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http://www.as.ysu.edu/~saleonard/Blake%20timeline.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-blake
http://www.william-blake.org/biography.html
http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
1.William Blake (28 November 1757 12 August 1827)
2.William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.)
in Soho, London, Great Britain. Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the
West End of London.
His father, James, was a hosier, one who sells stockings, gloves, and haberdashery, and
the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but "respectable"
neighborhood.
In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham, in Sussex (now West Sussex), to take up a
job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that
Blake began Milton a Poem (the title page is dated 1804, but Blake continued to work on
it until 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning "And did those feet in
ancient time", which became the words for the anthem "Jerusalem". Over time, Blake
began to resent his new patron, believing that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry,
and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" (E724). Blake's disenchantment
with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton: a Poem, in which Blake
wrote that "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies". (4:26, E98)
[The town of] Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than
London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not
obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their
forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses. My Wife &
Sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace... I am more famed in Heaven for
my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with
books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal
life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels. (E710)
Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804
1820),

3. Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782 when he was recovering from a relationship that
had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his
heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity
me?" When she responded affirmatively, he declared, "Then I love you." Blake married
Catherine who was five years his junior on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary's Church,
Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. The original
wedding certificate may be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass
window was installed between 1976 and 1982.[26] Later, in addition to teaching

Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she
proved an invaluable aid, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his
spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.
Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782 when he was recovering from a relationship that
had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his
heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity
me?" When she responded affirmatively, he declared, "Then I love you." Blake married
Catherine who was five years his junior on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary's Church,
Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. The original
wedding certificate may be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass
window was installed between 1976 and 1982.[26] Later, in addition to teaching
Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she
proved an invaluable aid, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his
spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.
Not all of the young man's interests were confined to art and politics. After one ill-fated
romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher, an attractive and compassionate woman who
took pity on Blake's tales of being spurned. After a year's courtship the couple were
married on 18 August 1782. The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women
of her class, could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and to write, and
under Blake's tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him in the
execution of his designs.
By all accounts the marriage was a successful one, but no children were born to the
Blakes. Catherine also managed the household affairs and was undoubtedly of great help
in making ends meet on Blake's always limited income.
5. The main work of William Blake was printer/engraver, while his hobbies and special
interest were writing of poetry books and illiustrating them.

6. On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is
reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside.
Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are I will draw
your portrait for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait
(now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses.[49] At six that
evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist
reports that a female lodger in the house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at
the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."[50]
George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel
Palmer:
He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all
His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through
Jesus Christ Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd
and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.[51]
Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five

days after his death on the eve of his 45th wedding anniversary at the Dissenter's
burial ground in Bunhill Fields, where his parents were interred. Present at the
ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and
John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine moved into Tatham's house as a
housekeeper. She believed she was regularly visited by Blake's spirit. She continued
selling his illuminated works and paintings, but entertained no business transaction
without first "consulting Mr. Blake".[52] On the day of her death, in October 1831, she
was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him "as if he were only in the
next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now".[53]
On her death, Blake's manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned some
he deemed heretical or politically radical. Tatham was an Irvingite, one of the many
fundamentalist movements of the 19th century, and opposed to any work that smacked of
blasphemy.[54] John Linnell erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake's drawings.
[55]
Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake's grave had been lost and forgotten as
gravestones were taken away to create a lawn. Blakes grave is commemorated by a stone
that reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 17571827 and his
wife Catherine Sophia 17621831". The memorial stone is situated approximately 20
metres away from the actual grave, which is not marked. Members of the group Friends
of William Blake have rediscovered the location and intend to place a permanent
memorial at the site.[56][57]
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1. He attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of
ten, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage
Blake.[15] The Blakes were dissenters, and believed to have belonged to the Moravian
Church. Blake was baptised at St James's Church, designed by Sir Christopher Wren,
Piccadilly, London. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and
remained a source of inspiration throughout his life.
Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his
father, a practice that was preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found
his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten
Heemskerk and Albrecht Drer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament
that he was not sent to school but instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on
subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake made explorations into poetry;
his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
On 4 August 1772, Blake was apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen
Street, for a term of seven years.[14] At the end of the term, aged 21, he became a
professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict
between the two during the period of Blake's apprenticeship, but Peter Ackroyd's
biography notes that Blake later added Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries
and then crossed it out.[16] This aside, Basire's style of engraving was of a kind held to
be old-fashioned at the time,[17] and Blake's instruction in this outmoded form may have
been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in
London (perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow
apprentice). His experiences in Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and
ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies
and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that "...the most immediate [impression]
would have been of faded brightness and colour".[18] In the long afternoons Blake spent
sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by boys from Westminster
School, one of whom "tormented" him so much that he knocked the boy off a scaffold to
the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence".[19] Blake beheld more visions in
the Abbey, of a great procession of monks and priests, while he heard "the chant of plainsong and chorale".

