2. Victorian literature Victorian poetry and Novel

1. William Blake and his role in English
William Blake was a painter, poet, and print-maker. During his lifetime, he was not recognized much. However, now, he is regarded as an influential figure in the history of visual arts and poetry in the Romantic period. His works were highly prophetic. Northrop Frye, the twentieth-century critic, says that the works of William Blake are least studied in the English language. The 21st-century artist, Jonathan Jones, comments on his visual arts that his art is remote from whatever Britain has produced so far. Among the 100 Greatest Britons, BBC has placed William Blake on number 38 in 2002.William Blake lived in London for his entire life; there, he produced versatile and symbolically rich works. His works employed the imagination of the “human existence itself,” and the body of God.”For his idiosyncratic views, the contemporary writers and poets consider him as mad. However, the later critics regarded him for his creativity and expressiveness, as well as for his mystical and philosophical undercurrents within his works. His poetry and painting are featured as Pre-Romantics and past of the Romantic Movement.William Blake was a committed Christian, yet aggressive to the Church of England. Even he was against all forms of hostile religions. He was greatly influenced by the American and French Revolution in the 18 th century. William Blake also abandoned political beliefs but maintained friendly relations with the political activists Thomas Paine. Thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg also influenced him greatly.Though Blake had many known influences, the uniqueness and distinguishing quality of his works makes him difficult to categorize. He has been categorized as “glorious luminary” and a man who had not been envisioned by the predecessors and was not ranked with his contemporaries by William Michael, the 19th-century critic. William Blake was born on 28th November 1757 in London. He attended school for a short period of time and then got further education at home. In the early years, Blake was highly influenced by the Bible. It remained a lifetime source of inspiration and colored his life and works with spirituality. Blake started experiencing visions at an early age. When Blake was four years old, writes Henry Crabb, he saw the head of God appearing in the window. He also supposedly envisions the prophet Ezekiel standing under the tree and also had seen a tree filled with angels. It was these visions that affect his writing and paintings he produced.By the age of 10, the artistic abilities of William Blake came to the forefront. He attended Henry Pars’ drawing school. There he learned to sketch the human figure. He also apprenticed with engravers at the age of 14. The master of Blake was an engraver to the London Society of Antiques. He sent Blake to Westminster Abbey to draw the monuments and tombs. In that place, his love for gothic was established.In 1779, Blake finished his apprenticeship that comprised seven years. He turned into a journeyman copy engraver. He started working on projects for print and book publishers. During that time, he was also preparing himself to make his career as a painter. In the same year, he attended the Royal Academy of Art’s School of Design. In 1780, he started exhibiting his own works in the Academy. In 1783, he published his Poetical Sketches. It was a collection of poems that he wrote over the course of 14 years.In 1782, William Blake married an illiterate lady Catherine Sophia Boucher. She was taught to read, write, and color. She was a great supporter of her husband until his death. In 1787, William Blake suffered greatly from the death of his brother Robert. At the instance of his brother’s death, Blake envisions a spirit coming down joylessly through the ceiling. This vision entered into the mind of Blake and greatly inspired his later poetry.In the following years, Blake started a new method of printing called “illuminating printing.” This painting influenced every aspect of his arts.An established engraver, William Black, soon started receiving commissions for his watercolors. He painted the scenes from the Bible and works of Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton.In 1800, William Blake shifted to a seaside Village of Felpham upon the invitation of his friend William Hayley. However, soon the relationship between Blake and Hayley soon turned bitter. Blake ran into different trouble. A soldier, in 1803, illegally occupied the property of Blake, and when Blake asked him to leave, he accused him of sedation and assault. In 1804, Black was acquitted, and he, along with his wife, shifted back to London. In the same year, Blake started writing and illustrating about Jerusalem. His works on Jerusalem are his most aspiring works to date. He also started showing his works, including the Canterbury Pilgrims by Chaucer and Satan Calling Up His Legions, at the exhibitions. However, his works did not get any appreciation. Devastated by the negative reviews and no attention for his works, Blake started withdrawing from his attempt of success. From 1809 to 1818, he only sketched a few paintings. He was sinking into paranoia, obscurity, and poverty. However, in 1819, Blake started sketching “visionary head.” Until 1825, Blake had sketched more than 100 of such visionary heads.Between 1823 and 1825, Blake remained highly busy with his arts. He engraved almost 21 designs of Book of Job and Dante’s Inferno. By 1825, he also started a series of watercolor illustrations of Dante.In the last years of his life, William Blake suffered from an undiagnosed disease. He died on 12th August 1827. He left unfinished watercolor illustrations of Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan and manuscript of the Book of Genesis of the Bible. Though he was unappreciated in his life, William Blake turned out to be a great figure in the arts of poetry and paintings.William showed his artistic tastes at an early age. At the age of ten he was sent to a drawing school in the Strand. At fifteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. He also made drawings of the monuments in Westminster Abbey. He was greatly influenced by the Gothic style. His creative faculty found an outlet in the early years in poetry, some of which has survived in the thin volume of Poetical Sketches, printed for him by his friends in 1783. These pieces were composed between his 12th and 20th years.As a Professional Engraver In 1779 Blake set out to earn his living as a professional engraver. He did a lot of work in this line for the booksellers and publishers. During the next twenty years or so he supported himself largely by this means.Marriage In 1781 Blake met Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, and married her in August, 1782. She made a perfect wife for him. She learned to draw and paint well enough to be able to help him in his work. She remained childless, and survived him by four years, dying in 1831.A New Method of Printing During the years 1783-87 Blake