The bourgeois Blake

On 29 November 2019, and coinciding with the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, I attended “William Blake and the Idea of the Artist”, a conference at the Paul Mellon Centre in Bedford Square. The conference sought to “consider the work of William Blake with the context of Romanticism and the artistic currents of his times, the creative legacies of his work and the contemporary resonances of Blake’s vision”.

The first speaker, Silvia Riccardi (University of Freiburg), drawing attention to the interlinear squiggles and elaborations of the lettering in, for example, America, made one want to go back to the works in illuminated printing again, and this time take a magnifying glass. The speakers that followed all made similarly thoughtful contributions. But the final speaker, Dave Beech (University of the Arts, London) left me puzzled.

If I understood his argument, Beech claimed there was an eighteenth-century class distinction between “artisans”, like Blake, who had undergone an apprenticeship, and “artists”, who attended academies. Perhaps it would be anachronistic to point out that Raphael, for example, was apprenticed to Perugino; but surely not anachronistic to note that Sir Joshua Reynolds served an apprenticeship with the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson. At the age of 10 Blake was drawing from casts of antiquities in the school of Henry Pars, before his apprenticeship to James Basire in 1772. After 1779 Blake was a student at the Royal Academy, where he diligently drew from classical sculpture under the instruction of George Moser.

Beech’s assertion reminded me of A.L. Morton who, in his Everlasting Gospel, claimed that William Blake “alone of all the great English poets, was, and remained all his life, a manual worker”. Presumably Blake was a “manual worker” since he pushed a burin through copper. This is a bit like claiming Michelangelo a manual worker since he carved marble with a hammer and chisel. I’m sure some writers have done precisely that but it doesn’t add much to one’s understanding of either Blake or Michelangelo. The imagined proletarian Blake is someone public-school Marxists like Morton can patronise while pretending to admire. Blake, of course, explicitly claimed that engraving was just “drawing on copper”.

(I was long puzzled that Leslie Morton and Palmer Thompson chose to write as A.L. Morton and E.P. Thompson respectively. Thompson was always called “Palmer” by his parents; he became “Edward” at school lest nasty boys called him “Violet”—after “Parma Violets”, old-fashioned sweets. This is not the same as the use of initials by women authors, notably J. K. Rowling, who worried that boys would not read an obviously female author of adventure stories. I don’t think Enid Blyton suffered from a lack of boyish readership, but that’s apparently what Joanne Rowling thought. One might also note the practice of nineteenth-century women signing business letters with initials. This, I think, is to avoid their concerns being dismissed as those of a mere woman. Thus the letter from H. Boddington cited in Blake Records, is definitely from Hannah and not from Henry James Boddington as Bentley assumes. Morton and Thompson, I suspected, were modelling their noms de plume on V.I. Lenin and J.V. Stalin, and I still think there’s an element of that in it. But replacing given names by initials is an affectation shared by so many English historians: A.J.P. Taylor, G.R. Elton, H.R. Trevor-Roper, J.H. Plumb, J.C.D. Clark, the list goes on. The model is clearly the school or college sporting team. They’re all claiming to be part of the First Eleven of English historians—alongside A.N. Other.)

What Beech ignored was evidence presented by the Tate exhibition itself. The estimates of how much Blake would have earned from his commercial work show that engraving was well paid. If Blake had stuck to commercial work like his one-time business partner James Parker he might have become quite comfortably off. Parker not only owned his own house in Kentish Town which he shared with his sister, but also a cottage in Highgate, rented out, and a couple of houses in the City, let as offices. Parker had the career Blake’s parents would have wished for their son. There is plentiful evidence that the reproductive work of the engraver could be much better paid than the creative work of the artist. Blake was paid one guinea per drawing for Blair’s Grave while the payment to Schiavonetti for the engravings is likely to have been over £500. When Robert Thornton commissioned the Virgil illustrations, Blake was paid five guineas for the drawings and some one hundred and fifteen guineas for the copper and wood engravings. William and Catherine could live respectably on that income for a year or maybe two.

Engraving after Phillips's portrait of Blake, 1807.

The other important evidence from the Tate show was Thomas Phillips’s portrait. Blake is clearly dressed as a gentleman, with a black coat, a white waistcoat, white shirt and neckerchief, clutching a porte-crayon, or pencil (not a burin), and with a gold fob seal attached to his waistcoat.

