1
When William Blake died in London in 1827, he was already a forgotten man. He had been living in two-room lodgings in Fountain Court, in the Middle Temple, off Fleet Street. His engraved and hand-painted Songs of Innocence and of Experience, had sold less than twenty copies in thirty years. His Prophetic Books had disappeared almost without trace. A single mysterious poem – The Tyger’ – had reached the anthologies. As a poet – once read in manuscript by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb – he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of disciples, a group of young men who pointedly called themselves The Ancients’. Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, magnanimously dismissed him ‘a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius’.
As an artist, his reputation was little better. He was chiefly remembered as a one-time commercial engraver of grimly improving texts: Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Robert Blair’s The Grave, the dark Biblical drama of the Book of Job, and Dante’s Inferno still unfinished at the time of his death. In 1830 Blake was given a short and gently patronizing entry in Alan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters. The illuminations to The Songs of Innocence, and the Book of Job, were mildly admired. The Tyger’ was re-printed as an example of fascinating eccentricity.
But Cunningham damned him with faint praise. Blake was a lovable, minor eccentric: unworldly, self-taught and self-deluded. He produced work that was ‘unmeaning, mystical and extravagant’. He was a man ‘overmastered’ by his own imagination. He confused ‘the spiritual for the corporeal vision’. But for the stabilizing influence of his faithful – but ‘illiterate’ – wife Kate, William Blake would be remembered simply as ‘a madman’.
Three years later, in March 1833, the Monthly Magazine wittily celebrated Blake’s lunacies. ‘Blake was an embodied sublimity. He held converse with Michael Angelo, yea with Moses; not in dreams, but in the placid still hour of the night – alone, awake – with such powers as he possessed in their full vigour…He chatted with Cleopatra, and the Black Prince sat to him for a portrait. He reveled in the past; the gates of the spiritual world were unbarred at his behest, and the great ones of bygone ages, clothed in the flesh they wore on earth, visited his studio.’
Blake was diagnosed as a sufferer of extreme and persistent visual hallucinations, a man who ‘painted from spectres’, and had lost his grasp on reality. ‘His may be deemed the most extraordinary case of spectral illusion that has hitherto occurred. Is it possible that neither Sir Walter Scott, nor Sir David Brewster – the authors of Demonology and Witchcraft and Natural Magic – ever heard of Blake?’
This article had great success, and was copied by the smart Parisian magazine, La Revue Britannique, the following year. The translation was a little hurried, and opened with the assertion that not only was the ‘spectral’ William Blake still alive, but he was actually incarcerated in a London madhouse. The two most celebrated inmates of the madhouse of Bedlam in London are the arsonist Martin, estranged elder brother of the painter John Martin, and William Blake – nicknamed “The Seer”.’
Twenty years after his death, ‘mad’ Blake’s reputation was barely taken seriously at all. A large manuscript collection of his work was offered for private sale by a keeper at the British Museum in 1847. It consisted of a foolscap quarto sketchbook of 58 leaves, packed with Blake’s unpublished poems and drawings. It would now be considered priceless, but then it was sold for a mere ten shillings and sixpence.
The purchaser was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vague plans to publish it by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were mooted, and Dante’s brother the critic William Rossetti, expressed an interest. But on examination it was put quietly aside as too difficult and obscure to interest the public. A whole generation had now elapsed, the surviving ‘Ancients’ were indeed growing old, and the memory of ‘mad’ Blake was dwindling to nothing. It is possible that the author of The Tyger’ might have been entirely lost.
Then, thirteen years later, on 1 November 1860, Rossetti wrote to his friend the poet William Allingham with surprising news. ‘A man (one Gilchrist, who lives next door to Carlyle) wrote to me the other day, saying he was writing a Life of Blake, and wanted to see my manuscript by that genius. Was there not some talk of your doing something by way of publishing its contents? I know William thought of doing so, but fancy it might wait long for his efforts…I have not engaged myself in any way to the said Gilchrist on the subject, though I have told him he can see it here if he will give me a day’s notice.’
When the ‘said Gilchrist’ finally visited in March 1861, Rossetti was surprised to encounter a long-haired, dreamy, moon-faced young man who looked rather as if he had stepped out of one of his own Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Alexander Gilchrist was thirty-two, a young writer and art critic, who announced quietly that he had been working on a Life of Blake for the last six years. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with the publisher Macmillan. He did not think William Blake was mad; in fact he thought he was a genius. He was going to transform his reputation, however long it took him, and whatever it cost him.
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Who was Blake’s unexpected champion? Born in the year after Blake’s death in 1828, Alexander Gilchrist had trained as a barrister in the Middle Temple. Restless in his profession, bookish and not physically strong, but with great determination and independence of mind, Gilchrist sought freedom in magazine journalism and freelance art criticism. From 1849, when he was just twenty-one, he began to write regularly for the Eclectic Review, and quickly made his name as critic and reviewer. He was known for his fresh eye, his jaunty prose style, his meticulous background research, and his highly unorthodox views. He was also a young critic in search of a cause.
In 1850, he produced an outstanding article on the forgotten and unfashionable painter, William Etty. Etty had once been renouned as an exuberant painter of Romantic nudes, both male and female, and erotic scenes from classical history and mythology, such as his Vision of Gyges. Once admired by Regency critics, Victorian taste and propriety had turned against him, and his paintings were scoffingly referred to in Academy circles as ‘Etty’s bumboats’. Gilchrist accepted a speculative commission from a provincial publisher, David Bogue, to write a full-length biography. He undertook to re-establish Etty’s reputation, and turn back the tide of priggish mockery and misunderstanding.
On the strength of the £100 commission, Alexander married his twenty-three year old sweetheart, Anne Burrows, in February 1851. They spent part of their honeymoon researching Etty’s life in York, where the painter had lived and worked. They interviewed his friends, and examined his nude studies and historical pictures, now mostly housed in private collections. This unorthodox nuptial expedition greatly appealed to Anne, who was freethinking in her views, and impatient with the conventions of her respectable Highgate upbringing. She too hoped one day to write.
Their first child was born in December 1851, and the large Etty biography was published in 1855, when Gilchrist was still only twenty-seven. The book, which was studiously written and safely deprived of all illustrations (apparently Bogue lost his nerve at the last moment), caused only a mild scandal in York. But in London it drew wholly unexpected praised from the sixty year-old doyen of biographical writing, Thomas Carlyle. It was written, the Sage announced, ‘in a vigorous, sympathetic, vivacious spirit’, and gave the ‘delineation, actual and intelligible, of a man extremely well-worth knowing’. This rare mark of approval from the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), confirmed Gilchrist in his new vocation as biographer.
After several visits to Chelsea, Gilchrist established himself as Carlyle’s confidante and to some extent his biographical protege. The Sage had recently published his influential Life of John Sterling (1851), which by sympathetically recounting the career of an apparent failure, indeed a kind of anti-Hero, gave the whole genre a new impulse. It was a time when biography was about to enter a new literary golden age, with John Forster’s Oliver Goldsmith