A short life of the author
William Blake (1757–1827) was born on 28 November 1757 in Broad Street, Soho, London, the third of seven children. His father, James Blake, was a hosier; his mother, Catherine Wright Armitage, was from a family of modest means. Blake had no formal schooling beyond a drawing school and an apprenticeship to the engraver James Basire. He saw visions from childhood — angels in a tree on Peckham Rye, God putting his head through the window — and these visions, far from diminishing, became the foundation of his entire creative life.
Life and Career
Blake was trained as an engraver and printmaker — a skilled artisan — and earned his living throughout his life from commercial engraving work, primarily book illustration. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools but quarrelled with the President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose empiricism offended Blake’s visionary convictions. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate woman whom he taught to read, write, and print; she became his devoted collaborator, inking his plates and colouring his prints.
In the 1780s Blake developed the technique of “illuminated printing” — a method of relief etching in which text and illustration were combined on a single copper plate, printed in coloured inks, and then hand-finished with watercolour. This technique allowed him to bypass publishers entirely and produce books that were unique works of art: each copy differed in colouring and sometimes in arrangement. The illuminated books — Songs of Innocence (1789), The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), The Book of Urizen (1794), and the epic prophecies Milton (c. 1804–1811) and Jerusalem (c. 1804–1820) — are among the supreme achievements of English art and literature.
Blake was virtually unknown during his lifetime except to a small circle of admirers. He lived in near-poverty, was charged with sedition in 1803 (and acquitted), and was widely regarded as mad. A late flowering of recognition came through the patronage of the painter John Linnell, who commissioned Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Book of Job — works of extraordinary power produced in the last years of his life.
He died on 12 August 1827, singing hymns, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields.
Major Works and Themes
Blake’s work is a unified imaginative system — a mythology, a theology, a politics — expressed simultaneously in verse and visual art. His central conviction is that imagination is the divine faculty in human beings, that reason divorced from imagination is tyrannical, and that the institutional structures of his age — church, state, monarchy, the factory system — have conspired to imprison the human spirit.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is his most accessible work: paired poems (“The Lamb” / “The Tyger,” “The Chimney Sweeper” in both modes) that present two contrary states of the human soul — the innocent vision of childhood and the experienced vision of a fallen world — without resolving the tension between them. “The Tyger” alone is one of the most famous poems in the language.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793) is Blake’s most provocative work: a series of satirical proverbs, visionary narratives, and “Memorable Fancies” that invert conventional morality, celebrate energy over reason, and declare that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
Jerusalem (c. 1804–1820) is Blake’s longest and most ambitious work: a hundred-plate epic prophecy that envisions the spiritual redemption of Albion (England) and the liberation of the human imagination. It is dense, difficult, and sublime.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Blake was rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century by the Pre-Raphaelites (particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and by the biographer Alexander Gilchrist. His reputation has risen steadily since, and he is now recognised as one of the greatest English poets — alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth — and one of the most important British visual artists. His influence extends to Yeats, Ginsberg, the Beats, and the psychedelic counterculture.
Key Works
- Songs of Innocence (1789)
- The Book of Thel (1789)
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793)
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
- The Book of Urizen (1794)
- Milton (c. 1804–1811)
- Jerusalem (c. 1804–1820)
- Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)
Collecting Blake
Blake collecting is unlike any other author because his major works are illuminated books — hand-printed, hand-coloured, and unique in every copy. Original Blake prints are museum objects, not items that circulate in the ordinary rare book market.
Individual plates from the illuminated books, when they surface — which is rare — command prices of $10,000–$200,000 depending on the work, the plate, and the colouring. Complete copies of the illuminated books are held by major institutions (the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam, the Morgan Library, the Library of Congress, Yale’s Beinecke) and are essentially priceless.
The 1826 Illustrations of the Book of Job (engraved by Blake, published by John Linnell) was produced in an edition of approximately 315 sets. Individual plates surface at auction and bring $1,000–$10,000. Complete sets are major collecting items.
For most collectors, the entry point is Blake’s commercial engravings — his illustrations for other authors’ works (Young’s Night Thoughts, Blair’s The Grave, Thornton’s Virgil) — which are available at $200–$5,000 per plate.
Early printed editions of Blake’s poetry — particularly the Pickering manuscript poems (“Auguries of Innocence,” “The Mental Traveller”) and the first scholarly editions by Gilchrist (1863), Yeats and Ellis (1893), and Geoffrey Keynes — are collected in their own right.
Blake’s original watercolours, drawings, and sketches surface occasionally at auction and command prices from $20,000 to several million dollars.