Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) by David V. Erdman

Author:David V. Erdman [Erdman, David V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-08-16T06:00:00+00:00

Fig. 14. Asylum Cross and Vicinity, 1791–1800

During the famine year 1795 the diary of John Stedman takes us through London streets to Blake’s Lambeth with the incoherent immediacy of a reel of candid camera parsimoniously exposed:

“June 2. Wrote Mrs. Stedman, and trip to Mr. Mrs. Blake….

“June 5…. London disloyal, superstitious, villainous, and infamous. An earthquake prophesied by [Richard] Brothers. Many leave town…. Visit Loutherbourg’s painting of Admiral Howe’s victory….

“June 9…. 75 guilotined at Lyons. Insurrection quell’d at Toulon. At Salisbury, Irishmen flogg’d,—a dozen…. Gave a blue sugar cruse to Mrs. Blake. View Drury Lane new Play-House…. Dined Palmer, Blake, Johnson, Rigaud, and Bartolozzi. La Vendee & Brittany in arms.

“June continued. All infantry order’d home…. A riot at Birmingham…. Saw Deslomes, who was robb’d of above 5,000 pounds sterling, Castle Street, the Apollo gardens [opposite the Asylum], Marylebone, Madagascar bat [a spectre?] as big as a duck….

“June 24. On Midsummer Day receive the first volume, of my book quite marr’d, oaths and sermons inserted &c…. How dreadful London; where a Mr. B-declared openly his lust for infants, his thirst for regicide, and believes in no God whatever…. Gave oil portrait to Mr. Blake…. Dined at Blake’s … Riots in St. George’s Fields. I was weighed,—197 lb….

“… August…. The King’s coach insulted. D-mn Bartolozzi. He goes away. Was at Greenwich to dinner. I also was at Lambeth Gardens [Flora’s?]…. Met 300 whores in the Strand. French prisoners come home…. Saw a mermaid. Meat and bread abused. Russian fleet down. Two days at Blake’s. Quiberon expedition fail’d. 188 emigrants executed….”

In September, when rioting for bread and peace was at an autumn peak, Stedman in bed with a broken ankle makes this unexpanded jotting:

“All knaves and fools, and cruel to the Excess. Blake was mobb’d and robb’d.”19

Blake continued, nevertheless, to publish copies of his now considerable stock of works, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and of Experience to the several books of his Bible of Hell. He continued to print off his pictorial History of England and his prophetic picture of the doom of king and counselors, as well as his ardent Song of Liberty and the Preludium and Prophecy of America without the “sick & drear lamentings.”20 Some time in the 1790’3 he secured a liberal and steady purchaser of new pictures in Thomas Butts, chief clerk in the office of the Commission of Musters, for whom he painted such things as Elijah riding the fiery chariot or a Lazar House dominated by suicidal Despair, in which both visionary joy and shady woe seep through the conventional surface of the hagiography. But as we know from their later correspondence, Blake dared not tell Butts all his thoughts.21 And there is little to suggest that the few purchasers of his songs and prophecies heard “the voice of the Bard” who had written them.

By 1797–1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth had responded to “these times of fear … when good men On every side fall off” by becoming “The most intense of Nature’s worshippers” to shelter their “visionary minds” from sneers (Prelude II.

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