Blake also learned how to etch copper plates with aqua fortis, or nitric acid. First coating the entire plate with acid-resistant wax, an engraver would sketch out the illustrator’s design with a needle. Next, he would drop the plate into an acid bath, which bit those traced lines into the metal, but left intact the parts of the plate covered in wax. Blake later explained this process to one of his own apprentices in a way that brings to mind Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore over that potter’s wheel in Ghost. “Take a cake of virgins wax . . . and stroke it regularly over the surface of a warm plate (the plate must be warm enough to melt the wax as it passes over) then immediately draw a feather over it and . . .” Good Lord, Mr. Blake, you are about to exceed the minimum age requirement for this book!
After seven respectable years with Basire, Blake graduated to journeyman, and was likely sent off with the customary gift of a “double suit of clothes and the tools of his trade.” Rather than open his own studio, however, Blake felt the inspiration of God instructing him to return to art school. So it was that he found himself at the Royal Academy in Somerset House in 1779. He was a capable but obstinate student, unwilling to bend to the demands of instructors with whom he disagreed. According to his preeminent biographer, Blake “distrusted oil color as a modern and perverse invention.” So what would he consider a more established and hallowed medium? Watercolors. Obviously.
Watercolors come with their own problems. They fade easily in the sun and aren’t nearly as permanent in application as oil. Blake wanted to get around this, and fortunately, God showed him how—or, rather, the father of God showed him how.
“[Blake] ground and mixed his water-colors himself on a piece of statuary marble, after a method of his own, with common carpenter’s glue diluted, which he had found . . . to be a good binder. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in vision and revealed that secret to him.” Sure, seeing dead people means you get branded a lunatic by your closest confidants, but it also means you get free art supply recipes. Fair trade.
After leaving the Royal Academy, Blake married, and took charge of his younger brother Robert after their father passed away. With the inheritance money, he was able to purchase an engraver’s printing press, a big rolling press that was capable of producing the much greater pressure required for common intaglio illustrations. This came in handy when he and a partner opened a print shop in 1784. Because they were both trained engravers, they didn’t have to hire others to create the material sold in their shop. Keeping everything in house cut down on the costs of production.
Life seemed to be going well for William Blake. His business was successful enough; he had a competent and loving spouse who helped in the shop; and he was even training his beloved brother Robert to follow in his footsteps as an engraver. Three years later, however, the scene was markedly changed. Robert lay coughing up blood, deep in the last stages of tuberculosis; William barely moved from his bedside during the last two weeks. When Robert died at the age of twenty-four, Blake said he saw the young man’s spirit ascend to heaven, clapping for joy. As happy as Robert’s ghost may have been, the brother he left behind cracked inside. He collapsed from exhaustion and for three days could not be roused, not even to attend Robert’s funeral.
More than a decade later, Blake found solace in his ability to commune freely with Robert. “Thirteen years ago I lost a brother,” he wrote, “and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly . . . I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate.” During one of those conversations, Robert’s ghost revealed the secrets of relief etching—because, apparently, when you die you become much better at your occupation than you ever were in life.
For Blake, the ability to etch in relief (to paint directly onto a copper plate and simply melt away the surrounding copper) commenced a rebirth in the art of illuminated manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts added hand-drawn ornaments, borders, and miniature paintings to embellish and beautify a text. During most of the first three hundred fifty years of print, graphic elements were usually added to books by what could be carved into a woodblock or scratched onto a metal plate. Now, by painting directly onto the medium, Blake could incorporate styles of art that were largely foreign to the mechanical printing process. The resulting books are an ineffable joy to behold, and a chance to see one of them a major event. The last copy of Songs of Innocence to sell at auction, for example, went for almost a million dollars in 2001.
In a 1793 advertisement for his relief-etched books, Blake wrote that his new style of printing was “more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense . . . The illuminated books are printed in colors, and on the most beautiful wove paper that could be procured.” It was “a method of printing which combines the painter and the poet,” making the author, the artist, the engraver, and the printer all the same person.
After the invention of his relief etching, Blake finally achieved complete creative control over his work, with no middleman inserting his own interpretation. In many books, this species of seemingly harmless meddling can be as simple as changing the font, or the layout of the text on the page, or the type of paper. It’s not unusual for an author to try to maintain control of these elements as well. For instance, in the twentieth century, James Joyce wrote the story of Ulysses as a single day in a leap year, and he made sure that the first edition mirrored this by having exactly 366 leaves.
