection of which Freud recognised as the fundamental building block of the modern subject. As society becomes, in theory at least, more secularised, blasphemy does not disappear: it is the remnant that is to be expelled, the rejected stone of body, race and sexuality that, ironically, a religious artist such as Blake and later artists and false prophets such as Ofili and Spare build upon. As we are told by the voice of the Devil in The Marriage: It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. But the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. (E34–5)

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I: Symbol and shuffle The copy [of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell] I saw was highly finished. Blake had worked so much and illuminated so richly, that even the type seemed as if done by hand. The ever-fluctuating colour; the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners; the living light and bursts of flame; the spires and tongues of fire, vibrating with the full prism, made the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries; and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something which was alive. As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought, so, in some of these type books over which Blake had long brooded with his brooding fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it – not with a mortal but an indestructible life, whether for good or evil.1 In this extract, the painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81), one of the ‘Shoreham Ancients’ who gathered around Blake in his old age, seems to be suggesting a metaphysics of the book that takes precedent over any idea of the book as being organised by genre or type. In an undated letter to Alexander Gilchrist, Palmer compares a book to conscience: ‘What a wonderful thing is a good book – next to a clear conscience, the most precious thing life has to offer.’2 Yet, the idea of the book that Palmer postulates also refuses to give up the physical presence of the book. In the extract above, he talks of the page moving and quivering, of ‘the very paper’, which ‘seems to come to life as you 169

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gaze upon it’. He continues: ‘As for Ovid, he is the quintessence of poetry, as your copy is the quintessence of editions. What a text! What a margin! They did not clip the book edges then to make those shreds up into paper again.’ Palmer, then, is aware that a book exists as something that can be hacked into, its expansive margins gobbled up to be recycled in a reproductive process. Yet he strives to preserve those margins. Palmer’s sense of the material life of the book is extremely provocative, and he indulges in a particular sort of sensuous hacking. This is his reaction upon first reading the 1863 edition of The Life of William Blake. Palmer starts his ‘beautiful and enthusiastic letter’ with the material presence of the book. He talks of waiting in anticipation for the paper knife so that he could ‘cut the first volume, and read wildly everywhere’. He quickly ascends through the authorial organisation of the book – ‘the dear Author and the Editor, – Mr. Linton, the Publisher and Printer’ – to a metaphorical representation of the book – ‘not a pearl thrown to the swinish many, but a tiara of jewels’. From this point, there is an oscillation between metaphors that represent the book as a live, organic structure, an electric eel for example, and those that represent it as static, inorganic structure, such as an imperishable monument. This is an idea of the book that twentieth-century bibliography, particularly Blake bibliographers, have tended to skip over. The received wisdom seems to go something like this: those Victorian editors and illustrators who snipped and snapped at Blake’s poetry – ‘shaking up’3 the poetry and producing illustrated books rather than illuminated works (Gilchrist’s Life, as we have seen, has fine examples of both of these traits) – just didn’t get Blake, neither as a radical poet nor as a technical artisan. Yet it is not what is going on bibliographically here that differentiates nineteenth-century reproduction from eighteenth or for the matter twentieth-century production and reproduction. The landmark bibliographical work on Blake in the last twenty years, Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book came to the core conclusion that shows a central practice not that different from nineteenth-century reproductive practice: Blake changed things . . . constantly. Viscomi has repeatedly observed that Blake’s method of production means that we should think in terms of the copy rather than the book, each printed version of the Songs or of Urizen often being substantially different from any other. If Rossetti changes a word every so often or Linton integrates part of America into the biographical text of Gilchrist’s Life, what, at a level of pure textual practice, the

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shuffle of the text here or there, is the difference between the Gilchrist collaborators and Blake? Not that much. But of course there is a difference. Yet it is not the difference that most people cling to, between author and imitator, that makes the text authentic. Walter Benjamin’s famous definition of what a work of art means in the age of mass reproduction is a red-herring where Blake is concerned: The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history it has experienced . . . One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art . . . The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition . . . In other words, the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.4 One of the most influential definitions of art and authenticity in the twentieth century is, as far as Blake is concerned, a reductio ad absurdum. Initially Benjamin’s aura seems to transfuse Blake’s illuminated works, and Blake’s artisan practice, really getting into the veins of Blake’s production ethos. The ‘unique value’ of the work that endures and is transmitted from its beginning seems to uncannily echo the fortitude and exactitude expressed about the work in the author’s adresss ‘To the Public’ at the beginning of Jerusalem: ‘Every word and every letter is studied and put in its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts – the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts’(E146). As with the poetry of Jerusalem, so with the illumination. Morton D. Paley makes a valuable distinction in the Tate edition of Jerusalem between Blake’s conception of the ‘unfinished’ and ‘finished’ Jerusalem. Citing Blake’s letter to George Cumberland of 12 April 1827 in which Blake talks about a ‘Finishd’ Jerusalem, Paley points out: By ‘Finishd’ Blake did not mean merely ‘written’ or ‘printed’ for he had almost certainly already produced at least three complete monochrome copies (A, C, and D) and a coloured copy (B) of Chapter 1 comprising twenty-five plates. ‘Finished’ is a term Blake often used, as in distinguishing between two pictures by George Romney, one ‘a Sketch,’ the other ‘a finished Production’ (to

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William Hayley, 28 December 1804, E760). When George Moser, Keeper at the Royal Academy, called prints after Rafael and Michelangelo ‘Unfinish’d’ and put forward alternatives under Rubens and LeBrun, the young Blake rejoined ‘These Things that you call Finished are not Even Begun’ (Annotations to Reynolds’ Discourses, E639). Blake’s own Job and Edward and Elinor are called ‘highly finished engravings’ in his prospectus of 1793 (E692). ‘Finished’, then, means both complete and brought to the artist’s idea of perfection. Not all works had to be coloured to merit this term, but Jerusalem did. Only one copy was ever finished in this sense – copy E[.]5 Benjamin’s aura would seem to have it all in the wrap, then, as far as Blake’s concept of the work, of its state of perfection, of its ‘essence’ that is ‘transmissable from its beginning’, is concerned. Blake is the ritualiser of production, the alchemist of the artefact. But there is a problem. Benjamin’s concept of the aura is something that is explicitly imbedded in ‘the fabric of tradition’, in the work’s ‘original use value’. Compare this to Blake’s own vision of poesis following on directly from the lines quoted above from the address ‘To the Public’, Jerusalem plate 3: ‘Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!’ (E146). In Blake’s conception, poetry is not chained to anything, be that historical circumstance or Biblical authority. In his ‘Annotations to Watson’ Blake celebrates Biblical exegesis as a turning up and turning over of possibility and potential, transforming interpretation into inspiration: He who writes things for true which none could write. but the actor. such are most of the acts of Moses. must either be the actor or a fable writer or a liar. If Moses did not write the history of his acts. it takes away the authority altogether it ceases to be history & becomes a Poem of probable impossibilities fabricated for pleasure as moderns say but I say by Inspiration. (E616) Up-anchored from authority and history, Blake’s work is freed and gives us – wonderful phrase – ‘probable impossibilites’. Rather than seeking refuge from the constantly encroaching contemporary in an over-mystified idea of the aura, there is a sense in which Blake puts his works out there, flagships of a brave new world, of tomorrow. We know, particularly in the light of Viscomi’s work, that Blake was continually mixing the way in which those works would face the world. And it is

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perfectly conceivable – we might even say expected – that if Blake had not died then the ‘Finished’ version of Jerusalem would have been ‘Finished’ again and probably again. The question is not one of what is authentic but of what is being authored. And the problem becomes one of how do we possibly begin to read this plurality of ‘probable impossibilities’, of multiple texts as well as multiple meaning? The nineteenth century has something to teach us here, which, as argued above, has been all too easy to dismiss. But to understand the current state of play it is instructive to look at the most innovative reproduction of Blake’s works in the last twenty years: the Blake Archive. The Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org) is an ambitious project to place the majority of the artist’s work in the public domain overseen by Joseph Viscomi, Robert Essick and Morris Eaves. The authors of the Blake Archive are (quite rightly) proud of the technical achievements of the site: this is not simply a collection of scanned images, but rather a much more labour-intensive process of image processing to calibrate the colour channels of the digital documents into alignment with the hues and tones of the original image.6 The value of the Archive for the Blake scholar is immense: reproduction of Blake’s work in print is too expensive for more than single copies of any of the texts. The ability to compare these significantly different copies is perhaps the main contribution of the Archive to Blake studies, one that has been lauded by a number of commentators.7 However, the Archive has not been universally praised: in a paper published in 1999, Andrew Cooper and Michael Simpson directed what has been probably the most sustained attack on the ideology that directs the Archive: ‘Hacking at the Net from within, Blake’s work also offers a particular challenge to the historicist ideology that, in league with the antiquarian structures of the Archive, seeks to place, distance, contain, and ultimately bring Blake into a timely focus.’8 The authors of this polemic welcome the Archive, but argue that it circumscribes the freedom that what they call Blake’s ‘Eternal hacking’ seems to invite: entering the site involves a Faustian bargain, an agreement that bounds the horizon of interpretation within academia and corporate sponsorship. Essick, Eaves and Viscomi, as well as others involved with the Archive, have understandably argued for the requirement to enforce the law of copyright as one that protects the labour they have put into producing the Archive as a valuable but freely available resource, and yet they operate against an antinomian subject who, by confronting the media of his day, continues to hack against the webs and nets of our own, who, in the words of Marshal McLuhan, disrupts

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Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock. But poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered ‘from single vision and Newton’s sleep,’ knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw Newton and Locke and others as hypnotized Narcissus types quite unable to meet the challenge of mechanism.9 We seem to be between a rock and a hard place. The very best textual critics, the most important and innovative Blake scholars of our time, operating with the most cutting-edge technology and bringing to more people than ever before Blake’s works as never before, may be choking the creative life out of those works, acting as navel-gazing Narcissi of Newtonian ratio and repetition. This rock and this hard place may be variously termed, as we argued in our introduction, preservation and propagation. In terms of propagation, a bold move for the Blake Archive would be to make it open source, rather like the Internet itself in its early years: the problem with such a move, however, is that it could leave the Blake Archive open to a babel of interpretation outside the control of the most significant Blake scholars today (although technological innovations such as the Net are not necessarily without standards). As we have tried to show throughout this book, however, Blake’s images and text are viruses, worms, pop memes that will circulate through cyberspace as they have through other subcultures and counter-cultures since their release into the wild at the end of the eighteenth century. Blake, like Paine, would have been sceptical of the corporate claims made for the web but would have welcomed the ways in which it can open up and challenge orthodox communication.10 So are we suggesting an ‘anything goes’ approach to the textual transmission of Blake’s works, ‘a little bit of anarchy never hurt anybody’ kick to conformity? Absolutely not. What we are suggesting is that amidst the great work done in bibliography and in recovering Blake’s method of production in the last decade or so of Blake scholarship, something has been missed. From the point of view of reception, Viscomi has basically provided us with a blind shuffle. Yes,

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the cool state of psychic, social and political somnambulism by dabbling in hot technologies:

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the text of each illuminated book changes, is re-ordered, is produced in a copy batch rather than as a unique book. But why? What is needed, and is indeed beginning to be done, is a closer knitting together of the bibliographic school with the historicist school, allowing what Jerome McGann calls the ‘social nexus’ of literary production to become apparent.11 A good example of the fruitfulness of this approach is Christopher Z. Hobson’s thoroughly well-researched argument that the plate changes and additions in Milton are a response to the Vere-Street persecutions of 1810–11, which culminated with the execution on 8 March 1811 of a forty-two year old ensign, John Newball Hepburn, and a sixteen year old drummer-boy, Thomas White. Amongst a plethora of detail regarding textual emendations between copies, this insight is typical: ‘Given Blake’s probable awareness of the events, and his concerns with sexual hypocrisy, Moral Law, and homosexuality, plates 3–5, added to Milton some time after the persecutions, may contain a coded reference to them [the Vere-street persecutions], among other details. Several aspects of the “calvarys foot” narration fit this hypothesis.’12 Blake’s work comes to life in the socio-political network; in the newspaper reports, brawling mobs and whispered intrigues of his own time. It is this network that requires hacking – it is not authenticity or its preservation that should concern us as creative critics of Blake, but what is being authored. It is here that the particular ‘hacking’ that the Victorian Palmer indulges in when confronted with Gilchrist’s Life regains relevance. Palmer specifically, as noted above, cuts or hacks into the book while at the same time relishing the material presence of the book. The book is something that entails an almost ritualistic entrance to open, the paper-knife taking on almost sacrificial proportions. In Blake studies, between fetishising the aura of the work and taking on the significance of the copy-edition, we have managed to dismiss the idea of the book. Yet we have barely stopped to discuss what the idea of the book is. The nineteenth-century has something to say to us where this is concerned. If Palmer talks of the book in symbols – tiara of jewels, electric eel, or imperishable monument, that is because the book is a symbol to him. He is not alone amongst those who were connected with Blake and later nineteenth-century interest in Blake. The nineteenth-century Blake book – Gilchrist’s Life being the prime example – as opposed to the work, edition, copy, etc. is a knot in the network, a synapse of society, pulling together various societal, political and aesthetic impulses. It is an ordering, stilling symbol of frenetic creativity. It is

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both preservation and propagation. We have already seen the depth of feeling that Anne Gilchrist imbued the Life with and her sensuous relationship to the book of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Another influence on the Life was Thomas Carlyle, who explicitly voices the struggle to create order in a book. Alexander Gilchrist wrote in his diary (28 December 1859): Carlyle again asked me about the Blake; what I was doing with it. I stated that I had delivered his letter to Chapman, but was giving my MS. a last revisal before sending it in. He talked of the difficulties of a book, of getting it done, of reducing chaos to order.13 For Carlyle the book is the symbol that holds together the ‘chaos’ of a text. The book is a signature of order, an assimilation of information that is open to reading and interpretation. Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the symbol and of the book in Sartor Resartus (1831) offers the most explicit expression of the book as cultural symbol. The structure of Sartor Resartus is configured around the rebuilding of a cultural artefact. This cultural artefact is the book of Teufelsdröckh’s (or devil’s dung) life, pieced together from the contents of paper bags, each marked with the sign of the zodiac. The cultural artefact, the material symbol, is both recreated as we read and that which we hold in our hands: it is the book. It is order out of chaos. Other nineteenth-century Blake enthusiasts concur is this special status of the book. Ruskin’s ideal book is human and communicable to the last degree: The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one else has yet said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly, at all events. That is his ‘writing;’ it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a ‘Book’.14 Swinburne goes further still: ‘a perfect book is a spiritual vehicle’ (AS, p. 205). But we would also be selling out Blake and the book if we rested on this vague idea of the book as being ‘spiritually symbolic’ in the nineteenth century. What really pulls everything back into focus is what makes things fall apart in the nineteenth-century production of Blake books: when artisan authenticity collides with innovative

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technology, when the market-place dictates, when freethinking spills over the margins. To produce, preserve and propagate the work of William Blake in the nineteenth century involved those who both valorised the symbolic nature of the book and those who were prepared to shuffle those books into a new order, a new symbolising.

II: Copycats and cut-ups: William Muir and William James Linton The work of William Muir strives for symbol status, almost to the point of turning Blake’s work into the coffee-table status symbol of Bohemian aestheticism. Just at the point when the mechanical reproduction of Blake’s books seems a precise certainty, the artisan tradition makes a ravishing comeback in the Blake revival. William Muir appropriates the uniqueness of Blake’s illuminated works and uses productive continuity within the artisan tradition as the ensign of value in his facsimiles: My desire and intention is to reproduce ALL the important works by Wm Blake that exist in book form and also some of his finest designs and this by methods working as nearly the same as Blake himself used as the need of maintaining fidelity to his results will allow. I will not use either photography or chrome-lithography. All outlines are drawn and all colouring is by hand. I produce Fifty Copies only of each book and each of them is numbered.15 The insistence on a retrograde production technique places Muir in a very odd, not to say precarious, position. Paul Mann, also taking his cue from Jerome McGann, sees literary production as a ‘maw of commerce’, which can crush and swallow those that step outside of its dictums and definitions.16 Muir’s declaration of independence from the prevailing status quo of technical reproducibility and commercialism is a risky, though potentially rewarding hand to play. Richard Shepherd thought illuminated works equalled obscurity for the poet: ‘Nevertheless, the fame of Blake as a poet has not kept pace with his fame as an artist. His original volumes, it is true, are sold for fabulous prices, but probably more on account of the embellishments than the poetry. Certain it is that, no poet can expect to survive who depends on illustrated or illuminated editions for his celebrity.’17 But Muir’s facsimiles were not quirks of a diminished tradition.

