Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
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minds like these, much was learned by Blake, in his art and out of it. In 1780, Fuseli, then thirty-nine, just returned from eight years’ sojourn in Italy, became a neighbour, lodging in Broad Street, where he remained until 1782. In the latter year, his original and characteristic picture of The Nightmare made ‘a sensation’ at the Exhibition: the first of his to do so. The subsequent engraving gave him a European reputation. Artists’ homes as well as studios abounded then in Broad Street and its neighbourhood. Bacon the sculptor lived in Wardour Street, Paul Sandby in Poland Street, the fair R.A., Angelica Kauffman, in Golden Square, Bartolozzi, with his apprentice Sherwin, in Broad Street itself, and at a later date John Varley, ‘father of modern Water Colours,’ in the same street (No. 15). Literary celebrities were not wanting: in Wardour Street, Mrs Chapone; in Poland Street, pushing, pompous Dr Burney, of Musical History notoriety.
In the catalogue of the now fairly established Royal Academy’s Exhibition for 1780, its twelfth, and first at Somerset House – all previous had been held in its ‘Old Room’ (originally built for an auction room), on the south side of Pall Mall East – appears for the first time a work by ‘W. Blake.’ It was an Exhibition of only 489 ‘articles,’ in all, waxwork and ‘designs for a fan’ inclusive among its leading exhibitors, boasting Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mary Moser, R.A., Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, R.A., Cosway and Loutherbourg, Paul Sandby and Zoffany, Copley (Lyndhurst’s father), and Fuseli, not yet Associate. Blake’s contribution is the Death of Earl Goodwin, a drawing probably, being exhibited in The Ante-room,’ devoted to flower-pieces, crayons, miniatures, and water-colour landscapes – some by Gainsborough. This first Exhibition in official quarters went off with much eclat, netting double the average amount realized by its predecessors: viz. as much as 3,000/.
In the sultry, early days of June, 1780, the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots rolled through Town. Half London was sacked, and its citizens for six days laid under forced contributions, by a mob some forty thousand strong, of boys, pickpockets, and ‘roughs.’ In this outburst of anarchy, Blake long remembered an involuntary participation of his own. On the third day, Tuesday, 6th of June, ‘the Mass-houses’ having already been demolished – one, in Blake’s near neighbourhood, Warwick Street, Golden Square – and various private houses also; the rioters, flushed with gin and victory, were turning their attention to grander schemes of devastation. That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from Justice Hyde’s house near Leicester Fields, for the destruction of which less than an hour had sufficed, through Long Acre, past the quiet house of Blake’s old master, engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and down Holborn, bound for Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank, and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates. This was a peculiar experience for a spiritual poet; not without peril, had a drunken soldier chanced to have identified him during the after weeks of indiscriminate vengeance: those black weeks when strings of boys under fourteen were hung up in a row to vindicate the offended majesty of the Law. ‘I never saw boys cry so!’ observed Selwyn, connoisseur in hanging, in his diary.
It was the same Tuesday night, one may add, that among the obnoxious mansions of magistrate and judge gutted of furniture, and consigned to the flames, Lord Mansfield’s in Bloomsbury Square was numbered. That night, too – every householder having previously chalked the talisman, ‘No Popery,’ on his door, (the very Jews inscribing ‘This House True Protestant!’) every house showing blue flag, every wayfarer having donned the blue cockade – that night the Londoners with equal unanimity illuminated their windows. Still wider stupor of fear followed next day: and to it, a still longer sleepless night of prison-burning, drunken infatuation, and onsets from the military, let slip at last from civil leash. Six-and-thirty fires are to be seen simultaneously blazing in one new neighbourhood (Bloomsbury), not far from Blake’s and still nearer to Basire’s; whence are heard the terrible shouts of excited crowds, mingling with the fiercer roar of the flames, and with the reports of scattered musket-shots at distant points from the soldiery. Some inhabitants catch up their household effects and aimlessly run up and down the streets with them; others cheerfully pay their guinea a mile for a vehicle to carry them beyond the tumult. These were not favourable days for designing, or even quiet engraving.
Since his twentieth year, Blake’s energies had been ‘wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession’ as artist: too much so to admit of leisure or perhaps inclination for poetry. Engrossing enough was the indispensable effort to master the difficulties of Design, with pencil or in water-colours. With the still tougher mechanical difficulties of oil-painting he never fairly grappled; but confined himself to water-colours and tempera (on canvas), with in after years a curious modification of the latter – which he daringly christened ‘fresco.’ Original invention now claimed more than all his leisure. His working-hours during the years 1780 to 1782 were occupied by various bookplates for the publications already named. These voluminous, well-illustrated serials are infrequently stumbled on by the Collector at the second-hand booksellers. Very few are to be found in our Museum Library, professedly miscellaneous as that collection is. In the Print Room exists a fine series of engravings after Stothard; which, however, being undated, affords little help to those wishing to learn something about the engravers of them.
These were days of Courtship, too. And the course of Blake’s love did not open smoothly. ‘A lively little girl’ in his own, or perhaps a humbler station, the object of his first sighs readily allowed him, as girls in a humble class will, meaning neither marriage nor harm, to ‘keep company’ with her, to pay his court, take mutual walks, and be as lovesick as he chose; but nowise encouraged the idea of a wedding. In addition to the pangs of fruidess love, attacks of jealousy had stoically to be borne. When he complained that the favour of her company in a stroll had been extended to another admirer, ‘Are you a fool?’ was the brusque reply – with a scornful glance. That cured me of jealousy,’ Blake used naïvely to relate. One evening at a friend’s house he was bemoaning in a corner his love-crosses. His listener, a dark-eyed, generous-hearted girl, frankly declared ‘She pitied him from her heart.’ ‘Do you pity me?’ ‘Yes! I do, most sincerely.’ Then I love you for that!’ he replied, with enthusiasm: – such soothing pity is irresistible. And a second more prosperous courtship began. At this, or perhaps a later meeting, followed the confession, I dare say in lower tones, ‘Well! and I love you!’ – always, doubtless, a pretty one to hear.
The unsophisticated maiden was named Catherine Sophia Boucher – plebeian corruption, probably, of the grand historic name, Bourchier; – daughter of William and Mary Boucher of Battersea. So at least the Register gives the name: where, within less than ten years, no fewer than seven births to the same parents, including two sets of twins in succession, immediately precede hers. Her position and connexions in life were humble, humbler than Blake’s own; her education – as to book-lore – neglected, not to say omitted. For even the (at first) paltry makeshift of National Schools had not yet been invented; and Sunday Schools were first set going a little after this very time, namely, in 1784. When, by-and-by, Catherine’s turn came, as bride, to sign the Parish Register, she, as the same yet mutely testifies, could do no more than most young ladies of her class then, or than the Bourchiers, Stanleys, and magnates of the land four centuries before could do – viz. make a X as ‘her mark:’ her surname on the same occasion being mis-spelt for her and vulgarized into Butcher, and her second baptismal name omitted. A bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim graceful form, can make a young artist and poet overlook such trifles as defective scholarship. Nor were a fair outside and a frank accessible heart deceptive lures in this instance. Catherine – Christian namesake, by the way, of Blake’s mother – was endowed with a loving loyal nature, an adaptive open mind, capable of profiting by good teaching, and of enabling her, under constant high influence, to become a meet companion to her imaginative husband in his solitary and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully, she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over-originality insured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after-years, under his