Richard Gough: scholar, antiquary and man of violence

The British Antiquities are now in the Artist’s hands; all his visionary contemplations, relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.—WILLIAM BLAKE(1)

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, interest in antiquities developed into the common pursuit of the educated man: Bishop Thomas Percy was collecting his Reliques; Thomas Warton collecting materials for histories of Winchester and of Kidlington, writing a history of English poetry, and exposing the forgeries attributed to Thomas Rowley; John Sherwen collecting materials to establish the authenticity of the Rowley poems; Horace Walpole assembling a catalogue of the works of royal and noble authors; John Nichols preparing his monumental history of Leicestershire; Joseph Ritson contributing to the creation of a real scholarly study of folk song and the ballad tradition; Francis Douce reviving interest in village traditions such as games and mummers' plays; and all of these men, along with almost everyone who was doing any writing at all, were looking up information for each other, copying inscriptions, collecting anecdotes, and writing innumerable letters.(2)

Blake scholars have long been engaged in an illuminating discussion of the way Blake and the other Romantics used in their works the often wonderfully perverse conclusions of contemporary antiquaries and mythologists such as Stukeley, Bryant, and the rest.(3) My concern here is with the intersection of Blake’s life and work with that of a more sober figure, Richard Gough. Gough’s life is exceptionally well-documented. And some details of Gough’s life can illumine that of the obscurer William Blake.

Newton and “Newton”.

Newton, [probably after 1804], Tate Collection.

Throughout the 1790s, the illustrations in Blake’s prophetic books grew progressively larger, until he devised a means of making very large colour monoprints and created a pictorial cycle of twelve such prints with no text. These twelve large colour-prints are among the most problematic of Blake’s visual works. They represent the culmination of Blake's technical experiments with colour-printing. They also demonstrate the breadth of his imagination, drawing their subjects from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and his own invention. Although no single interpretation of these images seems convincing, nevertheless all concur that the prints allude to the fallen state of humanity.