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Muir’s facsimiles were not only colour facsimiles of Blake’s illuminated works,18 they were also profitable and well-received books at the moment of their production in the 1880s and 1890s. In Paul Mann’s explication of the social failure of the original illuminated books lies the answer as to the failure of Blake’s books and the success of Muir’s. Firstly, Muir’s works ‘reveal themselves to the audience’, because although they eschew the commercial mechanisation of graphic art, they do not cast themselves out from the institutions of literary production but are part of the a complex socio-economic matrix of patronage and publishing (distributed by Bernard Quaritch).19 Secondly, there is the question of what Mann terms the ‘ontology of production’ inherent in Blake’s books. In the PROGRAMME printed at the back of a number of Muir Facsimiles, Muir addresses his patron, Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Count Gleichen – cousin of Queen Victoria: ‘I have to thank your Highness for the interest you have been pleased to take in this enterprise. Blake is pre-eminently an artist’s artist. He has created for himself a realm of “Pure Imagination”, in which he works alone, and his results are most stimulating to the imaginations of those who study them.’20 Muir places a clear emphasis on the ‘ontology of production’ that distinguishes Blake. In making the simple conjunction between ‘Pure Imagination’ and ‘he works alone’, metaphysical creativity is aligned to a physical ontology of lone labour, of unique production. At the same time, the ‘ontology of production’ attached to Blake is celebrated through the reproductive spectrum of which Muir’s facsimiles are a part. For Paul Mann, reproductions of Blake’s works are spectres of origin, creating a sacred aura around the mode of production itself: In Blake’s case, certainly, reproduction does not mark the demise of the aura; on the contrary, it produces an aura that marks the demise of the work as work. It transforms production itself into an icon. The facsimile simultaneously represents and disengages the book; it represents not only the book but its difference from the book, a difference which is not passive but actively signifies the book’s absence, its iconic ‘distance,’ its sacred and lucrative inaccessibility.21 Muir capitalises on the ‘spirituality’ of the book. This is in no way cynicism on Muir’s part: his enthusiasm for Blake’s works is obviously sincere. But the Muir facsimiles are a wonderful example of the backflow engendered when the ontology of production – Benjamin’s ‘aura’

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– encounters the spectrum of reproducibility – Viscomi’s ‘shuffle’. It is no longer the original that generates the value of reproduction, but reproduction that creates the enticing echo of production. Facsimiles presuppose a simulacrum, the loss of the aura of the original, but Muir worked to preserve the immediacy of the text and the vitality of the book by producing several prefaces using the production technique he describes in the programme. The preface looks like the text from one of William Blake’s illuminated works. The human hand upon the copperplate is entwined with the technology of the text. Muir himself cites the technology that was oppressing the craft production that had made Blake’s works unique in the first place. The art of the engraver that had created the aura surrounding the material presence of Blake’s works was being eroded by the developing technologies of reproduction, such as photography or chrome-lithography. Muir’s preface places the work within a specific material history. For example, in the preface to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Muir places the illuminated book in a far more direct and rigorous socio-historical context than either Gilchrist or Swinburne: Rousseau issued his tract on the ‘Social Contract’ in 1762. It was the first articulate utterance of that mode of thought which is now called Radicalism. It came and went like a gleam of lightning. The thunder followed in 1789, and continued for thirty years. Blake published this book before the hopes that were roused by the French Revolution had been disappointed by its excesses. This must in fairness be remembered when the book is read.22 As Muir describes the literary, theoretical and social discourses of Blake’s world, he brings the text to life with graphic minutiae stolen from Blake’s illuminated works. The immediate political reality of radicalism in 1789 is re-enacted using the radical artisan technique of 1789. What Muir achieves in his reproduction is beyond mere copy. It is the preservation of human hand and human history within the culture of print technology. What Muir does in the prefaces for his facsimile reproductions is to posit difference in the material production of the text. In doing so, he pinpoints a hermeneutic rupture point in the chain of literary production that runs from original work to production to interpretation. The production of the work is an act of interpretation. Muir’s direct appropriation of the means of original textual production to make this point places his small run of fifty facsimile copies at the centre of the Blake

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revival rather than at the margins. Muir’s facsimiles are index points in the changing technology of the text. Blake’s illuminated work The Book of Thel, is not simply reproduced as a simulacrum of originality. In Muir’s reproduction, the book becomes an index of historical change. The importance of Muir’s prefaces for nineteenth-century reproduction of Blake is the conjunction they mark between the artisan tradition and the developing history of literary production. Muir managed to retain a distinct artisan accent within the print culture of the 1880s, while at the same time ensuring commercial success by creating, virtually single-handed, a market for these strange and unfamiliar works. Muir had greater success in selling somewhat approximate facsimiles of the same works because, by 1884 when he issued his first proposals, Blake’s reputation had been firmly established in the biographies of J. T. Smith (1828), Allan Cunningham (1830), and especially Alexander Gilchrist (1863, 1880), in the critical eulogies of writers such as Swinburne (1868), and in editions such as those by Shepherd (1874), and Rossetti (1874). As Keri Davies confirms, Muir was producing Blake’s works within a very definite social and aesthetic dynamic: ‘It was into this milieu with its passionate interest in the art of Blake that Muir introduced the facsimiles of the Blake Press.’23 Muir is clearly part of the Blake industry that preceded the academic reception of Blake in the twentieth century. But he manages to keep at bay the ‘maw of commerce’ while at the same time distinguishing his methods of book production from the conventions of print technology and literary institutions. William Muir’s success in creating such unique reproductions of Blake’s works comes in part from his unique relationship with Quaritch who, acting as agent and distributor, provided Muir’s point of connection with the literary market-place. At the same time, Quaritch, as frontman, allowed Muir independence from an institutionalised literary establishment of editors, reviewers and publishers. A copycat who got the cream. Similar questions around reproduction are raised by our second example, William James Linton, the first facsimilist of Blake’s works. Linton, as we have seen, was employed as the illustrator for the 1863 edition of Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake. This reproduction of Blake took place on the brink of the great evolution in visual reproduction, photography, and on the verge of a sea change in his own political radicalism. Together with R. H. Stoddard, Linton edited a fivevolume edition of English Verse, published in 1883. Some of Blake’s lyric poetry appears in the volume entitled ‘Chaucer to Burns’. The

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Blake: engraver, painter, poet; who wrote, printed, and published his poems with his own designs, his own engraving and his own colouring. Very beautiful some of these, young and simply natural, giving promise, as with Chatterton, of a rich maturity; but excess of imagination, verging on insanity, rendered his longer and later works incoherent and unintelligible. His shorter lyrics, his best, yet not always clear are in the Songs of Innocence, 1787, and Songs of Experience, 1794. Jerusalem and Milton, ‘written against his will,’ soon after 1800, was [sic] the latest of his longer poetic utterances. After that he devoted himself mainly to Art.24 It is by no means certain that Linton wrote this extract (Stoddard was to write a biographical appreciation of Blake in 189325), but there is circumstantial evidence that points in Linton’s direction. Linton did write in his memoirs of a visit he paid with Alexander Gilchrist to John Linnell, in which he describes Blake’s works as ‘incoherences’: ‘A strange, dry, withered old man was the painter, quaint in speech, with strange utterance of strange opinions, a man who might have admired Blake as much for his literary incoherences as for his artistic imagination’.26 The negativity directed at the poetic work is balanced by the positive emphasis upon the nature of Blake’s production: ‘Blake: engraver, painter, poet; who wrote, printed and published his poems with his own designs, his own engraving and his own colouring. Very beautiful some of these . . .’ It should not be forgotten that Linton was first and foremost an artisan poet-engraver. He brings this skill to the nineteenth-century appreciation of Blake. Linton’s relationship with Blake’s works is not a simple one-to-one mirror reflection of a facsimilist making an exact copy of an original. Linton achieved throughout the nineteenth century a fusion and invigoration of Blake’s works within contemporary culture. G. E. Bentley was the first scholar to locate pre-Gilchrist Blake copyings by Linton, namely the ‘Death’s Door’ design’ from Blair’s The Grave in the Art-Union of London’s Thirty Pictures by Deceased British Artists (1859, 1860), and John Jackson’s Treatise On Wood Engraving (1861).27 Linton’s interest and interaction with Blake was to grow and develop throughout the century, from careful copyist to innovative facsimilist to creative assimilist, cut-up artist at large.

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biographical note on Blake in the appendix accentuates a split in Blake’s own oeuvre between the lyrical simplicity of youthful inspiration and the visionary imagination of the older artist:

Radical Blake

For Linton the ‘media value’ of the engraved work is inherently bound up with expression: ‘Art is expressive, mechanism inexpressive. Lines drawn with a graver, with design, have art in them, of however poor a quality; lines cut without a sense of drawing, without consciousness of meaning, are only mechanical’ (Practical Hints, p. 66). Linton could be paraphrasing Blake from the Public Address: ‘English Engraving is Lost> & I am sure [of the] [the] Result will be that the Society must be of my Opinion that Engraving by Losing drawing, has Lost all character & all Expression without which Art is Lost’ (PA 11, E572), and ‘A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art it is destructive of Humanity & of Art’ (PA 46, E575). Linton’s deferral to Blake in matters of engraving is often short on words and long on respect, lacking in any acknowledgement other than the visual homage of influence and reproduction. The reticence of Linton to compose purple passages in eulogy to Blake is often matched by the more powerful praise of Linton saying, ‘Look! This is Blake. I need say no more.’ For example, in Practical Hints on Wood-Engraving, Linton reproduces the crucifixion plate from Jerusalem as a frontispiece and says succinctly of Blake in a discussion of white-line engraving: ‘Plate II (the Crucifixion, a copy of a wood-cut, or metal plate engraved wood-fashion, by the hand of the poet-painter William Blake) shows exactly what “whiteline” is’ (Practical Hints, p. 43). In describing a wood-engraving known as Apocalypsis or Historia Sancti Johannis Evangeliste ejusque Visionis Apocalypticae (the story of Saint John the Evangelist and his Apocalyptic Vision), Linton evokes Blake in retrospect: ‘I take it to be so from its great superiority: copies are not usually better than their originals, nor does the abler artist copy the inferior. This coloured copy, coarsely and vilely coloured, has lost the Blake-like character to be seen in the earlier designs, in those of my first edition – Heinechen’s fifth.’28 This glancing reference to Blake is important on two counts. Firstly, it illustrates the power and distinctness of Blake’s work for Linton’s visual imagination. Secondly, it emphasises the complex status of copy and original for the late nineteenth-century artisan engraver. D. W. Dörrbecker sees visual reproduction as being charged with a particular communicative exchange value: ‘During the pre-photographic centuries, printed reproductions of all sorts of pictures possessed a media value which can alone be compared to that of the similarly political consequence and authority of the word printed from moveable type’.29 W. J. Linton understands the material translation of Blake’s works as an articulation

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If a poet is needed to translate the written verse from one tongue into another, is not he an Artist who can translate a painting into the different and less felicitous language of mere black and white? He who works in Art, artfully, artistically, is an Artist, whatever his subject, whatever his material, whatever his tools. The relative grandeur and importance of this or that branch of Art is altogether beside the question. Great as was Blake for his power as a designer, unrivalled as he is as a colorist, he had been not less than an Artist had he been only an engraver.30 In contrast to the simple praise expended on the fellow ‘hand-in-art’ of William Blake, Linton almost bursts with invective against the encroaching art of photography. In reply to art-reviewers who revered the new art of photolithography, unconsciously slighting the status of the artisan engraver, Linton would match Blake in exasperated mockery: Prodigious! He is inspired by escaping the danger of ideas, loses the aspect of his function, and so is provoked into excellence and becomes intimate with the artist. This is being elevated in a measure to the position of an interpreter, or translator of it into a new medium. It is better than the working backwards to simplicity of our friend in the Nation. And too funny to be treated seriously. (Practical Hints, p. 77) The truth is, however, that Linton did take the threat of photography towards the artisan tradition of engraving seriously: ‘But the objections to the use of photography, which I have been careful to note, remain the same. The most talented engravers are hampered and crippled by it; they are confined to colour, and compelled to indefiniteness; and they waste their powers on an excess of fineness, which may find ignorant admirers, but of which they themselves are ashamed.’31 As Linton continues in this vein, it becomes apparent that the integrity of the profession is one side of the coin in Linton’s argument. The other is the economic pressure exerted on an artisan tradition by new technology: ‘The end of this can only be imbecility in engraving, and then the substitution of some process for the mechanical weakness of the hand. For the mechanic-engraver the

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of creative synthesis, reliant upon the materials and tools, the language, of the Artist:

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days of engraving are numbered. Only the artist-engraver, while he upholds the dignity, can assure the future of engraving. Beware of photography!’32 Linton’s response to new reproductive technology is not, as might be supposed from his diatribe against photography, to become an anachronism. Instead he again acts as a Victorian mirror image to the life of Blake, and invents his own method of print reproduction, together ‘with a craftsman named Hancock’ (Radical Artisan, p. 146). In 1861, Linton produced a pamphlet promoting the ‘New Process of Engraving for Surface Printing’33 which he called kerography. In this pamphlet, Linton draws attention to the delicacy and exactness of this new process: ‘An engraving by the new process is necessarily an exact facsimile, even to the minutest touch, of the draughtsman’s work. Where an artist’s manner is of any value, the new process, therefore is infinitely superior to engraving on wood; capable also of giving greater delicacy, and very much more minuteness and elaboration.’ But the greatest emphasis that Linton places upon the new process is its cheapness of production over other methods. On almost every page he underlines the low cost of kerography: ‘less than wood-engraving in production, as little as wood-engraving in printing, and is even more durable’.34 Kerography, however, had lost the economic and artistic battle with photographic technology by the 1880s. But the immediate battle-lines between Linton’s method of facsimile reproduction and the new technology of photolithography had immediate repercussions in the 1860s that were of direct relevance to the mid-century publication of Blake’s works in book form. In Radical Artisan, F. B. Smith describes the method of kerography and its use in literary production: The process anticipated modern mechanical methods of engraving zinc or copper plates for surface printing, although Linton’s technique required drawing direct on the plate. Each plate was given a black ground, then another ground in wax, on which the drawing, as in ordinary etching, was cut through to the black ground with an etcher’s needle. A cast was taken from the plate to give the lines in relief and an electrotype then made from the cast to provide a printing surface. Thus for the first time it was possible to make thorough facsimile reproductions of line drawings . . . Linton studied Blake’s work very closely and used his kerographic method to make illustrations approximately to the layered colouring and printing of originals. (Radical Artisan, pp. 146–7)

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Given both Blake’s and Linton’s vituperation against the mechanisation of art, it must be the irony of ironies that Linton’s kerographic reproductions of Blake’s Job were replaced in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life with photolithographs. It is possible that this rejection can account for Linton’s consequent hostility to photography in art and engraving. But there could also be more innovative repercussions of this hatchet job: what was hacked out of one book could well have become the cut-up material for one of the strangest Blakean reproductions of the nineteenth-century.

III: Fakes and facsimiles At the end of the day material reproduction is the hard evidence of Blake’s nineteenth-century reception history. Blake may have been flattered by the contemporary facsimiles of Songs of Innocence and of Experience executed probably in 1805 and 1821, and described by Bentley ‘as an act of love’.35 Blake probably would have been flattered if these facsimiles were made with the same sensitivity, the same individual feeling that Tulk employed in his little copy, or Muir worked so hard to recreate in his facsimiles. If we can imagine Blake’s indulgence towards facsimiles created by loving hands in loving tribute to him, facsimiles that do not pretend to be other than they are (the reader could not really mistake a Muir facsimile for an original unless he or she had a very peculiar notion of Blake’s originality), we can make a guess at his disgust with facsimiles that have tripped over into the realm of forgery. In the last twenty years, nineteenth-century forgeries/facsimiles of two of Blake’s works have come to light, both of these discoveries resulting from the scholarship of Joseph Viscomi. Firstly, there is the 1983 discovery, made in conjunction with Thomas V. Lange, of two forged plates in the otherwise authentic America copy B, created to make up an incomplete copy.36 Viscomi gives the likely date of execution for the facsimile as 1874, the place as London, the method as photolithography, the model as copy F and the reason as the surreptitious completion of the incomplete. Viscomi then comments concerning the long time acceptance of these forged plates as original: To their credit, plates 4 and 9 are not only extremely good forgeries, but, and I think this is equally important, as pages in a bound volume, they appear innocent by association. Had plates 4 and 9 been separate prints, it is more likely they would have been detected

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Viscomi makes testament here to the book’s power to credit what is not. This dictum holds true for Viscomi’s later disclosure that half of the extant copies of There Is No Natural Religion consist either wholly of facsimiles or contain a substantial number of facsimile plates. The backstepping genealogy deployed to trace these ‘bogus’ plates is complex, but reveals their dependency on book forms for sustainability. In order to date the forgeries, and, ultimately, attempt to discover the identity of the forger/facsimilist, Viscomi looks at all reproductions of There Is No Natural Religion in the nineteenth century. Muir’s 1886 facsimile is discounted, on account of the paper used (despite the 1886 facsimile having an 1811 watermark as do the bogus plates, the paper is of different quality and different stock) and the sheer unconvincing nature of Muir’s work. Viscomi then considers Pickering & Co.’s facsimile, also of 1886, and comes to a startling conclusion: the Pickering & Co. facsimile and facsimilist are not implicated in the bogus plates, but used one of them as a believed genuine model, which was itself modelled on the genuine copy C (IB, pp. 203–5). Books are already folding in on themselves, disrupting the ‘flow across the cultural space that Blake identified as the space of imitation or reproduction, which is, however, a very well-established institutional frontier in the arts and economics’.38 Moving back through time, trying to fix the date of execution, Viscomi arrives at 1870 and the ‘curious fact’ that two sets of the bogus copies are bound into extraillustrated copies of Gilchrist’s Life. Again, the book folds around itself, gathering disparate production into an analogous whole. Viscomi initially makes a sideways move to the publisher of Swinburne’s William Blake, John Camden Hotten. Notoriously, and mistakenly, Hotten is associated with Blake’s name, not as the publisher of Swinburne’s William Blake: a Critical Essay or with the facsimile of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell produced by Hotten in 1868, but as a potential forger of Blake’s works. As Morton D. Paley shows, the ‘forged’ drawings were produced for Hotten by a talented draughtsman in his employ, Henry James Bellars,39 who had produced facsimile work for William Blake: a Critical Essay, and who was working on a projected complete facsimile collection of Blake’s works. These drawings were found in a drawer in a cellar after Hotten’s death, and subsequently ‘were acquired by J. W. Bouton along with a considerable number of Hotten’s books’. Bouton then ‘offered the drawings for sale

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long ago. As it is, no other illuminated book, bound or loose, is known to contain a facsimile. Do we need to look harder?37

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in New York ca 1875, perhaps believing they were genuine Blakes’.40 Hence the myth of the ‘John Camden Hotten forgeries’ was born. Viscomi exonerates both Hotten and Bellars from involvement with the There is No Natural Religion facsimiles/forgeries, before casting his eye on W. J. Linton and the possible link between the facsimilist of Gilchrist’s Life and the bogus copies. Describing the production process that can be reconstructed from Linton’s preliminary studies, entitled Blake: Proofs, Photos, Tracings, as exemplary, Viscomi makes the case that Linton certainly had the skill and expertise to execute the facsimile plates. Viscomi suggests ‘that Linton – or at least Linton’s kerographic technique, which required tracings of originals (or of photographs) and produced relief plates extremely close to but not exactly like the originals – was responsible for the facsimiles’ (IB, p. 211). The concluding supposition is that the likeliest candidate for the ‘mysterious facsimilist’ is ‘W. J. Linton, perhaps in the employ of B. M. Pickering’, Pickering suggested because he was in possession of copy C at the correct time (IB, p. 216). This is plausible enough, but Linton’s possible involvement in another reproduction, not a facsimile, not a forgery, but a cunning dissemblance, brings his name into conjunction with one of the discounted ‘usual suspects’ of Viscomi’s assessment: Buxton Forman. The pamphlet of the Address on the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society is a phenomenon fighting shy of its own significance. From a cultural perspective, it exhibits the flexibility, inclusiveness and downright idiosyncrasy of the British Secularist movement in writing its own history. From a production perspective, it is a wonderful ‘sham’, an exact copy but not a facsimile, not entirely truthful as to its origins but not a forgery, back-flipping between mirrors of production and reproduction. What we have is a fake. The New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society was opened on Sunday, 6 March 1881. A strange communion of saints, sinners and scholars were chosen to represent the intellectual tenets of Secularism.41 The illustrious company of poets and philosophers built into the pillars of the Secular Hall were joined on 6 March 1881 by Annie Besant and James Thomson. For the occasion Thomson had written an ‘address on the opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society’ to be delivered by Mrs Theodore Wright. The pamphlet which was produced to transmit this oral event acknowledges Thomson’s status as the ‘poet of pessimism’, the illuminated title page describing him as the author of The City of Dreadful Night and Vane’s Story. But the poetic address is