(I understand that one of the “Druid” orders claims to own Blake’s signet ring engraved with his seal. Of course a working engraver could not possibly wear a ring. Jewellery could catch on the plate when wiping off surplus ink, or acid could get trapped under it. The signet ring first appears in the possession of Richard C. Jackson, the “mendacious Richard C. Jackson” as Bentley calls him, along with other supposed Blake possessions of dubious provenance.)

There may, of course, be an element of dressing-up in creating this portrait of Blake the visionary artist (and not Blake the working engraver). Was William Blake ever this elegantly attired?

(It is interesting to compare Blake’s portrait with those of his contemporaries in the National Portrait Gallery. Byron, an aristocrat, wears fancy dress. John Clare, peasant, is smartly dressed but in a brown coat, with beige waistcoat, and a bright yellow silk neckerchief. He’s clearly not a gentleman. Clare is dressed in what I would term farm-labourer chic, a way of dressing that survived well into the twentieth century. I remember country towns on market day and middle-aged men in teddy-boy jackets, maybe with leopard-skin lapels, all very well turned-out.)

The bourgeois Blake makes another appearance in the story of Thomas Butts finding William and Catherine naked in their Lambeth garden, reading Paradise Lost. Gilchrist writes

At the end of the little garden in Hercules Buildings there was a summer-house. Mr. Butts calling one day found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from “those troublesome disguises” which have prevailed since the Fall. “Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”

The story is sometimes dismissed as apocryphal or else as a personal idiosyncrasy of the mad poet. But domestic nudism was an enthusiasm of others in the late eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin took regular “air baths” for his health, believing that nudity was good for you. Domestic nudism was also practised in the Shelley circle. Jeaffreson’s controversial Victorian biography notes

Another gentlewoman of the circle was chiefly remarkable for holding that, to enjoy perfect health of mind and body, it was necessary for the British matron to begin every day by sitting for three or four hours in unqualified nudity … In society, after telling how she had passed the first three hours of the well-spent morning, she sometimes added, for the edification of listeners, “I feel so innocent during the rest of the day”.

And the practice survives even today. I remember a university friend explaining that his father cooked breakfast in the nude every morning; the rest of the family remaining clothed. And in the 1970s, visiting a friend in Hove, I discovered, with some embarrassment, that his next-door neighbour, a lecturer at Brighton Polytechnic, was a domestic nudist, as was his wife. The two houses were separated only by a narrow drive and their kitchens overlooked. Writing these notes reminded me too that a couple of former work colleagues were themselves occasional practitioners of domestic nudism. Even Stephen Keynes, Sir Geoffrey’s youngest son, was known to his neighbours as “the naked gardener”. Domestic nudity, I would say, is very much an English middle-class thing.


Sources and Further Reading

Adam Eden.—A Vindication of the Reformation among the Ladies, to Abolish Modesty and Chastity, and Restore the Natural Simplicity of Going Naked.—London : Griffiths, 1755.
Apparently it’s all Milton’s fault.

G.E. Bentley, Jr.—”The Death of Blake’s Partner James Parker”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, volume 30, issue 2 (Fall 1996), 49-51.
With some errors, including the claim that the bachelor Parker was previously married.

G.E. Bentley, Jr.—Blake Records. 2nd ed.—New Haven CT : Yale University Press, 2004).

G.E. Bentley, Jr.—William Blake in the Desolate Market.—Montreal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.

Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus”, with Selections From His Poems and Other Writings; Illustrated From Blake’s Own Works, in Facsimile by W. J. Linton, and in Photolithography; with A Few of Blake’s Original Plates.—2 vols.—London & Cambridge : Macmillan, 1863.

John Cordy Jeaffreson.—The Real Shelley : New Views of the Poet’s Life.—2 vols.—London : Hurst & Blackett, 1885.

A.L. Morton.—The Everlasting Gospel : a Study in the Sources of William Blake.—London : Lawrence & Wishart, 1958.

Martin Myrone & Amy Concannon.—William Blake; with an afterword by Alan Moore.—London: Tate, 2019.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition William Blake, Tate Britain, London, 11 September 2019—2 February 2020.

National Archives.—PROB 11/1433, fols. 342r-43v (Will of James Parker).

“Obituary : Stephen Keynes”.—The Times (Thursday, 16 November 2017).