Apprenticeship and Marriage, 1771–1787

      Blake left the drawing school at the age of fourteen to become formally apprenticed to the engraver James Basire,[11] and to adopt this profession as his own. It was during this apprenticeship that most of the Poetical Sketches must have been written; we have lingered over them already partly because the earliest were written at the drawing school, but mainly to illustrate what Blake’s writings might have become had he followed his talent with poetry and literature. Writing, however, became the private satisfaction of his leisure, and we turn to Frederick Tatham[12] to learn how Blake arrived, and how he spent his apprenticeship, at Basire’s:

      All ideas of the shop had been abandoned and, if we are to believe J. T. Smith, the boy had been “sent away from the counter as a booby [foolish lad].” Nonetheless, Blake’s father seems to have continued to support his son. First of all he took his son to work with Ryland,[13] who introduced the stipple technique to England and was then engraver to the king. Blake must have not liked him, for on leaving Ryland’s studio he remarked: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Twelve years later, after falling into difficulties, Ryland committed a forgery on the East India Company and was condemned to the gallows. Blake’s father followed the boy’s wishes and took him next to James Basire. This James, the best known of four engravers, kept his shop at 31 Great Queen Street, and was retained professionally by the Society of Antiquaries. He was a man of fifty-one when Blake became his apprentice, and had been warmly esteemed by William Hogarth and many others. Basire had studied in Rome, and was particularly admired for his dry style, which no doubt recommended him to those, like the Society of Antiquaries, who were concerned with ancient monuments.

      Indeed, Basire’s chief patrons were antiquaries who had every reason to appreciate the precision of his plates. Basire’s severe style solidified Blake’s insistence on strict form and severe outline in all drawing. Basire was a good teacher and a kind master, and the seven years that Blake spent with him were extremely formative. Blake’s exuberant imagination accepted this controlling influence, without which his execution might never have equalled his creative power of design.

      The boy proved an apt and industrious pupil, who soon learned to copy to Basire’s satisfaction whatever work he was set to perform. The shop, too, had its exciting moments, for it was frequented by all sorts of people, including Emanuel Swedenborg, who was then living in London, where he remained until his death in 1772. The sight of the famous novelist is the only external recorded incident of Blake’s first three years at Basire’s, but a casual occurrence of great importance that interrupted his placid course after he had been working in the shop for two years.

      There were, we are told, several apprentices beside Blake, and the harmony of the place depended on the ease with which the youngsters worked together. In 1773, two new apprentices arrived who indulged in frequent quarrels with Blake “concerning matters of intellectual argument.” These quarrels created disorderly scenes, and when, according to Malkin,[14] Blake refused to side with his master against his fellow-apprentices, Basire’s kindly comment was: “Blake is too simple and they too cunning.” In order to restore harmony without sacrificing either party, Basire sent Blake, whose industry could be trusted not to abuse the privilege, out of the shop to draw the Gothic monuments in Westminster Abbey and other old churches, monuments which Basire’s patrons, the antiquaries, were always wanting to have engraved. Blake would spend the summer making these drawings, and the winter sometimes in engraving them. Lost in the corners of these old churches, Blake’s romantic imagination was completely Gothicised, and for the future he closed his mind to every other influence or interpreted it by the light of these impressions, for which he had been unconsciously prepared by the religious atmosphere of his home.

      We have only to imagine Blake transplanted from Westminster Abbey to the ruins of the Parthenon, walking the road to the Piraeus, and apprenticed at the same age to a sculptor occupied in classical studies, to see a different development