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To build our Temples on another plan, Devoting them to god’s Creator, Man; Not to Man’s creature, god. And thus, indeed All Men and Women of whatever creed We welcome gladly if they love their kind; No other valid test of worth we find. The syntactical chiasma – ‘To build our Temples on another plan, / Devoting them to god’s Creator, Man; / Not to Man’s creature, god’ – compresses the secular and mystical universe into three poetic lines. In those three lines there is a transfixing admixture. The secular and the divine are lyrically wrapped around each other, while at the same time the crucial difference between them is sharply carved out. A new spin is put on ontological discourse, displacing the metaphysical horizon of the eschatological with the human relations of the sociological. From text to design, such tricks and trumps are being pulled. The pamphlet, ostensibly published to celebrate the opening of the Leicester Secular Hall is a stunning example of the social integration of aesthetic technology within a communal text. The illustrations for the pamphlet can all be broken into semiotic units that are taken directly from the designs of William Blake. It is not true to say that these are facsimile reproductions as they are a synthesis of fragments assimilated and re-inscribed in the pamphlet. The sequence of fragments in relation to William Blake’s works is as follows: Secular Hall pamphlet

Blake’s work

Title – last ‘s’ of address

Songs of Experience, title, last ‘s’ of Songs Job, plate 20, border Job, plate 12, detail from border Job, plate 8, border Jerusalem, plate 9, detail from border

Title-page border Tailpiece Border of text Final tailpiece

The marginal illustrations are exact replicas of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, and a fragment taken from Jerusalem. There is hermeneutic appropriateness in Blake’s Job appearing in a pamphlet celebrating Secularism. As Andrew Solomon tells us: ‘Blake’s image of God is in the exact likeness of Job himself. To him there was no other God than the

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not apocalyptic but prophetic, creating a new ideology based on a radical humanist inversion of the creator:

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Human Imagination, the Divine Humanity, the creative power in man.’42 In fact the plates used have a carefully constructed significance to ‘god’s Creator, Man’. For example, Kathleen Raine tells us that the vine in the margin of plate 20 is one of Blake’s symbols for ‘the Divine Body of Jesus the Imagination’ and quotes A Vision of the Last Judgement in this context: ‘All things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination.’43 As to the form of the illustrations, the pamphlet is reproducing a design that was already considered dated in its original form: ‘By continuing this practice [of border design] Blake brought to the Job illustrations what must have seemed an old-fashioned practice in an era when an increasing number of book illustrations were printed without borders or even framing lines.’44 However, the strange silence of the marginalia reflects the crack in the mirror of nineteenth-century Blake reproduction. Nowhere on the detailed and precise title page is Blake (or the facsimilist) acknowledged. The illustrations are silent to their own significance and, at the same time, brimming over with unspoken meaning. What the producers of the text have done is to make the material presence of the text evoke the unconscious continuum between Blake and Thomson, mysticism and secularism, aestheticism and materialism. An ‘open secret society’ has been constructed, whereby seemingly opaque symbolism has distinct and transparent meaning if only you know what you are looking for, and can sense a universal correspondence. James Thomson, working under the pseudonym of ‘B. V.’, wrote in 1866 (the same year as his essay on Blake), a series of articles on ‘open secret societies’. He defines them initially as a communion of thought and spirit manifest throughout the ages in cultural symbols.45 Significantly, Thomson lists poets and mystics among those that enjoy this unconscious membership. The poem for Thomson is a symbol illuminated by mystical correspondence.46 As Blake’s composite art creates a textual play, so the marginalia of the 1881 pamphlet recalls the ‘Eternal hacking’ at work beneath the rational surface of the text. However, the ‘eternal Return’ of the mystical imagination is only manifested in material or bibliographic codes. In this way, the bibliographic reproduction of Blake’s works constructs an ‘open secret society’ amongst the aesthetic devotees of Blake enthusiasts. A certain aesthetic élitism seems to be suggested by this nod and wink towards Blake: artists and poets as the patrician class, recognising the sovereign figure of Blake, the lone bard surviving in the isolated figure of a textual fragment taken from Jerusalem.

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However, as we shall see, the anonymous creator of the graphic designs uses cut-up techniques to breakdown aesthetic hierarchies. So who was the anonymous secular artisan? Although the 1881 pamphlet has no clues as to illustrator, printer or publisher, there are many paths that converge between the facsimilist of the 1863 edition of Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake and the illustrator of the 1881 pamphlet in celebration of the Address on the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society. One of the most telling correspondences between the two is the similarity of the tailpieces for Gilchrist’s Life, and for the 1881 pamphlet. However, the connection between the facsimiles in the Life and the 1881 pamphlet are complicated by the inclusion of Linton’s woodcuts in the 1863 edition of the Life, together with photolithographs by another artist of the entire Job series. Robert F. Gleckner provides us with vital information regarding Job, Gilchrist’s Life and W. J. Linton: Elsewhere in Gilchrist we have Linton’s wood engraving of Job Plates 5, 8, and 14 (all full-page, the last excluding Blake’s border designs except for the corner angels), the top half of the border design of Plate 18, and the circular part of the main boxed design of Plate 15. From Rossetti’s correspondence with Anne Gilchrist (who had taken over editing of the Life at the death of her husband) as the volumes were nearing completion, we learn that, despite their plans to include photolithographs of the entire Job series, Linton (who had been part of the project as early as 1861 and, one would presume, knew about the photolithography idea) went ahead and executed his own wood engravings of the entire series.47 Confusion arose for Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist concerning the woodcuts and photolithographs, before a compromise between the artisan craft of engraving and the progressive technology of print was reached. As will be apparent, the confusion over the Gilchrist Jobs also leads to some confusion over the links between Linton and the Secular Hall pamphlet. However, there is one figure who is identical between the Life (in both the 1863 and 1881 editions) and the Secular Hall pamphlet. This is the figure of the shepherd boy from Jerusalem, plate 9, which appears as a tailpiece upon page 50 of the Life. At this point in The Life of William Blake, William Blake, the original author and creator of the shepherd boy, is reflected upon in Gilchrist’s biography as an original and isolated outsider. The author has become the reflection of his own work. But this mirror is deceptive. Not only is it

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possible that the Secular Hall pamphlet shows us the reflection of a poet other than Blake, the secular mirror is not actually reflecting the ritual production of Blake’s art, or the ‘aura’ of Blake’s original. We can speculate on the story of the Secular Hall pamphlet. One of the arguments against Linton’s involvement in the illustrations to the Secular Hall pamphlet is that he was no longer living in England in 1881. Linton left England in August 1866 and was to die in New Haven on 29 December 1897.48 However, Linton returned to England in the period 1882–84. James Thomson died in 1882. It is possible that the Job/Jerusalem illustrations in the Secular Hall pamphlet may, more than anything, be Linton’s memorial to Thomson, created after his death while Linton was still in England. The problem in proving or disproving this hypothesis is compounded by the total lack of publication details in the pamphlet itself. However, the existence of a far plainer printed version of the address in the records of the Leicester Secular Society suggests that the elaborate facsimiles of Job and Jerusalem might well have been later creations. Also, the type of date stamp used in the British Library copy of the pamphlet was introduced between 25 March and 3 April 1929. Consequently the pamphlet can not have been procured by the library until this century, i.e. not at the point of its publication. The catalogue date of publication is bracketed, indicating that the date of publication is only a supposition, probably based on the date of the original address. Therefore, it is perfectly possible that the pamphlet was not produced until a date later than 1881. If we accept this suggested recontextualisation of the Job version of the Secular Hall pamphlet, then the graphic text takes on a new symbolic weight. The little shepherd boy who stands at the end of Thomson’s address is a romanticised and isolated figure, akin to that ‘weary wanderer / In that same city of tremendous night’, who ‘Will understand the speech, and feel a stir / Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight.’49 Blake’s design has become a melancholy figure, serving as a silent comment both on the tragedy of James Thomson’s life (he died of alcoholic poisoning) and the failure of secularism and humanism to prevent the alienation and isolation that haunted the Godless self. So far, so pessimistic: an aesthetic triumph but a humanist failure. But what if the lone figure at the end of the Secular Hall pamphlet is not representative of humanity’s isolation but celebrates a hero of the secular community? When George William Foote was sentenced for blasphemy on 26 February 1883 to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour, the severity of the sentence caused outrage. Foote became a secular martyr.50

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Hacking Blake

Radical Blake

The little figure at the end of the Secular Hall pamphlet, when seen as a comment on the secular bard, the freethought voice of truth, is revitalised. To deconstruct aesthetic images in order to reconstruct a discourse of social and political cause would particularly appeal to Foote. Joss Marsh has commented on Foote’s campaign to dismantled the aesthetic strongholds of theological didacticism. Marsh writes of Foote’s campaign that he sought ‘to deconstruct and desacralize the bible . . . to forge a new language stripped of biblical resonance’.51 To reclaim the word was Foote’s mission. If someone was to reissue verse celebrating free thought in support of the martyred Foote, if they were to reforge a discourse out of past visions, they could do worse than the Secular Hall Pamphlet with its Job illustrations: Job the patient recipient of a wrathful, dictatorial God; the little shepherd boy, an isolated figure refusing to stop playing his seditious song. Blake’s work has become a cartoon, a double bluff blasphemy. That Linton could have had a part is fully possible. He was in England for the whole of 1883, and although he was not a secularist, he had a great liking for Charles Bradlaugh, who particularly supported Foote. It is also possible that one of the most notorious forgers of rare books in the nineteenth century had a hand in the production of the pamphlet. Harry Buxton Forman, together with his partner in crime, Thomas Wise, first started on the dubious course of illegal printing in 1887. Wise’s motivation is pretty clear. He is described as ‘a crusty old capitalist’.52 Buxton Forman is not so easy to fathom. A man of peculiar literary talents and sensitivities, he edited Shelley to a rigorous standard and was an avid collector of books, a bibliographer. His involvement in full-scale forgery always seems somewhat strange. Strange, that is, unless the forgeries were a corruption of a project far more in line with Foote’s ‘cultural terrorism’, the breaking and remaking of cultural artefacts, of the sacred aura. Buxton Forman, like Foote, was a freethinker. He met his wife at a positivist lecture and his sympathy with freethinking ideals, particularly Comte’s positivism, has been described as ‘intense in youth’, an enduring influence throughout his whole life.53 He also had connections with Linton and a taste for Blake. In a study of Thomas Wise and H. B. Forman, James Collins lists works of Blake in the sale catalogue of Forman’s library, with works listed by both Blake and Linton. Collins also cites letters of Blake in Forman’s possession: ‘four Blake letters and what was thought to be his poem Genesis, The seven days of the created world (it is in his hand but proves to be a transcription of Hayley’s translation of Tasso)’.

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Then there is surprising information concerning Blake’s Job: ‘and what are said to be (but cannot be) twelve original copper plates for Blake’s Job “with a set of impressions pulled recently”’.54 It is impossible that the copper plates were ‘original’, but it is worth speculating on what they may be. William James Linton was a friend and associate of Forman. In that association a taint of Harry Buxton Forman’s other ‘bibliographical’ activity – forgery – may have attached itself to Linton. Even if Linton did not act in collaboration with Buxton Forman, there is another link between Buxton Forman and the Jobs of Gilchrist’s Life. In the second edition of 1880, the Job plates are listed as being reproduced by photointaligo method and printed by the Typographic Etching Company. The Typographic Etching Company was at the forefront of the ‘photomechanical revolution’ in Victorian book illustration, exhibiting relief blocks made by photomechanical methods at the Caxton Centenary Exhibition in 1877.55 Buxton Forman used the Typographic Etching Company to print his 1873 edition of Shelley, and would have had contacts within the company. Could the facsimile plates have been spirited away to the atheist forger? And did Buxton Forman embark on forgery originally conceived as practical deconstruction, an anarchical reprinting of culture, mixing new and old technologies, reclaiming a freethinking past? If so, how does that change our conception of facsimile and forgeries of Blake in the nineteenth century? All of these questions are reflected straight back at the reader/ viewer/critic when we realise that the pamphlet designs are not just a comment on secular discourse but on technical process. On closer examination of the pamphlet marginalia, it becomes evident that the model for the illustrations is not Linton’s 1863 facsimile, nor the 1880 photo-intaglios, nor a Blake original. The model is the 1863 photolithographs in Volume II of Gilchrist’s Life, copied down to the mistakes. The reproduction of plate 8 as the border to the text of Thomson’s poem text has, on the right-hand corner a double line, a thickening of the plant stems creeping up the side of the plate. This is lacking in the 1880 copies and the 1825 original and also Linton’s facsimile. But the double line is present in the 1863 photolithographs. The evidence becomes indisputable when we look at the title-page of the Address on the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society. In the top lefthand corner there is a mark, extending out of the curving branches, which, on closer examination, is obviously not part of the design, but a mark, perhaps of a slipped burin or tracing stylus, on the plate. Only the 1863 photolithographs have this mark present. The obvious

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Hacking Blake

Radical Blake

explanation is that the same plates were used for production of the Secular Hall pamphlet and the 1863 facsimiles. This is possible despite the discrepancy in the size of the plates between the 1863 Life and the Secular Hall Pamphlet. As David Bland points out, after Walter Roberts discovered how to photograph drawings on to wood in 1864 (no doubt in the same entrepreneurial spirit that induced Linton’s experiments with kerography) not only could drawings be automatically enlarged or reduced for engraving, but the way was open for ever more sophisticated photo-mechanical reproduction.56 Would Linton, however, have used those cuts that ousted his own work from the Life? Are we in fact getting an agitprop director’s cut of Job in the Secular Hall pamphlet, a cut-it-up and spew-it-out commentary on both sociopolitical and technological censorship? In keeping with the rest of Radical Blake, we have no easy conclusions to offer as regards this fantastic fake. In the spirit of ‘Eternal hacking’, it poses more questions and opens more avenues, than it answers or closes.

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There is another way in which we can talk of Blake’s ‘Eternal hacking’, in terms of the ways he breaks into and breaks down perceptual systems – a feature that, as we have seen, has been of immense appeal to certain artists and writers. For Blake, our conceptual universe is always relational and social as well as geometrical, that place where we live as well as the space in which we perceive, and his art was frequently concerned in unfolding this manifold environment: ‘Now I a fourfold vision see / And a fourfold vision is given to me’ (E722). How this ‘faculty of vision’ transforms our universe provided the theme for an installation that accompanied the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain in 2000–2001: Cleave 00 by Cerith Wyn Evans (1959–) was an attempt to create a ‘contemporary celestial scenario using the props of discos and film, and the technology of binary computer code’.1 The installation, consisting of a slowly rotating mirror ball in a dark room on to which was projected apparently random beams of light, served as a chill-out room beside the intensity of the popular Blake display elsewhere. Evans, who had been a camera man on some of Derek Jarman’s films as well as doing work for the London Film-maker’s coop, has created a number of installation pieces since his first exhibition as part of The Other Contemporaries exhibition at St Martin’s School of Art in 1978; these pieces include a tribute to Bataille, Violent Silence (1984), as well as work with Psychic TV (a popgroup-cum-ersatz-religion that developed out of the performance art collective, Coum Transmissions), and installations demonstrating the influence of William Burroughs and other members of the counterculture such as Brion Gysin, notable examples being The Final Academy (1982) and the beautiful Dreamachine (1998). He has remarked that a common element of all his work is to contort everyday perceptions, to 195

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Conclusion

Radical Blake

create ‘somewhere that is out of place, the skew, the hinge in reality on which the relation of image and object swings’.2 Cleave 00, then, is Evans’s personal response to Blake’s art, drawing particularly from a comment made by Blake that he saw ‘words fly about the room in all directions’ (BR, p. 322): entering the installation in darkness, the sense of space is indicated by its absence until the glitter ball is outlined against the wall as a solar eclipse, Evans’s celestial space evoked by flakes of light that spin around the walls, Blake’s words transmitted in Morse code. The hypnotic allure of this heavenly sphere only becomes apparent over time, part of ‘the crisis in representation’ that Chrissie Iles and others have identified as central to video modernism since the 1980s.3 The (literally) floating signifiers of Cleave 00 are, initially, easy to dismiss as a post-modern irrelevance, very different to another exhibition in which Evans’s work was included, The Greenhouse Effect, which ran at the Serpentine Gallery in London during April and May 2000.4 In this exhibition, which also drew on the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Garden, the work of Evans and other artists such as Michel Blazy and Yutake Sony was intended as a meditation on an ecological dialectic of art and science, as well as man’s relationship with nature. Compared to such work, Cleave 00 is a much cooler piece, concerned with communication and perception. The artwork by Blake directly invoked by Evans, its model, as it were, is a small pencil and watercolour sketch, probably composed in 1819 or 1820. Entitled alternatively ‘Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall’ or ‘A Vision: Probably representing the Poet, in the innermost shrine of the imagination, writing from angelic dictation’ (suggested by W. Graham Robertson, who owned the drawing), this sketch depicts a small, pedimented shrine in a large bare room; in the shrine, an angel stands dictating to a seated figure above whom hangs a lamp. On the drawing is an inscription by Frederick Tatham, ‘William Blake. I suppose it to be a Vision . . . Indeed I remember a conversation with Mrs. Blake about it.’5 The vision is small, even humble, but the steep perspective of the room in which is found the prophet’s chamber disturbs the eye, rather like the non-Euclidean optical illusions that fascinated the Russian Futurists and French Cubists. This chamber of the imagination is a hyperspatial vision of the fourth dimension, not as an empty abstraction, a puzzle, but one of those vortices of Eternity Blake writes about in Milton in which we see planets and suns but also those friends with whom we ‘liv’d benevolent’ (M 15:21–35, E109). Blake has taken a pencil and created something quite extraordinary.

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In one sense, the lack of context (including even a definite title) does not detract from the fact that this is the work of a simple man who lived in a simple room in which he was witness to remarkable visions. When this piece is normally on display in the Tate, its small size and minimalism means that it is extremely easy to walk past: and yet, if one does stop and look, it galvanises perception with its strange perspectives. By contrast, one has to plunge into Cleave 00: one cannot help but notice its technologies and the fact of its installation, dependent on its position in Tate Britain. The celestial disco is very entertaining, but one cannot help but feel slightly cut off from the charter’d streets and charter’d Thames outside the museum: we doubt that works such as Cleave 00 will ever appear on a protest poster chained to railings on the roadside. Throughout this book, we have tried to show how Blake’s art has not simply been collected and admired by subsequent generations, and preserved, but has also inspired and motivated artists, poets, novelists, film-makers, composers and political activists, being propagated in their work. Installations such as Cleave 00 tend not to survive outside the institution: Blake, despite considerable effort on his part, was ignored by the institutions of his day, but his influence and afterlife throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been more profound than a multitude of his more celebrated contemporaries. Not only is this influence increasing, but it is also diversifying: the twentyfirst century could be Blake’s best yet.