met a number of distinguished persons, but this society soon disgusted him, and he ridiculed it in a satire known as An Island in the Moon written in 1785. In 1788 he began to experiment with a new method of printing from etched copper-plates. It is related that the secret of this process was revealed to him in a vision by the spirit of his brother Robert. The first results of this process were the small dogmatic works: There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One. It developed further with the production of Songs of Innocence, which consisted of simple lyrical poems etched on copper with decorations coloured by hand.The volume was finished in 1789 and was sold for a few shillings. This was the prelude to the remarkable series of books in “illuminated printing” which occupied Blake in some degree for the rest of his life.Mysticism and Philosophy Blake was now living in Hercules Road, Lambeth. Here he completed the works entitled The Book of Thel (1789); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793); America (1793); Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793); Songs of Experience (1794); Europe (1794); Urizen (1794); The Book of Los (1795); The Book of Ahania (1795); and The Song of Los (1795).During this period Blake was deeply under the influence of his visionary powers, and mysticism and philosophy emerged as his dominant interests. Colour-prints Blake’s output as an artist was considerable. In 1795 he produced his stupendous series of large colour prints which can scarcely be matched in the whole history of art for imaginative content and magnificence of colouring. These include “Nebuchadnezzar”, “The Elohim Creating Adam”, and “Newton”. By 1797 he had completed his series of 537 water-colour designs for Young’s Night Thoughts.The Problem of Earning a Livelihood Blake’s circle of friends had become a little wider now, and included Thomas Butts. It was chiefly Butts’s patronage which enabled Blake to earn a livelihood while devoting much time and energy to his symbolical works which never produced any adequate return by their sales. He even laboured over a long poem, The Four Zoas. It is a poem of the greatest significance for the understanding of Blake.Life and Work at Felpham During the seven years from 1793 to 1800, Blake’s creative output was enormous. In 1800, Blake moved with his wife and sister, from London to Felpham in Sussex in order to work at some engravings for William Hayley. But three years later he returned to London with a great sense of relief. At first he had been able to work happily enough at Felpham, but soon he became more and more irritated by Hayley’s patronizing airs and lack of understanding. He also experienced much spiritual discomfort at Felpham because of the visions that he incessantly saw. He was forced to lead a double life, submitting on the surface to Hayley’s vanities and developing in secret his own imaginative faculties. The Felpham period was, therefore; a strangely mixed output of second-rate engravings for Hayley, of fine paintings, and of mystical poetry of great power, which was mostly embodied in the poem Milton. In January,1804 Blake was tried on a false charge of having used treasonable words against the King, and was acquitted. Association with Cromek In 1805 Blake joined the engraver Cromek in a scheme for the production of a series of engravings for Robert Blair’s The Grave. But here he was again deceived, Cromek paid him a small sum for the designs, and then employed another man to engrave them. Blake, already embittered by neglect, felt still more embittered and suffered from fits of depression.The Failure of His Exhibition In 1809 Blake held an exhibition of his works at the house of his brother James in Broad Street, Golden Square. Sixteen pictures were exhibited, including his large painting of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, and each visitor to the house received for his entrance to the house a copy of the now celebrated “Descriptive Catalogue”. The exhibition attracted very little notice, the only criticism of it, which appeared in Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner being malicious and unfair.Years of Obscurity During the years that followed, Blake fell into complete obscurity. It is not known for certain how he earned his living during 1810-17. It has even been suggested that for part of this period he was confined to a mental hospital. Some of his acquaintances, such as Robert Southey, who visited him in 1811, did regard him as insane. But his intimate friends were convinced that he was not at all mad. Throughout this period he was occasionally selling copies of his illuminated books. He also executed engravings for various employers. He was occupied, too, with the 100 etched plates of his greatest symbolical poem, Jerusalem.“Illustrations of the Book of Job” In 1818, Blake entered upon the last phase of his life, and until his death in 1827 was probably happier with his friends and in his work than he had been at any other period. He was now able to obtain more work, and became the centre of a circle of young artists who regarded him with affection and reverence. In 1821, Blake moved from South Molton Street to 3, Fountain Court, Strand, and here he executed his most widely known work in creative art, the “Illustrations of the Book of Job”. Though superficially illustrations of the Bible story, the engravings form one of the most important of Blake’s symbolical works. Their mystical content has not prevented the designs from being the most widely known and generally appreciated of his works.Illustrations of the “Divine Comedy”, and Death Blake was to make one more great effort in his art. In October, 1825, he was asked to make illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and to engrave them. He completed a hundred water-colour designs, of which seven were engraved, and he was still at work upon these when he died on the 12th August, 1827. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields Cemetery, the approximate place being now indicated by a tablet placed there.Blake’s Character Blake suffered from the defects of his qualities. His mind was never systematically cultivated. His qualities isolated him from his contemporaries and drove his mind upon itself, so that the interpretation of his message to mankind cannot be made with accuracy. But through all his mental turmoil and difficulties in dealings with his fellow men he preserved his intellectual integrity, and he never prostituted his art. Throughout his life he tried to exalt the things of the mind, and for him the imagination was man’s highest faculty. Ceaselessly he fought against materialism. He was deeply religious, though in no conventional sense. In his later years Christ became identified in his mind with Art, and this fact provides many clues for the understanding of his doctrines. But perhaps the most illuminating revelation of his mind for most readers are the aphorisms and didactic statements which he engraved about the year 1820 around a representation of the Laocoon group.