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset
House, near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was
expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled
against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens,
championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to
detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of "general truth" and "general
beauty". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to abstractions, to
generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake responded,
in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize
is the Alone Distinction of Merit".[20] Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility,
which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting,
Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and
Raphael.
David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much
from the president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater
value than landscape and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his
ideals into practice."[21] Certainly Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal
Academy, submitting works on six occasions between 1780 and 1808.
Blake became friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland
during his first year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and
Cumberland joining the Society for Constitutional Information.[22]

2.Relief etching
In 1788, aged 31, Blake experimented with relief etching, a method he used to produce
most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process is also referred to as
illuminated printing, and the finished products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated
printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes,
using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner
of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the
untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name).
This is a reversal of the usual method of etching, where the lines of the design are

exposed to the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching (which
Blake referred to as "stereotype" in The Ghost of Abel) was intended as a means for
producing his illuminated books more quickly than via intaglio. Stereotype, a process
invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast from a wood engraving, but Blake's
innovation was, as described above, very different. The pages printed from these plates
were hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to form a volume. Blake used
illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including Songs of Innocence and
Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem.[30]

Engravings
Although Blake has become most famous for his relief etching, his commercial work
largely consisted of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the 18th
century in which the artist incised an image into the copper plate, a complex and
laborious process, with plates taking months or years to complete, but as Blake's
contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such engraving offered a "missing link with
commerce", enabling artists to connect with a mass audience and became an immensely
important activity by the end of the 18th century.[31]
Blake employed intaglio engraving in his own work, most notably for the illustrations of
the Book of Job, completed just before his death. Most critical work has concentrated on
Blake's relief etching as a technique because it is the most innovative aspect of his art, but
a 2009 study drew attention to Blake's surviving plates, including those for the Book of
Job: they demonstrate that he made frequent use of a technique known as "repoussage", a
means of obliterating mistakes by hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate.
Such techniques, typical of engraving work of the time, are very different to the much
faster and fluid way of drawing on a plate that Blake employed for his relief etching, and
indicates why the engravings took so long to complete.[3
3.By all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant
by his skipping any formal schooling. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London
and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Even at an early age, however,
his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. 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.
His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled
at the age of ten in Pars' drawing school. The expense of continued formal training in art,
however, was a prohibitive one, and the family decided that at the age of fourteen
William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. At first his father took him to
William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. 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 twelve years later. Instead of Ryland the family
settled on a lesser-known engraver but a man of considerable talents, James Basire.
Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft.
Blake was later to be especially grateful to Basire for sending the young student to
Westminster Abbey to make drawings of monuments Basire was commissioned to
engrave. The vast Gothic dimensions of Westminster and the haunting presence of the

tombs of kings affected Blake's romantic sensibilities and were to provide fertile ground
for his active imagination.
At the age of twenty-one Blake left Basire's apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the
newly formed Royal Academy. It was as a journeyman engraver, however, that Blake
earned his living. Booksellers employed him to engrave illustrations for publications
ranging from novels such as Don Quixote to serials such as Ladies' Magazine.
One incident at this time affected Blake deeply. In June of 1780 riots broke out in London
incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon but also by resistance to
continued war against the American colonists. Houses, churches, and prisons were burned
by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. On one evening, whether by design or by
accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burned Newgate prison. These
images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave Blake powerful material for
works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793).
Not all of the young man's interests were confined to art and politics. After one ill-fated
romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher, an attractive and compassionate woman who
took pity on Blake's tales of being spurned. After a year's courtship the couple were
married on 18 August 1782. The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women
of her class, could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and to write, and
under Blake's tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him in the
execution of his designs.
5.opposition
Because of his monetary woes, Blake often had to depend on the benevolence of patrons
of the arts. This sometimes led to heated exchanges between the independent artist and
the wealthy patron. Dr. John Trusler was one such patron whom Blake failed to please.
Dr. Trusler was something of a dabbler in a variety of fields. Aside from being a
clergyman, he was a student of medicine, a bookseller, and the author of such works as
Hogarth Moralized (1768), The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1750?), and A Sure Way
to Lengthen Life with Vigor (circa 1819). Blake's friend Cumberland had recommended
Blake to Trusler in hopes of providing some needed income for Blake. Blake, however,
found himself unable to follow the clergyman's wishes: "I attempted every morning for a
fortnight together to follow your Dictate, but when I found my attempts were in vain,
resolv'd to shew an independence which I know will please an Author better than
slavishly following the track of another, however admirable that track may be. At any
rate, my Excuse must be: I could not do otherwise; it was out of my power!" Dr. Trusler
was not convinced and replied that he found Blake's "Fancy" to be located in the "World
of Spirits" and not in this world.
Blake's rebuttal is a classic defense of his own principles. To the charge that Blake
needed someone to "elucidate" his idea, Blake replied with characteristic wrath: "That
which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients
consider'd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the
faculities to act." Blake relies on a basic principle of rhetoric that is evident in his writing:
it is often best to leave some things unsaid so that the reader must employ his