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Conclusion

Introduction: Radical Blake 1. Robin Hamlyn and Christine Riding, Preface to William Blake, Robin Hamlyn and Michael Philips (eds), (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), p. 9. 2. See, for example, Matthew Collings, ‘Blake’s Progress’, The Observer Magazine, 22 October 2000, pp. 36–45, and Waldemar Januszczak, ‘First Tate Britain Lost its Way’, The Sunday Times: Culture, 12 November 2000, pp. 8–9. 3. Januszczak, p. 9. 4. G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 49. 5. Marc Quinn, Incarnate (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998), pl. 39. 6. James Hall, The Guardian, 24 September 1998. See also G. E. Bentley, Jnr., Blake Records Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988; hereafter BR), 278. 7. Mark Gisbourne, ‘Dis-incarnate (And Whose Body is it Anyway?)’, in Incarnate, no page numbers. 8. Morris Eaves, ‘On Blakes we want and Blakes we don’t’, in Robert Essick (ed.), William Blake: Images and Texts (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1997), pp. 141–2. 9. Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 158–62; David Worrall, The Urizen Books (London: Tate Gallery/William Blake Trust, 1995), p. 157. 10. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

1

Visionary Blake

1. For twentieth-century descriptions of William Blake’s death, see Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1927), p. 317; James King, William Blake: His Life (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 228–9; Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: SinclairStevenson, 1995), pp. 366–7; G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 436–9. 2. Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi, ‘Blake’s Death’, Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, (hereafter BIQ), XXX (1996), pp. 36–49. 3. BR, p. 503. 4. Paula R. Feldman, ‘Felicia Hemans and the Mythologizing of Blake’s Death’ in Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 27:3 (1993–94), pp. 69–72, (p. 69). This essay reproduces the poem by Felicia Hemans, ‘The Painter’s Last Work – A Scene’, in full, as it was originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in June 1832. 198

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5. Peter Ackroyd, ‘Blake: The Man’ in William Blake, Robin Hamlyn and Christine Riding (eds), (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), pp. 11–13: p. 13. 6. ‘The Experiments of Colour-Printing and Blake Studies’, paper given at William Blake’s Large Colour Prints: a Symposium Tate Britain, 23 February 2002. 7. G. E. Bentley in Blake Records Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 87. 3 Suzanne R. Hoover, ‘Pictures at the Exhibition’ in Blake Newsletter, 6:1 (Summer 1972), pp. 6–12. Francis A. Palgrave, Handbook to the Fine Art Collection in the International Exhibition of 1862 (London and Cambridge, 1862), pp. 65–6. Anon., ‘International Exhibition: The English Watercolour Pictures’ in Athenaeum, 1803 (17 May 1862), p. 663. William Bell Scott, ‘The Blake Catalogue’ in Academy, IX (1876), p. 385. There is a review of the exhibition by J. Beavington Atkinson, ‘Exhibition of Works of William Blake, Burlington Club’, in Portfolio, 7 (1876), pp. 69–71. 8. G. E. Bentley, ‘Echoes of Blake’s Grave Designs in 1838’, in BIQ, 12:3 (1978–79), pp. 207–9. 9. Frances A. Carey, ‘James Smethan (1821–1889) and Gilchrist’s Life of Blake’ in Blake Newsletter (special double issue on Blake and the Victorians, hereafter BAV), 8:1–2 (Summer–Fall 1974), pp. 17–25. 10. Max Browne, ‘A Blake Source for von Holst’ in BIQ, 29:3 (1995–96), pp. 78–81. 11. Century Guild Hobby Horse, 2 (1887). 12. John Ruskin, ‘Arthur Burgess’ in Century Guild Hobby Horse, 2 (1887), pp. 46–53 (p. 52). 13. Morton D. Paley, ‘John Trivett Nettleship and His “Blake Drawings”’ in BIQ, 14:4 (1981), pp. 185–194. 14. Michael J. Tolley, ‘John Todhunter: A Forgotten Debt to Blake’ in BAV, pp. 15–16. 15. See James McCord, ‘John Butler Yeats, “The Brotherhood” and William Blake’ in Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 86 (1983–85), pp. 10–32. 16. McCord, ‘The Brotherhood’, p. 11. 17. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (London: Ellis & White, 1881), p. 314. 18. Robert N. Essick, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederic Shields, and the Spirit of William Blake’ in Victorian Poetry, 24 (1986), pp. 163–72, (p. 172). All quotations from the two poems can be found in this essay, which reproduces both in full. 19. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Rossetti’s Iconic Page’ in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture, George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (eds), (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 123–40, pp. 125–6. 20. See Paul Goldman in Victorian Illustration: the Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). 21. ‘Introduction’, in The Notebook of William Blake: a Photographic and Typographic Facsimile, ed. David Erdman, with the assistance of Donald K. Moore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 1. 22. Mark L. Greenberg, ‘The Rossettis’ Transcription of Blake’s Notebook’ in Library, 5:4 (1982), pp. 249–72, p. 252. 23. See Geoffrey Keynes commentary to the Notebook Poems in William Blake,

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Notes

Notes

The Complete Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 889, n. to p. 164. 24. I would like to thank Malcolm Hardman for pointing out this connection between Blake and Ruskin. 25. Marcia Allentuck, ‘Blake and Ruskin Again: Unpublished Sources not in Bentley’ in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 75:4 (1981), pp. 447–8. 26. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853), II, p. 171. 27. Ibid. 28. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Of Many Things (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), III, p. 103. 29. For further discussion see Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: the Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 35. 30. ‘Doth the eagle know what is in the pit, / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?’, quoted in The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art (London: George Allen, 1904), p. 27. 31. Leon Chai, Aestheticism: the Religion of Art in Post-romantic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. ix. 32. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry: 1830–1880, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), IV, p. 367. 33. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 12. 34. Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: the Contrary Vision (reprinted Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 7. 35. James John Garth Wilkinson, ‘Preface’ in William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (London: William Pickering, 1839), pp. xxi–xxii. 36. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Seen and Heard, J. Howard Spalding, (ed.), based on a translation by F. Bayley for the Swedenborg Society (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), pp. 38–9. 37. The two editions are: William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, James John Garth Wilkinson (ed.), (this includes a preface by Wilkinson), and an edition of twelve copies privately printed by Tulk in 1843. 38. Clement John Wilkinson, James John Garth Wilkinson: a Memoir of his Life with a Selection of his Letters. 39. For details of the unravelling of this bibliographic mystery see Geoffrey Keynes, ‘Blake, Tulk, and Garth Wilkinson’ in The Library or Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Ser. IV, 26:3 ( 1945), pp. 190–2. 40. Raymond H. Deck, Jr., ‘New Light on C. A. Tulk, Blake’s 19th Century Patron’ in Blake and Swedenborg, pp. 107–19, p. 109. 41. Raymond H. Deck, ‘New Light on C. A. Tulk’, pp. 107–8. 42. Geoffrey Keynes, ‘Blake, Tulk and Garth Wilkinson’ in The Library or Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Ser. IV, 26:3 (December 1945), p. 191. 43. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), IV pp. 832–9. 44. To C. A. Tulk, 12 February 1818 (Letters, Griggs), IV, p. 836. 45. Suzanne Hoover, ‘William Blake in the Wilderness; a Closer Look at his Reputation, 1827–1863’ in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Morton D. Paley and Michael Philips (eds), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 310–48, p. 329.

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46. Raymond H. Deck, Jr., ‘An American Original: Mrs Colman’s illustrated printings of Blake’s Poems, 1843–44’ in BIQ, 11:1 (1977), pp. 4–18. 47. Edward J. Rose, ‘The 1839-Wilkinson Edition of Blake’s Songs in Transcendental America’ in Blake Newsletter, 4 (1971), pp. 79–81. 48. Edward J. Rose, ‘1839 Wilkinson-Edition’, p. 80. 49. S. Foster Damon, ‘Some American References to Blake before 1863’, Modern Languages Notes, 14 (1930) pp. 365–70, p. 369. 50. Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, Vol. I (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), p. viii. 51. Denis Saurat, Blake and Modern Thought (London: Constable, 1929), p. xiv. 52. Henry G. Hewlett, ‘Imperfect Genius: William Blake, Part II’ in Contemporary Review, 29 (January 1877), pp. 207–28, p. 224. 53. Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: the Contrary Vision (reprinted Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 54. 54. Samuel Palmer to Anne Gilchrist, November 1863 in Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings, H. H. Gilchrist (ed.), with a prefatory notice by W. M. Rossetti (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), p. 143. 55. Letter from Samuel Palmer to Anne Gilchrist, 2 July 1862 in The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter & Etcher, A. H. Palmer (ed.), (London: Seeley, 1892), p. 246. 56. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 137. 57. Anne Gilchrist, ‘Preface’, Life (1863), I, p. xi. 58. See Paul Hamilton, ‘“A Shadow of A Magnitude”: the Dialectic of Romantic Aesthetics’ in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, Stephen Copley and John Whale (eds), (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 11–31. 59. See A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: a Study in the Sources of William Blake (New York: Haskell House, 1966), p. 22–3. 60. Edward Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1789–1877 (London: Kegan Paul, 1878), p. 15. 61. George William Foote, ‘William Blake’ in National Reformer, 25 (14 February, 21 February, 28 February and 21 March 1875), pp. 100–1, 115–6, 131–2, 181–2, p. 182. 62. Georges Bataille, ‘Happiness, Eroticism and Literature’ in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 186–208. 63. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alaistair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), p. 61–6. 64. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 109. 65. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 6. 66. André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Franklin Rosemont (ed.), (London: Pluto Press, 1978), pp. 207, 319. 67. Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, revised edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1986 [1959]), p. 39. 68. Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: an Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1997), p. 23.

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Notes

Notes

69. Ruthven Todd, ‘The Techniques of William Blake’s Illuminated Printing’, Print Collector’s Quarterly, 29 (1948), pp. 25–36. For a fuller discussion of Todd’s processes, see Robert Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) and Joseph Viscomi, IB. 70. Peter Woodcock, This Enchanted Isle (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2000), p. 1. 71. Andrew Causey, Paul Nash (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). See also Paul Nash: Paintings and Watercolours, Tate Gallery catalogue, 1975. 72. Cited in James King, Interior Landscapes: A Life of Paul Nash (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 42. 73. Margot Eates, Paul Nash: the Master of the Image (London: John Murray, 1973), p. 10; see also Leonard Robinson, Paul Nash, Winter Sea: The Development of an Image (York: Ebor Press, 1997), p. 37. 74. Paul Nash, ‘Abstract Art’, The Listener, 17 August 1932; cited in King, p. 137. 75. Roger Cardinal, The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), p. 7. 76. Paul Nash, Places (London: Heinemann, 1923). These illustrations are reprinted, with other landscapes, in Paul Nash: Places, South Bank Centre catalogue, 1989. 77. L. Robinson, Paul Nash, Winter Sea, p. 174. 78. See Kendall Johnson, ‘Haunting Transcendence: the Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton’, Twentieth Century Literature, 45:3 (1999), pp. 347–70. 79. Georges Bataille, The History of Eroticism, in The Accursed Share, Vols. II & III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 93. See also, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1962). 80. In Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), p. 6. 81. Elisabeth Arnould, ‘The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice’, Diacritics, 26:2 (1996), pp. 86–96, p. 87. 82. Georges Bataille, Sovereignty, in The Accursed Share, Vols. II & III, p. 343. 83. On the opposition of Bataille to Sartre’s essay ‘A New Mysticism’, in which he reviewed Inner Experience, see Jean-Michel Heimonet, ‘Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism’, Diacritics, 26:2 (1996), pp. 59–73. 84. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. 9. 85. Ibid., p. 79. 86. Ibid., p. 90. 87. Kenneth Itkowitz, ‘To Witness Spectacles of Pain: the Hypermorality of Georges Bataille’, College Literature, 26:1 (Winter 1999), pp. 19–33, p. 20.

2

Metropolitan Blake

1. Michael Moorcock, ‘Introduction’, in Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge (London: Granta, 1998), pp. 3–4. 2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1984), p. 93. 3. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd revd. edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 275. 4. E. P. Thompson, ‘London’ in Interpreting Blake, Michael Phillips (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 5–31.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

203

Erdman, Blake Prophet, p. 132. Thompson, ‘London’, p. 18. Erdman, Blake Prophet, p. 279. Thompson, ‘London’, p. 18, Erdman, Blake Prophet, p. 277. Erdman, Blake Prophet, p. 275. W. J. Linton, Bob-Thin or the Poorhouse Fugitive (privately printed, 1845). Geoffrey Keynes, from the commentary to ‘London’ in William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 151. Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), p. 73. Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 165. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 156. Paley, Continuing City, p. 165. See Susan Gurewitsch, ‘Golgonooza on the Grand Canal: Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and the Romantic Imagination’ in The Arnoldian: a Review of MidVictorian Culture, 9 (1981), pp. 25–39. Anne Gilchrist, ‘Memoir of Alexander Gilchrist’ in Life (London: Macmillan 1880), II, p. 359. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 416. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 424. ‘The Poems of William Blake’, first printed in National Reformer, 7 (14, 21 28 January and 4 February 1866). Reprinted in 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 (printed for private circulation at the Chiswick Press, 1884), p. 128. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 472–3. Roger Lockhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. xii–xvii. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, in Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1994), p. 123. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Zone Books, 1988, 1993), Vol. 1, p. 76. Jeanne Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1994), pp. 48–9. André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Franklin Rosemont (ed.), (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 275. See, for example, Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), pp. 5–7. Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy: Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 171. I would like to thank Andrew Marshall for introducing me to this particular text.

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Notes

Notes

29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 2. 30. Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, illustrations by Marc Atkins (London: Granta, 1997); Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair, Liquid City (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). 31. Tobias Hill, The Guardian, 19/11/1995; Ian Thomson, The Spectator, 8/2/1997. 32. Sinclair, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, p. 192, citing Jerusalem, 53.11, E202. 33. Iain Sinclair, Radon Daughters (London: Vintage, 1995 [1994]), pp. 47, 138. 34. Peter Ackroyd, London, The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), p. 2. 35. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), p. 26. 36. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), p. 92. 37. Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair, Liquid City, p. 162. 38. Michael Moorcock, Mother London (London: Penguin, 1989 [1988]), p. 123, citing Jerusalem 27:1–4, E171. 39. Iain Sinclair, cited in Angela Carter, ‘Iain Sinclair: Downriver’, Expletives Deleted, (London: Vintage, 1992) p. 127.

3

Blake and Nationalism

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962). 2. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Political Writings, Bruce Kuklick (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3. 3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 336. 4. Simon Schama, A History of Britain, Vol. 2, The British Wars, 1603–1776 (London: BBC Books, 2000), p. 393. 5. Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement: 1783–1867, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 102–3. 6. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), pp. 446–7. 7. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 8. See, for example: Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9. Susan Matthews, ‘Jerusalem and Nationalism’, in John Lucas (ed.), William Blake (London and New York: Longman, 1998), p. 83. 10. David Punter, Blake, Hegel and Dialectic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), pp. 130–1. 11. Nicholas Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 171.

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205

12. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 403. 13. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880). W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (London: Hutchinson, 1903), p. xiii. 14. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 416. 15. James John Garth Wilkinson, The African and the True Christian Religion, His Magna Carta: a Study in the Writing of Emanuel Swedenborg (London: James Speirs, 1892), p. 36. 16. Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 17 July 1874 (Augustus Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, Cecil Y. Lang (ed.), (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2, p. 311). 17. Letter to M. D. Conway, 7 November 1866 (Swin. Letts., I, p. 209). 18. W. J. Linton, The Religion of Organization: an Essay Read to Friends in Boston, Jan. 27 1869 (privately printed as a reprint from the Boston Radical), pp. 1–2. 19. Linton, Religion of Organization, p. 38. 20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 199–200. 21. W. J. Linton, The Paris Commune: in Answer to the Calumnies of the New York Tribune (Boston: reprinted from The Radical for September 1871), p. 26. 22. Abel Reid (pseud. W. J. Linton), Broadway Ballads: Collected for the Centennial Commemoration of the Republic (author’s edition, 1876). Bound into William James Linton, Poems and Translations 1875–92 (no publication details). See, John S. Deardon, ‘Printing at Brantwood: I. Linton, The Republic and The Tribune’ in The Book Collector, 27:4 (1978), 515–32. 23. F. B. Smith dates this work at c.1875. It is bound into the same volume as Broadway Ballads entitled Poems and Translations 1875–1892. 24. Smith, Radical Artisan, p. 196. 25. William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882), p. 1. 26. Maureen Duffy, England: The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 193. 27. Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, Jon Silkin, (ed.), 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), pp. 192–3. 28. Neil Corcoran, The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982), pp. 7–8. 29. Anne Price-Owen, ‘Typography=typoetry: The Art of David Jones’, in Point 8, (Winchester), 1999, p. 15. 30. Seamus Heaney, ‘Now in England’, Spectator, 4 May 1974, p. 547. 31. René Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones (Wellingborough: Christopher Skelton, 1977), pp. 149–50. 32. Corcoran, Song of Deeds, pp. 18–19. 33. Anne Price-Owen, ‘Typography’, p. 15. 34. Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge, 2nd edn. (London: Quartet, 1991) pp. 242–3. See also Smiling in Slow Motion, Keith Collins (ed.), (London: Century, 2000) for the final, painful years of Jarman’s ‘vita violenta’. 35. Cited in Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 246.

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Notes

Notes

36. Michael O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: BFI, 1979), p. 12. 37. Peake, Derek Jarman, pp. 227. Time Out, 25 November 1987, cited in Peake, p. 407. 38. Mark Douglas, ‘Derek Jarman and the Cinema of Englishness’, in The Visual-Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions (Southampton: Southampton Institute, 2000), p. 137. 39. Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 292. 40. Ibid., p. 9. 41. Cited in Peter Woodcock, This Enchanted Isle (Glastonbury: Gothic Images Publications, 2000), p. 112. 42. Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 43. David Cressy, ‘The Fifth of November Remembered’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (London: Polity Press, 1992), p. 68. 44. Jonathan Glancey, ‘Books: Songs of Celebrity Praise’, The Guardian, 11 December 1999, p. 9. 45. Nancy M. Goslee, ‘“In Englands Green and Pleasant Land”: the Building of Vision in Blake’s Stanzas from Milton’, Studies in Romanticism, 13:4 (Boston, 1974), pp. 105–25; See also Michael Ferber, ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem” as a Hymn’, in BIQ, 34:3, Winter 2000/1, pp. 82–9. 46. Billy Bragg, liner notes to The Internationale (Utility/WEA/Elektra); cited in Michael Ferber, ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem” as a Hymn’, BIQ, 34:3, Winter 2000/1 p. 89. 47. William Blake, Milton a Poem, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi (London: The William Blake Trust/The Tate Gallery, 1993), pp. 111–12. 48. Essick and Viscomi, Introduction, in Milton a Poem, pp. 39–40. 49. Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Myths of Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 137–42. 50. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 2nd edn., (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 537–45, 598–659. 51. ‘A Song of Innocence, if not Experience’, The Observer, 19 May 1996, p. 3. 52. Russell Thomas, ‘Football: England pick Jerusalem and Fat Les for Euro 2000’, The Guardian, 9 May 2000, p. 32. 53. Andrew Smith, ‘Three Lions’, The Observer, Life Magazine, 21 May 2000, p. 20. 54. Fat Les 2000, Jerusalem (EMI Records, 2000). 55. The Guardian, 20 June, 2000, p. 22. 56. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, p. 59. 57. Gwynfor Evans, Diwedd Prydeindod, (Y Lolfa, Talybont, 1981), p. 13, trans. Katie Gramich, ‘Cymry or Wales?: Explorations in a Divided Sensibility’, in Susan Bassnett (ed.), Studying British Cultures (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 99. 58. ‘An Enlightened Change’, The Guardian leader, Monday 17 September 2001.