William Blake wanted every choice that affected the final product to be his alone. As a result, when we use an edition that reproduces only the text (or an illustrated edition without the color), we lose some of Blake’s consciously crafted meaning. Consider the way in which the painter and poet work against each other in Blake’s “London,” from Songs of Experience. “London” is a cheery poem about life in a stand-up town where the Janes and the Darbs beat their gums on the street corners and laugh—a town where just drawing one’s breath is the cat’s meow. Just kidding, it’s about how much London, as a place for human beings to live, sucks. “In every face [you] meet,” there are “marks of woe.” There are “mind-forg’d manacles.” “[Y]outhful Harlots” curse. “[T]he hapless Soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls.” It’s the eighteenth-century equivalent of a half-star Yelp review.
“LONDON,” FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE, BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. IMAGE COURTESY YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART.
Yet, this is the original illustrated page of “London.”
Above the manically depressive text stands the image of a young boy helping a crippled old man, an illustrative act of charity overshadowing the textual human woes. Unless that kid is leading the old man to a gang of street punks who beat him up and steal those sweet crutches, the illustration and the poem are sending two different messages to the reader that must be considered together when experiencing “London.” Taken as a composite work of art, the poem can be read as a question and answer: the text as the problem and the illustration as the solution.
The additional context of Blake’s illustrations changes how we read the text, but important meanings can be imposed by other factors we may not immediately notice. When Charles Dickens was publishing his serial novel Hard Times in 1854, he did so within the pages of his own weekly magazine, Household Words. The weekly also contained nonfiction articles, but their arrangement in relation to the fictional Hard Times installments was designed to provide setting and context to the events of the novel. Actual news articles about the rights of workers, failed safety regulations, accidents, and industrial reform coincided with the lives and deaths of Dickens’s fictional characters. When reading Hard Times as a standalone novel separate from Household Words, we miss major components of the argument Dickens is making.
As the scholar Jerome McGann argues, the words on a page offer only “the merest glimpse of that complex world we call literary work and the meanings it produces.” William Blake is an exquisite example of this concept because his “composite art
” of word and image allows for unusual complexity, with layers upon layers of meaning.
EUROPE A PROPHECY FRONTISPIECE BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art.
Sometime just before 1794, William Blake had his most powerful vision. A godlike figure appeared to him and “hovered over his head at the top of his staircase.” What God was doing up there is anyone’s guess (though, if Blake’s experiences as a youth are any indication, God was probably waiting to pop out and scare the bejesus out of him). Upon seeing this vision, Blake felt inspired to create one of his most famous illustrations, “The Ancient of Days.”
EUROPE A PROPHECY TITLE PAGE BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art.
This design became the frontispiece of Blake’s lengthy poem Europe a Prophecy (1794). Filled with all the doom and gloom and apocalyptic fervor that the 1790s could muster (which was a surprisingly large amount), Europe’s text depicts a world of “almost hopeless torment,” where understanding the causes of evil does nothing to free mankind from their collective suffering. Just a light read, really.
Next to “Ancient of Days” sits Europe’s title page, shown above.
Not only the illustrations, but their specific placement in the book, tell a story. The creator God from Blake’s frontispiece reaches down from the sky to fashion not a garden of Edenic beauty, or a naked man and woman, or even dinosaurs who need to hurry up and go extinct before the naked man and woman get booted from the magical garden for fruitful translations. Instead, reading the book’s illustrations from left to right, God first creates a traditional symbol of evil: the Serpent.
We tend to assume that a book’s narrative is communicated simply by the words alone. That’s an obvious mistake when you consider Blake’s work, but the principle applies much more broadly. Some modern authors, experimenting with the new medium of digital-born texts, have created narratives that change based on how you interact with them. In Shelley Jackson’s 1996 hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl, the reader is presented with the body of a woman. Each body part has its own individual backstory. “I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself.” A woman’s body, graveyards, journals, and even a quilt—the reader must click on various hyperlinks, embarking on a tale of a female Frankenstein’s monster created interactively by the reader. The way a reader advances the story “characterize[s] a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity.” As brilliantly crafted as Jackson’s narrative is, it could not exist outside its original medium without dramatic loss to its meaning.
For William Blake, certain symbols were bursting with significance. The Serpent, like that from Europe a Prophecy, held an interesting place in Blake’s mythos: “Satan . . . is father & God of this world.” And there was this gem: “The Prince of darkness is a gentleman & not a man[;] he is a Lord Chancellor.” All right, Mr. Blake. How did you come upon this information?
“For many years . . . I longed to see Satan.”
No story that starts this way ever ends well.
“I never could have believed that [Satan] was the vulgar fiend which our legends represent him . . . At last I saw him. I was going upstairs in the dark, when suddenly a light came streaming amongst my feet, I turned round, and there he was looking fiercely at me through the iron grating of my staircase window.” Blake really needed to stay away from windows and staircases at night.
