The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women of her class, could not sign her own name. After a year’s courtship the couple were married on August 18, 1782. After one ill-fated romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher. Not all of the young man’s interests were confined to art and politics. These images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave Blake powerful material for works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793). On one evening, whether by design or by accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burned Newgate prison. Houses, churches, and prisons were burned by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. In June of 1780 riots broke out in London incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon and by resistance to continued war against the American colonists. One incident at this time affected Blake deeply. Booksellers employed him to engrave illustrations for publications ranging from novels such as Don Quixote to serials such as Ladies’ Magazine. He earned his living as a journeyman engraver. Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft.Īt the age of 21, Blake left Basire’s apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the newly formed Royal Academy. Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver, James Basire. William, however, resisted the arrangement telling his father, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!” The grim prophecy was to come true 12 years later. At first his father took him to William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. The expense of continued formal training in art was a prohibitive, and the family decided that at the age of 14 William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at the age of 10 in Pars’ drawing school. According to Gilchrist, on one ramble he was startled to “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His parents were not amused at such a story, and only his mother’s pleadings prevented him from receiving a beating. Even at an early age, however, his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died young.īy all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by skipping any formal schooling. In all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Wright Blake, but only five survived infancy. His father, James, was a hosier, and the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but “respectable” neighborhood.
Unlike many well-known writers of his day, Blake was born into a family of moderate means. In addition to being considered one of the most visionary of English poets and one of the great progenitors of English Romanticism, his visual artwork is highly regarded around the world.īlake was born on November 28, 1757.
Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels himself ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of his peers. Though in his lifetime his work was largely neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and his work has only grown in popularity. Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men.
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