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Notes

Blake, Emancipation and America

1. G. E. Bentley, Jnr., ‘The Vicissitudes of Vision: the First Account of William Blake in Russian’ in BIQ, 10:4 (1977), 112–14, p. 112. 2. ‘Artist-Poet-Sumassheshii: zhizn Vil’yama Bleka’ (‘Artist-Poet-Madman: Life of William Blake’), in Bentley, ‘Vicissitudes’, p. 113. Other nineteenthcentury Russian references to Blake are noted in Nicholas O. Warner, ‘Shaw, Tolstoy and Blake’s Russian Reputation’ in BIQ, 17:3 (1983–84), pp. 102–4. 3. Dr G. K. Nagler, ‘Blake, William’ in Neunes Allgemeines Kunstler-Lexicon: Oder Nachrichten von dem Leben und den Werken der Maler, Bildhauser, Baumeister, Kupferstecher, Formschneider, Lithographen, Zeichner, Medailleure, Elfenbeinarbeiter, etc. 25 Vols (Munchen, 1835), I, pp. 519–22. 4. Anon., ‘Review. Mr Swinburne on William Blake’ in Argus [Melbourne] 2 June 1868, pp. 5–6. 5. Bentley, ‘Vicissitudes’, p. 113. 6. These include the American Monthly Magazine and the New Jerusalem Magazine of 1832, in a treatise, for ‘young readers’, on the fine arts in 1833 in the widely read Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post in 1835, in Whittier’s Supernaturalism of New England in 1847, in T. S. Arthur’s The Brillant: a Gift Book for 1850, and in Shearjashub Spooner’s anecdotes of artists in 1853 . These reproductions and references are listed in Suzanne Hoover, ‘William Blake in the Wilderness’, pp. 310–48. 7. Allan Cunningham, ‘Life of Blake’ in Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 6 Vols (London: John Murray, 1830), II, pp. 143–88. John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his Time, 2 Vols (London: Henry Coburn, 1829). In BR, pp. 455–76. See also Hoover, ‘William Blake in the Wilderness’, p. 321. 8. J. G. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 2 Vols (London: J. Johnson, 1796). See Thomas V. Lange, ‘Blake in American Almanacs’ in BIQ, 14:2 (Fall 1986), pp. 94–6. 9. See Anne Rubenstein and Camilla Townsend, ‘Revolted Negroes and the Devilish Principle: William Blake and Conflicting Visions of Boni’s Wars in Surinam’ in Blake, Politics and History, Jackie Di Salvo, G. A. Rosso and Christopher Z. Hobson (eds), (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 273–98, p. 284. 10. Anne Mellor, ‘Blake, Gender and Imperial Ideology: a Response’ in Blake, Politics and History, pp. 351–3, p. 353. 11. Rubenstein and Townsend, ‘Revolted Negroes’, p. 273. 12. David Dabydeen, Slave Song (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1984). 13. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000). 14. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, p. 329. 15. See William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (Detroit, Michigan: Broadside Press, 1975), pp. 12–23. 16. John G. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of the Surinam, 2 Vols (London: J. Johnson, 1796), II, pp. 259–60. 17. See Lauren Henry, ‘“Sunshine and Shady Groves”: What Blake’s “Little

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes Black Boy” Learned from African Writers’ in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 67–86. Andrew M. Stauffer, ‘The First Known Publication of Blake’s Poetry in America’ in Notes & Queries n.s. 43:1 (1996), 41–3, p. 43. Morton D. Paley, ‘A New Heaven is Begun: William Blake and Swedenborgianism’ in BIQ, 13:2 (1979), pp. 64–89, p. 65. James John Garth Wilkinson, The African and the True Christian Religion. See Moncure Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865). Moncure Conway, ‘William Blake’ in Fortnightly Review, 3 (February 1868), p. 216. Moncure Conway, Demonology and Devil Lore, 2 Vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879), I, p. 13. Conway, Testimonies, p. 4. John d’Entremont, Moncure Conway, 1832–1907: American Abolitionist, Spiritual Architect of South Place, Author of ‘The Life of Thomas Paine’ (The 58th Conway Memorial Lecture, December 1977, South Place Ethical Society), p. 18. John d’Entremont, Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years, 1832–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xii. Conway, ‘William Blake’, p. 216. George William Foote, ‘Christianity and Common Sense’ in Flowers of Freethought: First Series (London: The Pioneer Press, 1893), p. 114. W. J. Linton, Ireland for the Irish: Rhymes and Reasons against Landlordism, with a Preface on Fenianism and Republicanism (New York: The American News Company, 1867). Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception/ Heaven and Hell (London: Granada, 1977), pp. 37–8. Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971). Robert Kiernan, American Writing Since 1945: A Critical Survey (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), pp. 120, 132–3. David Wyatt, Out of the Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 149. Hazel Pierce, ‘Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition’, in Joseph Chandler and Martin Harry Greenberg (eds), Ray Bradbury (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1980), pp. 165–185. Donald Watt, ‘Burning Bright: “Fahrenheit 451” as Symbolic Dystopia’, in Chandler and Greenberg, Ray Bradbury, pp. 195–213, p. 207. Robert A. Lee (ed.), The Beat Generation Writers (London and East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996). Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Virgin, 2000), p. 208. Ibid., p. 99. Cited in Paul Portugés, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978), p. 23. For accounts of Ginsberg’s Blake vision see also Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking Press, 1967); Miles, and Alicia Ostriker, ‘Blake, Ginsberg, Madness and the Prophet as Shaman’, in Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (eds), William

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40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

209

Blake and the Moderns (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 111–31. John Muckle, ‘The Names: Allen Ginsberg’s Writings’, in, The Beat Generation Writers, p. 29. Allen Ginsberg, Your Reason and Blake’s System, reprinted (New York: Hanuman Books, 1992), p. 34. Franca Bellarsi, ‘William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Imagination as a Mirror of Vacuity’, The Blake Journal of the Blake Society at St James’s, 5 (2000), pp. 71–86. Miles, Ginsberg, p. 194. Ostriker, ‘Blake, Ginsberg, Madness’, pp. 121–2. Also, see Leroy Searle, ‘Blake, Eliot, and Williams: The Continuity of the Imaginative Labor’ regarding the influence of Blake on Williams; in Blake and the Moderns, pp. 39–72. Louis Simpson, Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), p. 55. Ostriker, ‘Blake, Ginsberg, Madness’, p. 125. Terence Diggory, ‘Allen Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral’, College Literature, 27:1 (2000), pp. 103–18, p. 104; see also Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 266–8. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) p. 126. Michael Horovitz (ed.) Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, reprinted (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). John Cotton, ‘Tiger Caged’, in Horovitz, 1971, p. 46. Anne Cluysenaar, in Contemporary Poets, James Vinson (ed.), 3rd edn. (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), p. 310. See Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: The Bodley Head, 1991). Tanner, City of Words, p. 109. See also, Douglas Baldwin, ‘“Word Begets Image and Image is Virus”: Undermining Language and Film in the Work of William S. Burroughs’, College Literature, 27:1 (2000), pp. 63–83. Cited in Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 40. Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 31–3; see also V. A. De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Angela Carter, ‘William Burroughs: The Western Lands’, p. 41. Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1997), p. 119. Jonathan Paul Eburne, ‘Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac and the Consumption of Otherness’, Modern Fiction Studies, 43:1 (1997), pp. 53–92, p. 55. William Burroughs, The Western Lands (London: Picador, 1988), pp. 257–8. William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (London: Picador, 1981), p. 13.

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Notes

60. Ibid., p. 10. 61. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, p. 228. 62. David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century British Art (Mundelstrup and Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo Press, 1985), p. 18. 63. Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man, 12-Gauge Productions Inc., 1995. 64. Jim Jarmusch, Interview with Jayne Margetts for Celluloid, http://www.thei.aust.com/isite/celldeadman.html, 1996. 65. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, pp. 374–8.

5

Blake and Women

1. Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 171. 2. Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), and ‘Sex, Violence and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft’ in Robert Essick (ed.), William Blake: Images and Texts (San Marino, Calif.: 1997), pp. 69–94; see also, Irene Tahoer, ‘The Woman Scaly’, Midwestern Modern Languages Association Bulletin, 6 (1973), pp. 74–87; Susan Fox, ‘The Female as Metaphor in the Poetry of William Blake’, Critical Enquiry, 3 (1977), pp. 507–19. 3. Myra Glazer, ‘Why the Sons of God Want the Daughters of Men: On William Blake and D.H. Lawrence’, in Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (eds), William Blake and the Moderns (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982), 164–85, p. 182. 4. Bruder, William Blake, p. 36. 5. Keri Davies, ‘Mrs Bliss: a Blake Collector of 1794’ in Blake in the Nineties, David Worrall and Steve Clarke (eds), (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 212–230. 6. Anne Gilchrist, A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman, pp. 345–69, p. 353. See also Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings. 7. ‘To the Editor of the Reader’ in Reader 11 (7 November 1863), p. 544. 8. Letter from Anne Gilchrist to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2 May 1863, Anne Gilchrist, p. 138. 9. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 55. 10. Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 October 1862, in Swin. Letts, I, p. 60. 11. Anne Gilchrist to Walt Whitman, 4 July 1874 and 27 November 1871 in The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, Thomas B. Harned (ed.), (London: T. Fisher, [1920]) pp. 112 and 68 respectively. 12. Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 171. 13. Donald Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), p. 87. 14. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, The Two Paths, and The King of the Golden River (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 8. 15. Tony Trigilio, ‘Strange Prophecies Anew’: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H. D., and Ginsberg (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000).

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16. Trigilio, Strange Prophecies, pp. 28–9, 83. 17. Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 Vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 18. Kathleen Raine, William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), pp. 47–8. 19. Susan Levin, ‘A Fourfold Vision: William Blake and Doris Lessing’, in Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (eds), Blake and the Moderns, pp. 212–21, p. 212. 20. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (London: Flamingo, 1969), p. 663. 21. In Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley, Patti Smith: an Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999) p. 212. 22. Patti Smith, interview with Michael Bracewell, ‘Touched by the Spirit of Blake’, Tate, 23 (2000), 26–33, p. 27. 23. Patti Smith, ‘Birdland’, Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Notes, Reflections (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 16. 24. Bracewell, ‘Touched by the Spirit of Blake’, p. 29. 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 1–2. 27. Merja Makinen, ‘Sexual and Textual Aggression in The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve’, in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism (London and New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 149–65. 28. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 168. 29. Carter, Infernal Desire Machines, p. 134. 30. Sarah Sceats, ‘The Infernal Appetites of Angela Carter’, in Bristow and Broughton, Infernal Desires, pp. 100–15. 31. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), p. 9. 32. Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 124. 33. Linden Peach, Angela Carter (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 117. 34. Makinen, ‘Sexual and Textual Aggression’, p. 162. 35. Leopold Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 45–50. 36. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, pp. 21–3.

6

Blake and Blasphemy

1. Nicolas Walter, Blasphemy, Ancient & Modern (London: Rationalist Press Association, 1990), p. 8. 2. Martin Butlin, William Blake 1757–1827, Vol. V (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990), pp. 119–20. 3. Cited in Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 343. See also, Simon Schama, Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Viking, 1989), pp. 778–9, 830–5.

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Notes

Notes

4. Thomas Paine, Political Writings, Bruce Kuklick (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), p. 216. 5. Walter, Blasphemy, p. 35. 6. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 105–8. R. Watson, Bishop of Landaff, An Apology for the Bible (London, 1797), p. iii. 7. David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 201–5. 8. E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, p. 60. 9. Ibid., pp. 10–12. 10. See Keri Davies, ‘William Blake’s Mother: a New Identification’ in BIQ, 33:2 (Fall 1999), pp. 36–50. 11. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Victor Hugo: l’année terrible’ in Essays and Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1888), pp. 17–59 (p. 39). 12. Benjamin Heath Malkin, A Father’s Memoir of his Child (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806). BR, pp. 421–31, p. 424. 13. Frederick Tatham, ‘Life of Blake in The Letters of William Blake, Together with a Life by Frederick Tatham, ed. Archibald G. B. Russell (London: Methuen, 1906). This was the first publication of Tatham’s Life, although it was originally written in 1832. The text is quoted from BR, pp. 507–35, p. 530. 14. David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1796 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 52. 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (London: Ellis & White, 1881), p. 314. 16. ‘A Prefatory Memoir’ in The Poetical Works of William Blake: Lyrical and Miscellaneous, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), p. lxxvi. 17. Jean Overton Fuller, Swinburne: a Critical Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), p. 151. 18. Fuller, Swinburne, pp. 153–4. 19. Letter to Lord Lytton, 13 August 1866 (Swin. Letts., I, pp. 172–3). 20. Letter to Charles Augustus Howell, 20 August 1866 (Swin. Letts., I, p. 175). 21. Letter to J. C. Hotten, 4 September 1866 (Swin. Letts., I , p. 181). 22. See AS, p. 89. 23. M. K. Louis, ‘Swinburne, Clough, and the Speechless Christ: “Before a Crucifix” and “Easter Day”’ in Victorian Newsletter, 72 (1987), pp. 1–5, p. 3. 24. M. K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: the Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990), pp. 63–69. 25. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: an Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 248. 26. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 532–7, p. 537. 27. Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 30 October 1874 ( Swin. Letts., II, p. 348). 28. Nash, Blasphemy, pp. 107–66. 29. The National Reformer, 26 (21 February 1875), p. 11. 30. Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain, p. 113. 31. Walter, Blasphemy, p. 50. 32. John Symonds, The Great Beast, rev. edn (St Albans, Herts: Granad, 1973), p. 13.

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213

33. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 412–3. 34. See Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, new edn (London: Skoob Books, 1991). 35. Roger Hutchinson, The Beast Demystified (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Books, 1998). Martin Booth, A Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000). 36. Cited in Symonds, The Great Beast, p. 114. 37. Cited in Hutchinson, The Beat Demystified, p. 115. 38. Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph vel CXI. The Book of Wisdom or Folly (Maine: Sameul Weiser, 1991), pp. 114, 119. 39. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. ix. 40. Aleister Crowley, ‘Concerning “Blasphemy” in General and the “Rites of Eleusis” in Particular’, from The Bystander, 16 November 1910. Reprinted in The Rites of Eleusis, Keith Richmond (ed.), Thame, Oxon: Mandrake Press, 1990), pp. 287–8. 41. Aleister Crowley, ‘Hymn to Pan’ in Magick in Theory and Practice, John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (eds), (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1973), p. 127. 42. For more details on Spare’s biography, see Kenneth Grant, Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (London: Frederick Muller, 1975). 43. From The Times, 5 March 1927. In From the Inferno to Zos: The Writings and Images of Austin Osman Spare, ed. A. R. Naylor (Seattle: First Impressions, 1993), Vol. I. 44. Grant, Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, p. 16. 45. Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure, p. 7. In The Writings and Images of Austin Osman Spare, I. 46. Ibid., p. 53. 47. Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life, p. 7. In The Writings and Images of Austin Osman Spare, I. 48. Cited in ‘Austen Osman Spare’, in Kenneth Graff and Steffi Graff, Hidden Lore: The Carfax Monographs (London: Skoob, 1989), pp. 19–22. 49. Austin Osman Spare, The Anathema of Zos, p. 15. In The Writings and Images of Austin Osman Spare, I. 50. Grant, Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, p. 8. 51. Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain, p. 232. 52. Walter, Blasphemy, Ancient and Modern, pp. 70–4. 53. Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (London: Arrow, 1993 [1981]), p. 301. 54. Michael Dibdin, Dark Spectre, (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 256–7. 55. Louisa Buck, Moving Targets: a User’s Guide to British Art Now (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998) p. 84. 56. Godfrey Worsdale, ‘The Stereo Type’, in Chris Ofili, catalogue (London and Southampton: Serpentine Gallery/Southampton City Art Gallery, 1998), p. 5. 57. Worsdale, ‘Stereo Type’, p. 6. Lisa Corrin, ‘Confounding the Stereotype’, in Chris Ofili, p. 16. 58. David Beech, review of Ofili’s one-man show at Southampton City Art Gallery. In Art Monthly, 6 (1998), pp. 31–3.

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Notes

59. See Louisa Buck, ‘Openings: Chris Ofili’, in ArtForum, September (1997) pp. 112–3. 60. Stuart Morgan, ‘The Elephant Man’, Frieze, 15 (1994), pp. 40–3.

Hacking Blake

1. A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (London: Seeley & Co., 1892), p. 243. 2. Samuel Palmer, quoted in Anne Gilchrist, p. 58. 3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letter to Anne Gilchrist, July 1861 in Anne Gilchrist, p. 94. 4. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), and Harry Zohn (trans.), (London: Fontana Press, 1992) pp. 215–8. See also John Hartan, The History of the Illustrated Book: the Western tradition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 201. 5. Morton D. Paley, ‘Introduction’ to Jerusalem (London: William Blake Trust/ The Tate Gallery, 1991), p. 9. 6. See the technical specification at www.blakearchive.org/public/about/tech/ index.html for details. 7. See, for example, Julia Bryan, ‘Blake Unbound’, in Endeavours (Fall 1997); Mathew Kirschenbaum, ‘Managing the Blake Archive’, Romantic Circles (March 1998); and J. Hillis Miller, ‘Digital Blake’, paper from the Digital Cultures Project conference, Fall 2000. 8. Andrew Cooper and Michael Simpson, ‘The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake’s Eternal Hacking’, The Wordsworth Circle, 30:3 (Summer 1999), pp. 125–31, p. 125. 9. Marshal McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’, in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (eds), Essential McLuhan (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 163. 10. See, for example, Jon Katz, ‘Tom Paine and the Internet’, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (eds), Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 227–39. 11. Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 48. 12. Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 123. 13. From Alexander Gilchrist’s diary, 28 December 1859 (Anne Gilchrist, p. 74). 14. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 8. 15. William Muir, ‘Programme’ to William Blake, The Book of Thel (London: Edmonton Press, 1885). Back cover (no page numbers). 16. Paul Mann, ‘Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce’ in English Literary History, 52 (1985), pp. 1–32, p. 9. 17. Richard Herne Shepherd (ed.), The Poems of William Blake, Comprising of Songs of Innocence and of Experience together with Poetical Sketches and Some Copyright Poems not in any Other Edition (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1874), p. ix. 18. G. E. Bentley, ‘“Blake . . . Had No Quaritch”: the sale of William Muir’s Blake Facsimiles’ in BIQ, 27:2 (1993), pp. 4–13, p. 4. 19. Mann, ‘Apocalypse and Recuperation’, p. 9.