imagination. To the charge that his visions were not of this world, Blake replied that he
had seen his visions in this world, but not all men see alike: "As a man is, So he Sees. As
the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the
Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One
continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination." The problem then is not the location of
Blake's subjects, but the relative ability of man to perceive. If Dr. Trusler could not
understand Blake's drawings, the problem was his inability to see with the imagination.
Dr. Trusler was not the only patron that tried to make Blake conform to popular tastes.
Blake's stormy relation to his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley directly
affected the writing of the epics Milton and Jerusalem. When Blake met him Hayley was
a well-known man of letters who had produced several popular volumes of poetry. His
Triumphs of Temper (1781), which admonishes women to control their tempers in order
to be good wives, was very popular. In 1800 under Hayley's promptings Blake moved
from London to the village of Felpham, where Hayley lived. It was expected that Blake
would receive numerous engraving commissions, and his financial problems would
disappear.
Hayley did provide Blake with some small commissions. Blake began work on a series of
eighteen "Heads of the Poets" for Hayley's library and worked on the engravings for
Hayley's Life of Cowper (1802). Hayley also set Blake to work on a series of small
portraits, but Blake soon bristled under the watchful eye of his patron. In January of 1803
Blake wrote to Butts that "I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but
the meer drudgery of business, & intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall
not live; this has always pursu'd me." In the same letter Blake argued that his duty to his
art must take precedence to the necessity of making money: "But if we fear to do the
dictates of our Angels, & tremble at the Tasks set before us; if we refuse to do Spiritual
Acts because of natural Fears of natural Desires! Who can describe the dismal torments
of such a state!"
The "Spiritual Acts" Blake referred to include the writing of his epic poetry despite
Hayley's objections. In the same month Blake wrote to his brother James that he is
determined "To leave This Place" and that he can no longer accept Hayley's patronage:
"The truth is, As a Poet he is frighten'd at me & as a Painter his view & mine are
opposite; he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he
nor all the devils in hell will never do."
Blake left Felpham in 1803 and returned to London. In April of that year he wrote to
Butts that he was overjoyed to return to the city: "That I can alone carry on my visionary
studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See
Visions, Dream Dreams & Prophecy & Speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the
Doubts of other Mortals." In the same letter Blake refers to his epic poem Milton,
composed while at Felpham: "But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years'
Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the Spirit, or unless he
should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts."

In a later letter to Butts, Blake declares his resolution to have Milto

printed:
This Poem shall, by Divine Assistance be progressively Printed & Ornamented with
Prints & given to the Public. But of this work I take care to say little to Mr H., since
he is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a Chapter in the Bible. He knows that I
have writ it, for I have shewn it to him, & he has read Part by his own desire & has
looked with sufficient contempt to inhance my opinion of it. But I do not wish to
irritate by seeming too obstinate in Poetic pursuits. But if all the World should set
their faces against This, I have Orders to set my face like flint (Ezekiel iiiC, 9v)
against their faces, & my forehead against their foreheads.
Blake's letter reveals much of his attitude toward his patron and toward his readers. Blake
believed that his poetry could be read and understood by the general public, but he was
determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. Men of letters such as
Hayley would not be allowed to dictate his art. Blake compares himself to the prophet
Ezekiel, whom the Lord made strong to warn the Israelites of their wickedness. Blake's
images of a stern prophet locked head to head with his adversary is a fitting picture of
part of Blake's relation with his reader. Blake knew that his poetry would be derided by
some readers. In Milton Blake tells us that "the idiot reasoner laughs at the Man of
Imagination," and in the face of that laughter Blake remained resolute.
In his "slumber on the banks of the Ocean," Blake, surrounded by financial worries and
hounded by a patron who could not appreciate his art, reflected on the value of visionary
poetry. Milton, which Blake started to engrave in 1804 (probably finishing in 1808), is a
poem that constantly draws attention to itself as a work of literature. Its ostensible subject
is the poet John Milton, but the author, William Blake, also creates a character for himself
in his own poem. Blake examines the entire range of mental activity involved in the art of
poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to the reception of his vision by the reader
of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject the very nature of poetry: what it
means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be a reader of poetry.
=====
Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a
physical altercation with a soldier, John Schofield.[38] Blake was charged not only with
assault, but with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the king.
Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed "Damn the king. The soldiers are all
slaves."[39] Blake was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a
report in the Sussex county paper, "[T]he invented character of [the evidence] was ... so
obvious that an acquittal resulted".[40] Schofield was later depicted wearing "mind
forged manacles" in an illustration to Jerusalem.[41]
=========================================
George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel
Palmer:
"He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all
His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus
Christ - Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he

burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."

Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five
days after his death - on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary - at the Dissenter's
burial ground in Bunhill Fields, where his parents were also interred. Present at the
ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and
John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine moved into Tatham's house as a
housekeeper. During this period, she believed she was regularly visited by Blake's spirit.
She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but would entertain no
business transaction without first "consulting Mr. Blake". On the day of her own death, in
October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him "as if
he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long
now".
On her death, Blake's manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned
several of those which he deemed heretical or too politically radical. Tatham had become
an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist movements of the 19th century, and was
severely opposed to any work that smacked of blasphemy. Sexual imagery in a number of
Blake's drawings was also erased by John Linnell. Blake is now recognised as a saint in
the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his
honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey, in
memory of him and his wife. (From Wikipedia)