“. . . through the bars glared the most frightful phantom that ever man imagined. Its eyes were large and like live coals—its teeth as long as those of a harrow [spiked plough], and the claws seemed such as might appear in [a] distempered dream . . . It is the gothic fiend of legends, the true devil—all else is apocryphal.”
To recap: I wanted to meet Satan. I didn’t believe he was as awful as the legends say. There was a light at my window. Whoa! Just kidding about that Lord Chancellor nonsense; he is a monster! A goddamned monster!
Blake’s demons had many faces. “The Tyger,” arguably his most famous poem, published in 1794, starts off like a children’s rhyme. Then it quickly turns into something an angsty teenager might read to summon Cthugha, the Lovecraftian fire god.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
“THE TYGER,” IN SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE, BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art.
The text itself should be read only to children who don’t cry at eighteenth-century German fairy tales—but the design Blake chose to personify this hellish beast of youthful nightmare looks like this:
“GHOST OF A FLEA,” ORIGINAL WATERCOLOR BY WILLIAM BLAKE, C. 1819–20. Image courtesy Tate Museum.
Well, that’s not very frightening at all. It’s kind of adorable. Less “dare its deadly terrors clasp” and more “I CAN HAS DEADLY TERRORS?”
Blake’s work can often be more intriguing for its questions than its answers. Why would he draw his forest demon like that? Who knows? The weird tree face at the top is scarier than the feline predator. It wasn’t as if William Blake were incapable of designing “distorted, absurd, and impossible monsters.” Recall his illustration of Leonora or, better yet, this terror of Christian indecency.
This is the “Ghost of a Flea,” circa 1819. And here is how this amazing image came about:
I [Allan Cunningham] called on him one evening, and found Blake more than usually excited. He told me he had seen a wonderful thing—the ghost of a flea!
“And did you make a drawing of him?” I inquired.
“No, indeed,” said he, “I wish I had, but I shall if he appears again!”
He looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and then said, “here he is—reach me my things—I shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! His eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green”;—as he described him so he drew him.
The last sentence of Cunningham’s description is priceless. You walk into your friend’s house, and he tells you that he’s seen the ghost of a flea. Generally, being familiar with the size and shape of a flea, you ask him to draw it, because—why not? It will probably be cute. He scribbles for a few minutes and then hands you the picture of a six-foot-two bipedal fish monster carrying a mixing bowl of human blood. When Cunningham wrote, “[A]s he described him so he drew him,” he nonchalantly captured one of the most fundamental aspects of his friend’s world. For Blake, the grotesque and the heavenly were mixed with the most ordinary features of life.
William Blake was a visionary in every sense of the word. While regarded mostly as an oddity during his lifetime—whenever he went missing for a while, people assumed he was either dead or finally locked up in a madhouse—he invented an illustration method that would be admired and remarked upon for centuries to come. In fact, his precise relief etching technique wasn’t fully understood until the second half of the twentieth century. But while his technical achievements are interesting and beautiful, the intentions that drove him to these breakthroughs are equally compelling.
Blake couldn’t bear working only as an engraver, accomplishing the “mere drudgery” of imitating some other artist’s original work. He took control of the medium, forcing readers to recognize that a text should not be analyzed apart from its materiality. The bibliographer G. Thomas Tanselle says, “Books are a part of material culture. Every artifact, every physical object made by human beings, is a reco
rd of human effort at a particular time and place, as well as a tangible link to all the succeeding moments of its life.” Blake understood this, and his printing methods were meant to be an integral part of his message. He explains this in a way so very Blakean: “The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives [etching], which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
During the last years of his life, Blake slipped into acute poverty, and varying degrees of mental wellness. Some who met him described him as “so evidently insane, that the predominant feeling in conversing with him, or even looking at him, could only be sorrow and compassion.” At other times it was said of him, “I remember William Blake, in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.” Which is sweet, but also hints of protesting a bit too much. How’s your uncle, Bill? Oh, fine, fine. Completely sane. Really, he’s great. Not insane at all.
Henry Robinson, the journalist from whom comes a treasure trove of Blake interviews, diagnosed Blake in 1810 with “monomania,” a nineteenth-century psychiatric term for a person whose mind was mostly sound, except for one pathological preoccupation. From Robinson’s interviews we get rare (and sometimes heartbreaking) insights into Blake’s progressing preoccupation.
“THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL, PAOLO AND FRANCESCA,” ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION TO DANTE’S INFERNO, BY WILLIAM BLAKE. ENGRAVING WITH DRYPOINT, 1826–27. Image courtesy John Windle, Antiquarian Bookseller.
“He is now old,” Robinson wrote, “pale, with a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, though with something of languor about it except when animated, and then he has about him an air of inspiration . . . [he] spoke of his paintings as being what he had seen in his visions . . . In the same tone he said repeatedly, ‘the Spirit told me.’ . . .
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