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215

20. Keri Davies, ‘William Muir and the Blake Press at Edmonton, with William Muir’s letters to Kerrison Preston’ in BIQ, 27:2 (1993), pp. 14–25, p. 15. 21. Mann, ‘Apocalypse and Recuperation’, p. 25. 22. William Muir, ‘Preface’ to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London: Edmonton Press, 1885), no page numbers. 23. Keri Davies, ‘William Muir’, p. 18. 24. Note to the poetry of William Blake in ‘Chaucer to Burns’ in English Verse, W. J. Linton and R. H. Stoddard (eds), (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), p. 321. 25. Richard Henry Stoddard, ‘William Blake’ in Under the Evening Lamp (London: Gay and Bird, 1893), pp. 164–81. 26. W. J. Linton, Memories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895), p. 182. 27. G. E. Bentley, Jnr., ‘“New” Blake Engravings After Blake’s Designs, 1837, 1859, 1861’ in BIQ, 12:3 (1978–9), p. 204. 28. W. J. Linton, The Masters of Wood-Engraving (New Haven: issued to subscribers only, 1889), p. 41. 29. D. W. Dörrbecker, ‘Innovative Reproductions: Painters and Engravers at the Royal Academy of Arts’ in Historicizing Blake, Steven Clark and David Worrall (eds), (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), pp. 125–46, p. 127. 30. ‘The Engraver: His Function and Status’ in Scribner’s Magazine (June 1878), included in W. J. Linton, Prose and Verse, 1836–1886 30 vols, self-compiled, XIX, p. 53. 31. W. J. Linton, Wood-Engraving: a Manual of Instruction (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), pp. 101–2. 32. Linton, Manual of Instruction, p. 102. 33. W. J. Linton, Specimens of a New Process of Engraving for Surface Printing (London: no publisher detail, 1861), title page. 34. Linton, New Process, pp. 5, 3. 35. G. E. Bentley, ‘Two Contemporary Facsimiles of Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ in Bibliographical Society of America, 54 (1970), pp. 450–63, p. 459. 36. Thomas V. Lange, ‘Two Forged Plates in America Copy B’ in BIQ, 16:4 (1981), pp. 212–18; and Joseph Viscomi, ‘Facsimile or Forgery? an Examination of America, Plates 4 and 9, Copy B’ in BIQ, 16:4 (1981), pp. 218–23. 37. Viscomi, Facsimile or Forgery?, p. 222. 38. Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). 39. Morton Paley, ‘John Camden Hotten, A. C. Swinburne and the Blake Facsimiles of 1868, in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 7 (1976) pp. 259–96, pp. 274–80. 40. Paley, ‘John Camden Hotten’, p. 287. 41. F. J. Gould, A. L. Vago, in The History of the Leicester Secular Society (published by the society, 1900), p. 20: ‘In the carved capitals of the five stone pillars which carry the front on the ground storey are to be read the names of Socrates, Jesus, Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Robert Owen: and in corresponding niches above are placed terracotta busts of these personages.’ 42. Andrew Solomon, Blake’s Job: a Message for Our Time (London: Palambron Press, 1993), p. 2.

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Notes

Notes

43. Kathleen Raine, The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 257. 44. Robert Essick, ‘Blake’s Engravings to The Book of Job, with an Essay on their Graphic Form, with a Catalogue of their States and Printings’ in William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, David Bindman (ed.), (London: William Blake Trust, 1987), pp. 35–101, p. 44. 45. James Thomson, ‘Open Secret Societies’, in National Reformer, 7 (1866), pp. 98–135, p. 99. 46. Ibid., p. 134. 47. Robert F. Gleckner, ‘W. J. Linton’s Tailpieces in Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake’ in BIQ, 14 (1981), pp. 208–11 p. 208. 48. Francis Barrymore Smith, Radical Artisan, pp. 151, 215. 49. Thomson, City of Dreadful Night, p. 3. 50. Nicolas Walter, Blasphemy: Ancient and Modern, pp. 49–55. 51. Joss Lutz Marsh, ‘“Bibliolatry” and “Bible-Smashing”: G. W. Foote, George Meredith, and the Heretic Trope of the Book’ in Victorian Studies, 34 (1991), pp. 315–36, p. 320. 52. James Collins, The Two Forgers: a Biography of Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), p. 237. 53. Ibid., pp. 33–6. 54. Ibid., pp. 213–14. 55. Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: the Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), p. 134. 56. David Bland, The Illustration of Books (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 74 –75.

Conclusion 1. Rachel Meredith, Art Now: Cerith Wyn Evans (London: Tate, 2000), p. 2. 2. Cerith Wyn Evans, in Meredith, Art Now, p. 2. 3. Chrissie Iles (curator), Signs of the Times: a Decade of Video, Film and Slide-tape Installation in Britain, 1980–1990 (Oxford: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990). 4. See Lisa Corrin (curator), The Greenhouse Effect (London: The Serpentine Gallery, 2000). 5. See Martin Butlin, William Blake: 1757–1827 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1990), p. 251.

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Ackroyd, Peter, Hawksmoor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985). — Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995). — London, The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). Adams, Hazard, Blake and Yeats: the Contrary Vision (reprinted Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). Adams, W. E., Memoirs of a Social Atom (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1903). Allentuck, Marcia, ‘Blake and Ruskin Again: Unpublished Sources not in Bentley’ in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 75:4 (1981), pp. 447–8. Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993). Arnould, Elisabeth, ‘The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice’, Diacritics, 26:2 (1996), pp. 86–96. Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, revd edn (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press 1986 [1959]). Baldwin, Douglas, ‘“Word Begets Image and Image is Virus”: Undermining Language and Film in the Work of William S. Burroughs’, College Literature, 27:1 (2000), pp. 63–83. Ballard, J. G., The Unlimited Dream Company (London: Triad/Panther, 1981). — A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997) Bataille, Georges, Literature and Evil, trans. Alaistair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973). — The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989). — The Accursed Share, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988, 1993). — ‘Happiness, Eroticism and Literature’ in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994). Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964). Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, in Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1994). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, and trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992). Bentley, G. E. Jnr., Blake Books: annotated catalogue of William Blake’s writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). — ‘The Vicissitudes of Vision: the First Account of William Blake in Russian’ in Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 10:4 (1977), pp. 112–114. — ‘“Blake . . . Had No Quaritch”: the Sale of William Muir’s Blake Facsimiles’ in Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 27 (Summer 1993), pp. 4–13. — Blake Books Supplement: a Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake, 1971–1992, being a Continuation of the Blake Books (1977) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 217

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Bentley, G. E. Jnr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Berman, David, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1988). Bertholf, Robert and Levitt, Annette (eds), William Blake and the Moderns (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982). Blake, William, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed., James John Garth Wilkinson (London: William Pickering, 1839). — Songs of Innocence and of Experience (twelve copies privately printed by Charles Augustus Tulk, 1843). — Poetical Sketches, ed., Richard Herne Shepherd (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1868). — The Poems of William Blake, Comprising of Songs of Innocence and of Experience together with Poetical Sketches and some Copyright Poems not in any other Edition, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1874). — The Poetical Works of William Blake: Lyrical and Miscellaneous, ed. with a Prefatory Memoir, William Michael Rossetti (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874). — The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, facsimile by William Muir (London: Edmonton Press, 1885). — Visions of the Daughters of Albion, facsimile by William Muir (London: Edmonton Press, 1885). — Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). — The Illuminated Blake, annotated by David Erdman (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). — The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revd edn, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988). Bockris, Victor and Bayley, Roberta, Patti Smith: an Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Breton, André, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London, Pluto Press, 1978). — Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1990). Briggs, Asa, The Age of Improvement: 1783–1867, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000). Bristow, Joseph and Broughton, Trev Lynn (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism (London and New York: Longman, 1997). Bronowski, J., William Blake: a Man without a Mask (London: Secker & Warburg, 1943). Bruder, Helen, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Bryant, William Cullen, Thanatopsis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882). Cardinal, Roger, The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (London: Reaktion Books, 1989). Butlin, Martin, William Blake 1757–1827, Vol. V (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990), pp. 119–20. Burroughs, William, Cities of the Red Night (London: Picador, 1981). — The Western Lands (London: Picador, 1988).

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Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus/ Lectures On Heroes/ Chartism/ Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896). — ‘Signs of the Time’ in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin, 1971). Carter, Angela, The Sadeian Woman: an Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979). — The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982). — The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (London: Penguin, 1982). — Expletives Deleted (London: Vintage, 1993). Causey, Andrew, Paul Nash (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Caws, Mary Ann, The Surrealist Look: an Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1997). Chai, Leon, Aestheticism: the Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Vol. I (London: Rest Fenner, 1817). — Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Yale University Press, 1992). Collins, James, The Two Forgers: a Biography of Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992). Conway, Moncure, ‘William Blake’ in Fortnightly Review n.s., 3 (February 1868). — The Earthward Pilgrimmage (London: John Camden Hotten, 1870). Corcoran, Neil, The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982) Crehan, Stewart, Blake in Context (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984). Crowley, Aleister, Magick in Theory and Practice, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1973). — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Arkana, 1979) — ‘Concerning “Blasphemy” in General and the “Rites of Eleusis” in Particular’, from The Bystander, 16 November 1910. Reprinted in The Rites of Eleusis, ed. Keith Richmond (Thame, Oxon: Mandrake Press, 1990), pp. 287–8. Cunningham, Allan, ‘Life of Blake’ in Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2, 6 Vols (London: John Murray, 1830). Dabydeen, David, Slave Song (Mundelstrup and Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo Press, 1984). — Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century British Art (Mundelstrup and Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo Press, 1985). — The Counting House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). Damon, S. Foster, William Blake: His Philosophy and His Symbols (London: Constable and Company, 1924). — ‘Some American References to Blake Before 1863’, Modern Languages Notes, 14 (1930), pp. 365–70. Davies, Keri, ‘William Muir and the Blake Press at Edmonton, with William Muir’s letters to Kerrison Preston’, Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 27 (Summer 1993), pp. 14–25.

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Davies, Keri, ‘William Blake’s Mother: a New Identification’, Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 33:2 (Fall 1999), pp. 36–50. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984). d’Entremont, John, Moncure Conway, 1832–1907: American Abolitionist, Spiritual Architect of South Place, Author of ‘The Life of Thomas Paine’ (The 58th Memorial Lecture, December 1977, South Place Ethical Society). — Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years, 1832–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). De Luca, Vincent A., Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983). Deck, Raymond H., ‘New Light on C. A. Tulk Blake’s 19th Century patron’ in Blake and Swedenborg, Opposition is True Friendship: Anthology of the Sources of William Blake’s Arts in the Writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1985). Diggory, Terence, ‘Allen Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral’, College Literature, 27:1 (2000), pp. 103–18. Dorfmann, Deborah, ‘Blake in 1863 and 1880: the Gilchrist Life’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 71 (1967), pp. 216–38. — Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). Dörrbecker, D. W. ‘Innovative Reproductions’, in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steven Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan Press, 1994). Douglas, Mark, ‘Derek Jarman and the Cinema of Englishness’, in The Visual–Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions (Southampton: Southampton Institute, 2000). Dowden, Edward, Studies in Literature, 1789–1877 (London: Kegan Paul, 1878). Dowling, Linda, The Vulgarization of Art: the Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Eates, Margot, Paul Nash: The Master of the Image (London: John Murray, 1973). Eaves, Morris, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). — The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Eburne, Jonathan, ‘Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac and the Consumption of Otherness’, Modern Fiction Studies, 43:1 (1997), pp. 53–92. Ellis, Edwin John, and William Butler Yeats (eds), The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, 3 Vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893). Einsenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Erdman, David, Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, ed., with assistance of John E. Thiesmeyer and Richard J. Wolfe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967). — Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Erickson, Lee, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the

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Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Essick, Robert, William Blake Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). — (ed.), William Blake: Images and Texts (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1997). Evans, Frederick H., James John Garth Wilkinson: an Introduction, reprinted from The Homœpathic World, 1912. Ferber, Michael, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). — ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem” as a Hymn’, BIQ, 34:3, Winter 2000/1, pp. 82–9. Foote, George William, ‘William Blake’, National Reformer (21 February 1875). — Flowers of Freethought: First Series (London: The Pioneer Press, 1893). — Flowers of Freethought: Second Series (London: The Pioneer Press, 1894). Fox, Susan, ‘The Female as Metaphor in the Poetry of William Blake’, Critical Enquiry, 3 (1977), pp. 507–19. Fuller, Jean Overton, Swinburne: a Critical Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968). Gamble, Sarah, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Gilchrist, Alexander, The Life of William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1863). — The Life of William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1880). — The Life of William Blake, ed. Ruthven Todd (London: Everyman, 1945). Gilchrist, Anne, Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings, ed. H. H. Gilchrist, with a prefatory notice by W. M. Rossetti (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). — The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, ed. with an introduction by Thomas B. Harned (London: T. Fisher Unwin, [1920]). Ginsberg, Allen, Your Reason and Blake’s System, reprinted (New York: Hanuman Books, 1992). — Collected Poems 1947–1985 (London: Penguin, 1995). Gleckner, Robert F., ‘W. J. Linton’s Tailpieces in Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake’ in Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 14 (Spring 1981), pp. 208–11. — ‘W. J. Linton, a Latter-day Blake’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (Summer 1982), pp. 208–27. Gould, Frederick James, The History of the Leicester Secular Society (published by the society, 1900). Goslee, Nancy M., ‘“In Englands Green and Pleasant Land”: The Building of Vision in Blake’s Stanzas from Milton’, Studies in Romanticism, 13:4 (Boston, 1974), pp. 105–25. Grant, Kenneth, Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (London: Frederick Muller, 1975). Greg, Walter, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–51). Growoll, Adolf, James Thomson, Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch (New York: printed for the author, 1893). Hague, René, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones (Wellingborough: Christopher Skelton, 1977). Hamlyn, Robin and Riding, Christine, William Blake (London: Tate Gallery, 2000). H. D., Collected Poems 1912–1944 (New York: New Directions Books, 1983).

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Hagstrum, Jean H., ‘Blake and the Sister-Arts Tradition’ in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Heimonet, Jean-Michel, ‘Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism’, Diacritics, 26:2 (1996), pp. 59–73. Henry, Lauren ‘“Sunshine and Shady Groves”: what Blake’s “Little Black Boy” learned from African Writers’ in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 67–86. Herrick, James, Vision and Realism: a Hundred Years of the Freethinker, Foreword by Barbara Wooton (London: G. W. Foote, 1982). Hewlett, Henry G., ‘Imperfect Genius: William Blake, part II’, Contemporary Review, 29 (January 1877). Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962). Hobson, Christopher Z., Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Hoover, Suzanne R., ‘Fifty Additions to Blake Bibliography: Further Data for the Study of his Reputation in the Nineteenth Century’, Blake Newsletter: an Illustrated Quarterly, 5:3 (Winter 1971–72), pp. 167–72. — ‘Pictures at the Exhibition’, Blake Newsletter, 6:1 (Summer 1972), pp. 6–12. — ‘William Blake in the Wilderness; a Closer Look at his Reputation, 1827–1863’ in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Philips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 310–48. — ‘The Public Reception of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake’, Blake Newsletter, 8:1–2 (Summer–Fall 1974), pp. 26–31. Horovitz, Michael (ed.), Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, reprinted (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Huxley, Aldous, Doors of Perception/ Heaven and Hell (London: Granada, 1977). Itkowitz, Kenneth, ‘To Witness Spectacles of Pain: the Hypermorality of Georges Bataille’, College Literature, 26:1 (Winter 1999), pp. 19–33. Jarman, Derek, The Last of England, ed. David L. Hirst (London: Constable, 1987). — Dancing Ledge, 2nd edn (London: Quartet, 1991). — Modern Nature (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1994). — Derek Jarman’s Garden, with photographs by Howard Sooley (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). — Smiling in Slow Motion, ed. Keith Collins (London: Century, 2000). Jarmusch, Jim, Dead Man, 12-Gauge Productions Inc., 1995. Johnson, Kendall, ‘Haunting Transcendence: the Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton’, Twentieth Century Literature, 45:3 (1999), pp. 347–70. Jones, David, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1972 [1955]). Keynes, Geoffrey, ‘Blake, Tulk and Garth Wilkinson’, The Library or Transcations of the Bibliographical Society, Ser. IV, 26:3 (December 1945). — ‘On Editing Blake’ in English Studies Today: Third Series (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), pp. 136–53. Kiernan, Robert, American Writing Since 1945: A Critical Survey (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983).

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King, James, Interior Landscapes: A Life of Paul Nash (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). — William Blake: His Life (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1991) Lee, Robert A. (ed.), The Beat Generation Writers (London and East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996). Lessing, Doris, The Four-Gated City (London: Flamingo, 1969). Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000). Linton, William James, Bob Thin or the Poor House Fugitive (privately printed, 1845). — Specimens of a New Process of Engraving for Surface Printing (London, n.p., 1861). — Ireland for the Irish, Rhymes and Reasons Against Landlordism with a Preface on Fenianism and Republicanism (New York: The American News Company, 1867). — The Religion of Organization: an Essay Read to Friends in Boston, Jan. 27 1869 (privately printed as a reprint from the Boston Radical, n.d.). — The Paris Commune: in Answer to the Calumnies of the New York Tribune (Boston: reprinted from The Radical for September 1871). — [pseud. Abel Reid], Broadway Ballads: Collected for the Centennial Commemoration of the Republic (author’s edition, 1876). — Some Practical Hints on Wood-Engraving for the Instruction of Reviewers and the Public (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1879). — Wood-Engraving: a Manual of Instruction (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884). — The Masters of Wood-Engraving (New Haven: issued to subcribers only, 1889). — and R. H. Stoddard (eds), English Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883). — Famine, bound into William James Linton, Poems and Translations 1875–92 (no publication details). — Heliconundrums (one of twenty-five copies printed privately at the Appledore press, n.d.). — Memories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895). — Prose and Verse Written and Published in the Course of Fifty Years, 1836–1886, presented to the British Museum by W. J. Linton in 1895. Lockhurst, Roger, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). Louis, M. K., ‘Wise Words and Wild Words: the Problem of Language in Swinburne’s Atalanta’, in Victorian Poetry, 25 (1987). — Swinburne and His Gods: the Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990). McGann, Jerome, Swinburne: an Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). — ‘The Text, the Poem and the Problem of Historical Method’, New Literary History: a Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 12 (Winter 1981), pp. 269–88. — The Romantic Ideology: a Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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Select Bibliography

McGann, Jerome, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). — A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1992). Macluhan, Herbert Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). Maidment, Brian, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987). Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Mann, Paul, ‘Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce’, English Literary History, 52 (1985), pp. 1–32. Mee, John, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Mellor, Anne, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). — ‘Sex, Violence and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft’ in Robert Essick (ed.), William Blake: Images and Texts (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1997), pp. 69–94. — ‘Blake, Gender and Imperial Ideology: a Response’, in Blake, Politics and History, ed. Jackie Di Salvo, G. A. Rosso and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 351–3. Meredith, Rachel, Art Now: Cerith Wyn Evans (London: Tate, 2000). Miles, Barry, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Virgin, 2000). Mitchell, W. T., Blake’s Composite Art: a Study of the Illuminated Poetry of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Moorcock, Michael, Mother London (London: Penguin, 1989 [1988]). Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: The Bodley Head, 1991). Morton, A. L., The Everlasting Gospel: a Study in the Sources of William Blake (New York: Haskell House, 1966). Moskal, Jeanne, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1994). Mottram, Eric, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Marion Boyars, 1977). Nash, David, Secularism, Art and Freedom (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992). Nash, Paul, Places (London: Heinemann, 1923). Norton, Charles Eliot, William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (with Descriptive Letterpress and A Sketch of the Artist’s Life and Works) (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875). O’Pray, Michael, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: BFI, 1979). Otto, Peter, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Paris: n.p., 1794). Paley, Morton D. ‘The Critical Reception of A Critical Essay’, Blake Newsletter, 8:1–2 (Summer–Fall 1974), pp. 32–7. — ‘John Camden Hotten, A. C. Swinburne and the Blake Facsimiles of 1868’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 7 (1976).

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— ‘John Trivett Nettleship and His “Blake Drawings”’, Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 14:4 (1981), pp. 185–94. — The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Palgrave, G. F., Francis Turner Palgrave: His Journals and Memories of his Life (London: Longmans Green, 1889). Palmer, A. H., The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (London: Seeley & Co., 1892). Pater, Walter, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, The Bibeiot, V (October 1899). Patterson, Annabel, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987). Peake, Tony, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999). Porter, Roy, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000). Portugés, Paul, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara, Calif.: RossErikson, 1978). Preston, Kerrison, Blake and Rossetti (London: The De La More Press, 1944). Punter, David, Blake, Hegel and Dialectic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982). Quinn, Marc, Incarnate (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998). Raine, Kathleen, Blake and Tradition, 2 Vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). — The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982). — ‘The Swedenborgian Songs’ in Blake and Swedenborg, Opposition Is True Friendship: the Sources of William Blake’s Arts in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, ed. Harvey F. Bellini and Darrell Ruhl (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1985), pp. 69–86. — Autobiographies (London: Skoob Books, 1991). Reiman, Donald, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987). Rigby, Brian, ‘Victor Hugo and the English Secularists and Republicans’ in Victor Hugo et la Grande-Bretagne: actes du deuxieme colloque vinaver, ed. A. R. W. James (Liverpool: Carnes, 1986). Robinson, Leonard, Paul Nash, Winter Sea: The Development of an Image (York: Ebor Press, 1997). Robinson, William H., Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (Detroit, Michigan: Broadside Press, 1975). Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). Rose, Edward J., ‘The 1839-Wilkinson Edition of Blake’s Songs in Transcendental America’, Blake Newsletter, 4 (1971), pp. 79–81. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1873). — Hand and Soul, reprinted from The Germ (London: Kelmscott Press, 1895). Rossetti, William Michael, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: a Criticism (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866). — ‘Review of The Poems of William Blake: Comprising Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Together with Poetical Sketches and some Copyright Poems not in any Other Edition (London: Pickering 1874)’ in Academy, (5 September 1874), p. 255.

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Rossetti, William Michael, ‘The Poems of William Blake’, Academy, 6 (10 October 1874), p. 408. — Letters of William Michael Rossetti Concerning Whitman, Blake and Shelley to Anne Gilchrist and Her Son Herbert Gilchrist, ed. Paul Franklin Baum and Clarence Gohdes (Durhan, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1934). Royle, Edward, The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1976). — Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Rubenstein, Anne and Townsend, Camilla, ‘Revolted Negroes and the Devilish Principle: William Blake and conflicting visions of Boni’s wars in Surinam’ in Blake, Politics and History, eds Jackie Di Salvo, G. A. Rosso and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 273–98. Ruskin, John, The Stones of Venice Vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853). — Modern Painters (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1873). — The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Sunnyside, Kent: George Allen, 1886). — The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art (London: George Allen, 1894). — Sesame & Lilies / The Two Paths/ The King of the Golden River (London: J. M. Dent, 1907). Salt, Henry Stephen, The Life of James Thomson (‘B.V.’) (London: Reeves and Turner/ Betram Dobell, 1889). Saurat, Denis, Blake and Modern Thought (London: Constable & Co., 1929). Schama, Simon, A History of Britain, Vol. 2, The British Wars, 1603–1776 (London: BBC Books, 2000). Schorer, Mark, William Blake: the Politics of Vision (New York: Henry Holt, 1964). Simpson, Louis, Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), Sinclair, Iain, Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales (London: Vintage, 1995 [1991]). — Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge (London: Granta, 1998). — Lights Out for the Territory, illustrations by Marc Atkins (London: Granta, 1997). — White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (London: Granta, 1998 [1987]). — (with Marc Atkins) Liquid City (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). Skipsey, Joseph (ed. and with Prefatory Notice), The Poems, with Specimens of Prose Writings, of William Blake (London: Walter Scott [The Canterbury Poets], 1885). Smith, Francis Barrymore, Radical Artisan, William James Linton 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973). Smith, Patti, Early Work (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994). — The Coral Sea (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996). — Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Notes, Reflections (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Solomon, Andrew, Blake’s Job: a Message for our Time (London: Palamabron Press, 1993). Spare, Austin Osman, From the Inferno to Zos: The Writings and Images of Austin Osman Spare, ed. A. R. Naylor (Seattle: First Impressions, 1993).

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Stauffer, Andrew M., ‘The First Known Publication of Blake’s Poetry in America’ in Notes & Queries, n.s. 43:1 (1996), pp. 41–3. Stoddard, Richard Henry, ‘William Blake’, Under the Evening Lamp (London: 1893). Swedenborg, Emanuel, Heaven and Its Wonders, and Hell: from Things Seen and Heard, ed. J. Howard Spalding, based on a translation by F. Bayley for the Swedenborg Society (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1909). Swinburne, Augustus Charles, William Blake: a Critical Essay (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868). — The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). — William Blake: a Critical Essay, ed. Hugh J. Luke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1970). Tahoer, Irene, ‘The Woman Scaly’, Midwestern Modern Languages Association Bulletin, 6 (1973), pp. 74–87. Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971). Tanselle, G. Thomas, Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1979). Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). — ‘London’ in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 5–31. Thomson, James, [B.V.], ‘The Poems of William Blake’, National Reformer (14, 21 and 28 January and 4 February 1866). — ‘Open Secret Societies’ in National Reformer n.s. 7 (18 and 25 February, 4 March 1866), pp. 98–100, 117–18, 134–5. — The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880). — Address On the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society, 6th March 1881 (no publication details). — 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 (printed for private circulation at the Chiswick Press, 1884). Trigilio, Tony, ‘Strange Prophecies Anew’: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H. D., and Ginsberg (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000). Tulk, Charles Augustus, The Science of Correspondency and other Spiritual Doctrines of Holy Scripture with Illustrative Spiritual Expositors, ed. Charles Pooley (London: James Speirs, 1889). Viscomi, Joseph, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Walter, Nicolas, Blasphemy, Ancient and Modern (London: Rationalist Press Association, 1990). Watt, Donald, ‘Burning Bright: “Fahrenheit 451” as Symbolic Dystopia’, in Joseph Chandler and Martin Harry Greenberg (eds) Ray Bradbury (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1980), pp. 195–213. Whittaker, Jason, William Blake and the Myths of Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

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Select Bibliography

Wilkinson, Clement John, James John Garth Wilkinson: a Memoir of his Life with a Selection from his Letters (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tribner & Co., 1911). Wilkinson, James John Garth, The Human Body and its Connexion with Man, Illustrated by the Principal Organs (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851). — Improvisations from The Spirit (London: W. White, 1857). — Revelation, Mythology, Correspondences (London: J. T. Speirs, 1887). — The African and the True Christian Religion, His Magna Carta: a Study in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (London: James Speirs, 1892). Williams, Nicholas, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Wilson, Mona, The Life of William Blake (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1927). Woodcock, Peter, This Enchanted Isle (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2000). Worrall, David, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). Worrall, David and Clarke, Steve (eds), Blake in the Nineties (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). Wyatt, David, Out of the Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Yeats, W. B., A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937).

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abolitionism 97–100 Ackroyd, Peter 13, 45, 64–5, 199 n. 5, 204 nn. 34–6 Adams, Hazard 21, 27, 200 n. 34, 201 n. 53 Adams, W. E. A. 72 Address on the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society 10, 187–94 aestheticism 20, 32–4, 36, 152–4, 189 Age of Reason, The 145–6 Albion 58, 60, 61, 66, 69–71, 83, 87, 134, 140 Allen, Keith 91–2 Allentuck, Marcia 200 n. 31 American Civil War, the 100 American Revolution, the 98–9, 118–19 American Transcendentalists 25 Amis, Martin 45 Anathemata, The 61, 80-3 Anger, Kenneth 157 Armstrong, Isobel 203 n. 21, 205 n. 12 Arnold, Matthew 86 Arnould, Elisabeth 42, 202 n. 81 atheism 145–6, 155–6 Atkins, Marc 204 nn. 30, 37 Attwood, Margaret 137 Austen, Jane 123 Autobiographies (Kathleen Raine) 130-2 Bacon, Francis 5 Bacon, Sir Francis 146 Balakian, Anna 37, 201 n. 67 Baldwin, Douglas 209 n. 52 Ballard, J. G. 9, 45, 55–60, 104, 133 Barthes, Roland 210 n. 12 Bartolozzi, Francesco 113 Basire, James 3, 49, 51 Bataille, Georges 9, 36–7, 159, 160, 165, 195, 201 nn. 62–3, 202 nn. 79–87, 203 n. 24, 213 n. 39; and sovereignty 40–3 Baudelaire, Charles 37, 42, 50, 52,

137, 153 Baudrillard, Jean 55, 203 n. 23 Bax, Clifford 161 Bayley, Roberta 211 n. 21 Beardsley, Aubrey 161 Beatles, the 157 Beats, the 104–9, 134 Beech, David 167 Bell, Steve 92 Bellars, Henry James 186–7 Bellarsi, Franca 106, 209 n. 41 Benjamin, Walter 171–2, 178, 214 n. 4 Bentley, G. E. 4, 8, 15, 65, 96, 149, 181, 198 nn. 4, 1, 199 nn. 7–8, 207 nn. 1–2, 5, 215 nn. 18, 27, 35 Berman, David 212 n. 7 Bertram, James 161 Besant, Annie 187 Beulah 138–40 Blair, Tony 89 Blake Archive, the 173–5 Blake, Catherine 4, 10, 12, 17, 120–1, 123–5, 149, 196 Blake, Robert 120 Blake, William, and gothic 19–20; and hacking 173–4, 189, 195; and nationalism 69–71, 93–4; and religion 29, 36, 143–7; and sexuality 120-1; and supposed madness 34–5, 148–9; and the idea of the book 8–9, 126–9, 169–73, 175–7; as an artist 14–16, 19–20, 37–8, 79–80; death of 11–12, 149, 152; feminist responses to 121–3, 141–2; international reception of 96–7; life of 3–5, 11–12, 197, 198 n. 1; reproductions of his work 177–87; works: ‘A Poison Tree’ 19, 110, 132; Ahania 7; ‘Cradle Song’ 19; ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ 40, 105, 108; America 69, 83, 93, 98, 118, 124, 170, 185; ‘Annotations to Watson’ 172; ‘Auguries of Innocence’ 117, 159; A Vision of the Last Judgement 189;

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Index

Index

Blake, William – continued Descriptive Catalogue 37; Edward and Elinor 172; ‘Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall’ 196; Europe 7, 69, 79, 120; Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne 167; illustrations to Blair’s The Grave 15, 181; illustrations to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam 97, 113–5; ‘Infant Joy’ 24; Jerusalem 1, 4, 7, 9, 23–4, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 69–70, 72, 81, 83, 87–8, 93, 103, 107, 109, 112, 126, 136, 146, 147, 15, 171–3, 181, 188–90; ‘Jerusalem’ (stanzas from Milton) 3, 66, 85–6, 88–95; Job illustrations 172, 185, 188–93; ‘King Edward the Third’ 93; ‘London’ 2, 44–8, 65, 132; ‘Merlin’s Prophecy’ 119; Milton 4, 49, 55–7, 59–60, 69–70, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 107, 116, 130, 134, 138–9, 147, 175, 181, 196; Oberon and Titania asleep on a Lily 31; On Virgil 19; Public Address 182; Satan in All his Original Glory 166–7; Songs of Innocence and of Experience 18–19, 22–5, 32, 46, 72, 102, 106–7, 109, 132, 135, 170, 181, 185, 188; The Ancient of Days 54; The Bard, from Gray 37; The Blasphemer 144; ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ 18, 102, 109; ‘The Divine Image’ 2, 73; The Dream of Queen Catherine 31; ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ 118, 143, 146; The [First] Book of Urizen 7, 8, 170; The French Revolution 4, 69; The Gates of Paradise 101; The Ghost of Abel 146; The Ghost of a Flea 165; ‘The Human Abstract’ 33–4; ‘The Little Black Boy’ 99; ‘The Little Girl Lost’ 106; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 8, 41, 43, 63, 103, 108, 111–2, 116, 118, 137–8, 146, 158–60, 168–9, 179, 186; ‘The Sick Rose’ 86, 106, 110; ‘The Tyger’ 35, 104; Thel 20, 130, 132, 135, 180; There is No Natural Religion 186–7; Tiriel 39; Vala, or the Four Zoas 26, 106–7, 110-1, 137–8; Visions of the Daughters of Albion 120, 122–3, 128, 130, 135

Bland, James 194, 216 n. 56 blasphemy 143–7 Blazey, Michel 196 Bliss, Rebekah 124–5 Bob-Thin 47–9, 203 n. 10 Bockris, Victor 211 n. 21 Boehme, Jacob 21, 26 Booth, Martin 157 Bouton, J. W. 186 Bracewell, Michael 211 nn. 22, 24–5 Bradbury, Ray 104, 208 nn. 34–5 Bradlaugh, Charles 160, 192 Bragg, Billy 89, 206 n. 46 Breton, André 37–8, 40, 59, 201 nn. 65–6, 203 n. 26 Briggs, Asa 68, 204 n. 5 BritArt 6, 13 Britten, Benjamin 86 Broadway Ballads 77–8, 80, 205 nn. 22–3 Brontë, Emily 42 Brotherhood, the 16, 199 nn. 15–16 Brown, Ford Madox 86 Browne, Max 199 n. 10 Bruder, Helen 7, 121, 135, 198 n. 9, 209 n. 56, 210 nn. 1, 4 Bryant, William Cullen 79, 205 n. 25 Buck, Louise 213 n. 55 Buddhism 103, 106, 109 Burgess, Arthur 15 Burroughs, William 105, 110–13, 133, 134, 136, 158, 210 nn. 58–60 Butlin, Martin 216 n. 5 Byatt, A. S. 45 Capaneus 144 Cardinal, Roger 202 n. 75 Carey, Frances A. 199 n. 9 Carlile, Richard 146 Carlyle, Thomas 129 Carrington, Dora 39 Carter, Angela 10, 45, 111, 133, 134, 136–41, 204 n. 39, 209 n. 55, 211 n. 26–33 Causey, Andrew 39, 202 n. 71 Caws, Mary Ann 201 n. 68 censorship 164 Chartism 48 Chai, Leon 200 n. 28 Chaucer, Geoffrey 82

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Child, Lydia Maria 99 Christ, Jesus 70, 90, 144, 147 Cities of the Red Night 112–13 City of Dreadful Night, The 53–4, 187, 205 n. 13, 216 n. 49 Cixous, Hélène 137 Clark, Steve 7, 13 Cleave 00 195–7 Cluysenaar, Anne 110, 209 n. 50 Cobbett, William 88 Coleridge, S. T. 4, 24, 82, 104, 200 nn. 43–4 Colley, Linda 68, 204 n. 3 Collings, Matthew 198 n. 2 Collins, James 192, 216 n. 52 Confessions of Aleister Crowley, The 156–60 Conway, Moncure 10, 99–101, 208 nn. 21–4, 27 Cooper, Andrew 173, 214 n. 8 Cope, Julian 10 Corcoran, Neil 81, 205 nn. 28, 32 Corrin, Lisa 167, 216 n. 4 Cotton, John 110, 209 n. 50 Coum Transmissions 195 Covering Cherub, the 57, 139 Cressy, David 88, 206 n. 43 Crowley, Aleister 10, 156–61, 163–4, 213 nn. 34–8, 40–1 Cumberland, George 171 Cunliffe, Dave 110 Cunningham, Allan 12, 97, 149, 180, 207 n. 7 Dabydeen, David 97, 113–16, 117, 207 n. 12, 210 n. 62 Dali, Salvador 37, 58 Damon, S. Foster 7, 25, 201 n. 49 Damrosch, Leopold 141, 211 n. 35 Dante, Alighieri 117, 144 Darby, Nelson 157 Davies, Keri 8, 124, 180, 210 n. 5, 212 n. 10, 215 nn. 20, 23 Davies, W. H. 161 Dead Man 112, 116–18 Deardon, John S. 205 n. 22 Debord, Guy 60, 203 n. 27 de Certeau, Michel 45, 55, 202 n. 2 de Chazal, Malcolm 36 Deck, Raymond H. 24, 201 n. 46

231

Dee, Doctor John 158 Deism 145–6 Deleuze, Gilles 204 n. 29 De Luca, Vincent A. 209 n. 54 Delville, James 5–6 de Man, Paul 201 n. 64 Dent, William 7 d’Entremont, John 100, 208 nn. 25–6 Depp, Johnny 116 de Rais, Gilles 160 de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis 41, 42, 137, 138 Dibdin, Michael 165–6, 213 n. 54 Dickens, Charles 146 Dickinson, Emily 25 Diggory, Terence 109, 209 n. 47 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) 130, 134, 211 n. 15 Doors, The 8, 14 Dorfmann, Deborah 9, 14, 31 Dörrbecker, D. W. 7, 182, 215 n. 29 Douglas, Mark 85, 206 n. 38 Dowden, Edward 35, 201 n. 60 Dowling, Linda 200 n. 26 Downriver 62–4 Duffy, Maureen 80, 205 n. 26 Dyer, Nicholas 64 Eates, Margot 39, 202 n. 73 Eaves, Morris 6–7, 173, 198 n. 8, 215 n. 38 Eburne, Jonathan 112, 209 n. 57 Eliot, T. S. 31, 52, 128, 132, 201 n. 56 Éluard, Paul 37 Ellis, Edwin John 16, 20, 159, 163, 201 n. 50; editing of Blake 25–7 Emerson, R. W. 25 Enitharmon 120–1, 163 Erdman, David 8, 19, 45–6, 68, 93, 199 n. 21, 202 n. 3, 203 nn. 5, 7, 9, 204 n. 7 Ernst, Max 37, 57, 162 Essick, Robert 8, 16, 89–90, 173, 199 n. 18, 202 n. 69, 206 nn. 47–8, 216 n. 44 Euro 2000 91–4 Evans, Cerith Wyn 195–7, 216 n. 2 Evans, Gwynfor 206 n. 57 Fabian Society, the

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Index

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale 200 n. 29 Famine: a Masque 79 Farmer, Gary 116 Fat Les 91–2, 206 n. 54 Feldman, Paula R. 198 n. 4 Ferber, Michael 89, 206 nn. 45–6 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 105 Festival of Reason, the 145 flâneur 44–5, 50, 55, 65 Flaxman, John 3–4 Foote, George William 10, 35–6, 74, 155–6, 160 191–2, 201 n. 61, 208 n. 28 Forman, Harry Buxton 192–3 Fox, Susan 210 n. 2 Franklin, Benjamin 71 Freethinker, The 35, 155–6 French Revolution, the 4, 67–9, 145 Freud, Sigmund 35, 130, 168 Frye, Northrop 7, 141 Fuller, Captain John Frederick Charles 158 Fuller, Jean Overton 150, 212 n. 17 Fuseli, Henry 104, 122 Gamble, Sarah 136, 140, 211 nn. 26, 32 Geoffrey of Monmouth 81 George III 47, 93 George V 89 Gilchrist, Alexander 5, 9, 11–13, 15, 26, 27–33, 54–5, 65, 71, 124–6, 129–30, 149, 152, 169–70, 175–6, 179, 181; and London 49–52 Gilchrist, Anne 10, 29–30, 33, 176, 190, 201 n. 55, 203 n. 17, 210 nn. 6, 8, 11, 214 n. 3; editing of Blake 125–30 Gill, Eric 81 Ginsberg, Allen 10, 60, 104–12, 134, 208–9 nn. 37–47 Ginsberg, Louis 106 Ginsberg, Naomi 106, 108 Gisbourne, Mark 5, 198 n. 7 Gladstone, William 115 Glancey, Jonathan 89, 206 n. 44 Glazer, Myra 121, 210 n. 3 Gleckner, Robert F. 190, 216 n. 47 Glück, Louise 103 gnosticism 29, 34

Goldman, Emma 137 Goldman, Paul 199 n. 20 Golgonooza 55, 134 Gordon riots, the 47, 49–50 Gormley, Anthony 5 Goslee, Nancy 89, 206 n. 45 Gould, F. J. 216 n. 41 Grant, Kenneth 157, 213 nn. 34, 42, 44, 50 Greenberg, Mark L. 199 n. 22 Guattari, Félix 204 n. 29 Gull, Sir William 61 Giuliani, Rudolph 167–8 Gurewitsch, Susan 203 n. 16 Gysin, Brion 195 Hague, René 82, 205 n. 31 Hall, James 198 n. 6 Hamilton, Paul 201 n. 58 Hamlyn, Robin 198 n. 1, 199 n. 5 Hammons, David 166 Hardman, Malcolm 200 n. 30 Harris, Thomas 165–6, 213 n. 53 Hayter, Stanley 38 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 130, 134, 211 n. 15 Heaney, Seamus 81, 205 n. 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 41 Heimonet, Jean-Michel 202 n. 83 Hemans, Felicia 12, 198 n. 4 Henry, Lauren 208 n. 17 Hercules 98 Hermes Trismegistus 131 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the 157, 159, 161–2 Hewlett, Henry 27 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 25 Hilton, Nelson 122 Hinton, James 61 Hirst, Damien 91–2 Hoffman, Abbie 106–7 Hobbs, Christopher 86 Hobsbawm, Eric 67, 204 n. 1 Hobson, Christopher Z. 7, 87, 175, 206 n. 42, 214 n. 12 Holst, Theodore von 15 Hoover, Suzanne 15, 199 n. 7, 200 n. 45 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 82 Horovitz, Michael 110, 209 n. 49

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Hotten, John Camden 151–2, 186–7 ‘Howl’ 107–8, 111 Human Body, The 72–3 humanism 36, 42, 51 Hutchinson, Roger 157, 213 nn. 35, 37 Huxley, Aldous Leonard 14, 102–3, 105, 208 n. 30 Huxley, Thomas 102 Iles, Chrissie 196, 216 n. 3 Ireland for the Irish 101–2 Itkowitz, Kenneth 43, 202 n. 87 Irigaray, Luce 137 Isherwood, Christopher 158 Jah Wobble 10 James, Alex 91 Januszczak, Waldemar 2–3, 198 nn. 2–3 Jarman, Derek 9, 84–8, 91, 195, 205–6 nn. 34–40 Jarmusch, Jim 10, 56, 112, 116–8, 210 nn. 63–4 Jarrow Marchers, the 14, 89, 91–2 Johnson, Joseph 4, 97 Johnson, Kendall 202 n. 78 Jones, David 9, 61, 80-3 Joyce, James 52 Jubilee 84–5 Jung, Carl Gustav 134 Kafka, Franz 42 Kant, Immanuel 37 Katz, Jon 214 n. 10 Keats, John 212 n. 26 Kelley, Mike 167 Kelly, Edward 158 Kennedy, Emmet 212 n. 3 kerography 184 Kerouac, Jack 104, 105, 134 Keynes, Geoffrey 8, 199–200 n. 23, 203 n. 11 Kiernan, Robert 103, 208 n. 32 King, James 198 n. 1, 202 n. 72 Kirkup, James 164 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 214 n. 7 Kristeva, Julia 168 Laing, R. D.

66, 134

233

Landor, Walter Savage 153 Lange, Thomas V. 185, 207 n. 8, 215 n. 36 Last Night of the Proms 88–9, 92, 94–5 Last of England, The 85–7 Lawrence, D. H. 121 Led Zeppelin 157 Lee, Robert A. 208 n. 36 Lessing, Doris 133–4, 211 nn. 19–20 Levin, Susan 133, 211 n. 19 Life of William Blake, The 13, 18, 27–33, 47, 49–52, 124–30, 170, 175–6, 180, 186, 190, 193 Linebaugh, Peter 97–8, 112, 118–9, 207 nn. 13–14, 210 nn. 61, 65 Linnell, John 5, 181 Linton, William James 9, 47–9, 101–2, 170, 180–5, 187, 190–4, 203 n. 10, 205 nn. 18–19, 21, 208 n. 29, 215 nn. 24, 26, 28, 30–34; and republicanism 74, 76–80 Locke, John 67, 69, 145, 146 Lockhurst, Roger 203 n. 22 Lo Duca, J. M. 41 Los 48, 55, 103, 140 Louis, M. K. 153, 212 nn. 23–4 Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge 60–1 Luddites 91 Luke, Hugh J. 34 Luvah 57 McCord, James 199 nn. 15–16 McGann, Jerome 18, 126–7, 153, 175, 177, 199 n. 19, 210 n. 9, 212 n. 25, 214 n. 11 McKean, Dave 203 n. 28 McLuhan, Marshal 173–4, 214 n. 9 McTaggart, John Ellis 164 Maidment, Brian 203 n. 12 Makdisi, Saree 50, 203 n. 14 Makinen, Merja 137, 141, 211 nn. 27, 34 Malkin, Benjamin Heath 148, 212 n. 12 Malory, Thomas 82 Mann, Paul 177–8, 214 n. 16, 215 nn. 19, 21 Mapplethorpe, Robert 136 Marsden, Francis 161

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Index

Index

Marsh, Joss Lutz 216 n. 51 Marx, Karl 37 Mason Affair, the 100 Masson, André 37 Mazzini, Giuseppe 75 Matthews, Susan 69, 204 n. 9 Maus, Marcel 42 Mee, Jon 7, 69, 204 n. 8 Mellor, Anne 97, 119, 121, 141, 207 n. 10, 210 n. 2, 211 n. 36 Meredith, Rachel 216 n. 1 Miles, Barry 105, 208 nn. 37, 39, 209 n. 43 Miller, J. Hillis 214 n. 7 Milton, John 57, 82 Minton, John 39 Miró, Joan 38 Modern Nature 87 Momoro, Antoine-François 145 Moorcock, Michael 9, 45, 65–6, 202 n. 1, 204 n. 38 Moore, Donald K. 199 n. 21 Moore, G. E. 164 Morgan, Stuart 168, 214 n. 60 Morgan, Ted 209 n. 51 Mortimer, Raymond 39 Morton, A. L. 201 n. 59 Moser, George 172 Moskal, Jeanne 59, 203 n. 25 Mother London 65–6 Mottram, Eric 209 n. 53 Muckle, John 106, 209 n. 40 Muir, Edwin 131 Muir, William 177–80, 185–6, 214 n. 15, 215 nn. 18, 20, 22–3 Naked Lunch 111 Nagler, G. K. 207 n. 3 Nash, David 149, 156, 212 nn. 14, 213 n. 31 Nash, Paul 9, 39–40, 202 nn. 71–7 Nazezhdin, Nicolai 96 Nennius 81 Neoplatonism 21, 131–3 Nettleship, John Trivett 16, 199 n. 13 Newton, Sir Isaac 146, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 41 Novalis 37 Ofili, Chris

10, 166–8, 214 nn. 56–60

Oliver, Douglas 61 Ololon 57–9 Oothoon 123 O’Pray, Michael 84, 206 n. 36 Orc 57, 98–9, 114, 118 Orlovsky, Peter 109 Orr, Gregory 103 Orwell, George 88 O’Shaugnnessey, Arthur W. E. 16 Ostriker, Alicia 108, 208 n. 39, 209 nn. 44, 46 Otto, Peter 111, 209 n. 54 Owen, Robert 71 Owen, Wilfred 80, 86, 205 n. 27 Paine, Tom 4, 68, 71, 145–6, 174, 204 n. 2, 212 n. 4, 214 n. 10 Paley, Morton D. 99, 171, 186, 199 n. 13, 203 nn. 13, 15, 208 n. 19, 214 n. 5, 215 n. 39, 216 n. 40 Palgrave, Francis 15, 199 n. 7 Palmer, A. H. 214 n. 1 Palmer, Samuel 4–5, 30, 38–9, 129, 169–70, 175, 201 nn. 54–5, 214 n. 1 Paris Commune, the 77–8, 147 Parry, Sir Charles Hubert 89, 92 Passion of New Eve, The 137–40 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer 25 Peach, Linden 211 n. 33 Peake, Tony 84, 85, 205 n. 37, 206 nn. 39–40 Phillips, Michael 207 n. 6 photography and photolithography 179, 183–4, 190, 194 Picabia, Francis 167 Pickering & Co. 186–7 Pierce, Hazel 208, n. 34 Piers Plowman 82, 86 Piper, John 39, 40 Pitt the Younger, William 68 Place, Francis 145 Plato 131, 141 Plotinus 131 Plymouth Brethren, the 156–7 Poe, Edgar Allan 37 Poems and Ballads 150–1 Porter, Roy 68, 204 n. 6 Portugés, Paul 208 n. 39 potlatch 58, 42 Potter, Dennis 164

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Quaritch, Bernard 178, 180 Quinn, Marc 5–6, 198 n. 5 Rahab 139 Raine, Kathleen 10, 130–4, 189, 211 nn. 17–18, 216 n. 43 Rajan, Tilottama 6–7 Rediker, Marcus 97–8, 112, 118–19, 207 nn. 13–14, 210 nn. 61, 65 Reid, Abel (W. J. Linton) 78, 205 n. 22 Reiman, Donald 129, 210 n. 13 republicanism 71, 74–8, 80 Reverdy, Pierre 37 revolutionary Atlantic, the 96–102 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 29 Riding, Christine 198 n. 1, 199 n. 5 Rimbaud, Arthur 37, 158 Rinpoche, Dudjom 106 Roberts, Walter 194 Robertson, W. Graham 13, 196 Robinson, Leonard 202 nn. 73, 77 Robson, Lane 11–12, 198 n. 2 Romney, George 171 Rose, Edward J. 201 nn. 47–8 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 5, 13–14, 16–19, 39, 125–6, 150, 170, 180, 190, 199 nn. 18–22, 210 n. 8, 212 n. 15, 214 n. 3; editing of Blake 18–19, 26, 126 Rossetti, William Michael 13, 26, 75, 125–6, 150, 210 n. 10, 212 nn. 15, 27 Roszack, Theodor 109, 209 n. 48 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 68, 179 Rubenstein, Anne 97, 207 nn. 9, 11 Rubin, Jerry 107 ‘Rule Britannia’ 89, 92 Rushdie, Salman 164–5 Ruskin, John 14–16, 19–21, 30, 51, 101, 130, 176, 200 nn. 24–7, 211 n.

14, 214 n. 14 Russell, Bertrand

131, 164

Sartre, Jean Paul 42, 202 n. 83 Satan 59, 166–7 Saurat, Denis 201 n. 51 Sceats, Sarah 138, 211 n. 30 Schama, Simon 68, 204 n. 4, 212 n. 3 Scott, William Bell 15, 199 n. 7 Searle, Leroy 209 n. 44 secularism 14, 18–20, 36, 53–4, 101, 148, 155–6, 187–94 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 77, 205 n. 20 Self 5–6 Sensation Exhibition 5, 167–8 Sex Pistols 91 Shakespeare 82 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28, 37, 126–7, 135, 146, 158, 192–3 Shepherd, Richard 177, 180, 215 n. 17 Shields, Frederick 16–17 Sibson, Thomas 48–9 Simpson, Louis 209 n. 45 Simpson, Michael 173, 214 n. 8 Sinclair, Iain 9, 45, 60–4, 65, 66, 203 n. 28, 204 nn. 30, 32, 37, 39 Situationism 60, 66 slavery 97–101, 113–16, 119 Slave Song 97, 113–14 Smethan, James 15 Smith, Andrew 206 n. 53 Smith, Francis Barrymore. 184, 205 n. 23, 216 n. 48 Smith, John Thomas 97, 148, 180, 207 n. 7 Smith, Patti 10, 134–6, 211 nn. 21–5 Socrates 141, 143 Solomon, Andrew 188–9, 216 n. 42 Sony, Yutake 196 Southey, Robert 4 Spa Field Riots, the 98 Spare, Austin Osman 60, 161–4, 168, 213 nn. 42–9 Spicer, Jack 103 Spinoza, Benedict Baruch 37 Stauffer, Andrew 208 n. 18 Stedman, J. G. 2, 10, 97–9, 141, 207 n. 8 Stoddard, Richard Henry 180–1, 215 n. 25

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Pound, Ezra 60, 105 Praz, Mario 157, 213 n. 33 Pre-Raphaelites, the 13–14, 19–20, 32, 75, 150 Price-Owen, Anne 81, 205 nn. 29, 33 Psychic TV 195 psychogeography 60–5 Punter, David 70, 204 n. 10 Putney Debates, the 98 Pynchon, Thomas 103

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Straw, Jack 93 ‘Sunflower Sutra’ 108–9 Sung, Mei-Ying 13 Sutherland, Graham 39, 40 Surrealism 13–14, 36–41, 56, 60, 65 Swedenborg, Emanuel 22, 26, 63, 73, 160, 200 n. 36 Swedenborgianism 14, 21, 22–6, 73, 99–100, 132 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 5, 9, 10, 14, 24, 26–8, 43, 96, 99, 125, 127–8, 147–8, 150–8, 176, 179–80, 186, 205 nn. 16–17, 212 n. 11; and Blake’s psychology 33–5; and blasphemy 150–5; and republicanism 74–7 Swinton, Tilda 86 Symonds, John 157, 213 nn. 32, 36 Tahoer, Irene 210 n. 2 Tanner, Tony 103, 208 n. 31, 209 n. 52 Tate Britain exhibition 1–3, 10, 13, 124, 195, 197 Tatham, Frederick 148–9, 196, 212 n. 13 Taverner, John 10 Taylor, Charles 52, 72, 203 nn. 18–19, 205 n. 14 Taylor, Thomas 131–2 Thatcher, Margaret 62, 86 Theosophy 162 Thomas, Russell 206 n. 52 Thompson, E. P. 45–6, 69, 146, 147, 202 n. 4, 203 nn. 6, 8, 204 n. 8, 206 n. 50, 212 nn. 6, 8–9 Thomson, James 9, 53–4, 187–9, 191, 203 n. 20, 205 n. 13, 216 nn. 45–6, 49 Tiberius 143 Todd, Ruthven 13, 38, 202 n. 69 Todhunter, John 16, 199 n. 14 Tolley Michael 16, 199 n. 14 Townsend, Camilla 97, 207 nn. 9, 11 Trigilio, Tony 130, 211 nn. 15–16 Tulk, Charles Augustus 22–5, 185, 200 nn. 39, 42, 44 Turner, Joseph Mallard William 136 Turner Prize, the 167 Typographic Etching Company, The 193

Unlimited Dream Company, The Urizen 48, 57, 76

55–60

Vago, A. L. 216 n. 41 Vala 82, 140 Van Morrison 10 Varley, John 5, 159 Viscomi, Joseph 8–9, 11–13, 89–90, 170–1, 172–5, 179, 185, 198 nn. 10, 2, 206 nn. 47–8, 215 nn. 36–7 Vision, A 21, 132 Voloshinov, V. N. 141 Voltaire 145 Vonnegut, Kurt 104 Vorticism 39 Wahl, Jean 37, 59 Wakeman, Geoffrey 216 n. 55 Walter, Nicholas 164, 211 n. 1, 212 n. 5, 213 n. 31, 216 n. 50 Washington, George 93 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Landaff, 146 Watt, Donald 104, 208 n. 35 Weldon, Fay 45 Wheatley, Phillis 10, 99 White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings 61–2 Whitman, Walt 75, 77, 105, 125, 128, 176, 210 n. 11 Whittaker, Jason 206 n. 49 Wilkinson, Clement John 200 n. 38 Wilkinson, John Garth 22–5, 72–4, 99, 200 nn. 37–9, 201 nn. 47–8, 205 n. 15, 208 n. 20 William Blake: A Critical Essay 33–5, 76, 99–100, 125, 150, 152–5, 186 William of Malmesbury 90 Williams, Nicholas 70, 204 n. 11 Williams, William Carlos 105, 106, 108 Wilson, Mona 198 n. 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 131 Wollstonecraft, Mary 122, 132, 141 Women’s Movement 14, 89 Woodcock, Peter, 202 n. 70, 206 n. 41 Wordsworth, William 4, 30, 131 Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical 25–7, 201 n. 50 Worrall, David 7, 13, 69, 70, 204 n. 8

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Index Worsdale, Godfrey 166–7, 213 nn. 56, 57 Wren, Sir Christopher 64 Wyatt, David 103–4, 108, 208 n. 33

Yeats, John Butler 16, 199 n. 15 Yeats, William Butler 9, 14, 20–1, 131, 132, 159, 162–3, 200 nn. 33–4, 201 nn. 50, 53; editing of Blake 25–7. Yippies, the 107

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