William Blake: A Critical Essay was published by John Camden Hotten in 1868. The book was one of the earliest serious critical studies of Blake — preceding the Pre-Raphaelite editions and the twentieth-century scholarly industry by decades — and it argued for Blake’s importance at a time when he was still widely regarded as an interesting madman rather than a major artist.
Swinburne’s Blake is not a lunatic but a systematic thinker — a man with coherent philosophical positions about art, religion, sexuality, and freedom that he expressed through the only means available to him: poetry, painting, and engraving. Swinburne traces Blake’s thought through the prophetic books (which most earlier readers had dismissed as incomprehensible) and finds in them a consistent attack on the same targets Swinburne himself attacked: conventional religion, sexual repression, political tyranny, and the subordination of imagination to reason.
The essay is as much a manifesto as a critical study: Swinburne finds in Blake a predecessor and an ally, a poet who had fought the same battles against the same enemies a generation earlier. Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” — with its inversion of conventional morality, its celebration of energy over restraint, and its identification of imagination with divinity — reads, in Swinburne’s account, like a prototype of Poems and Ballads.
The prose is elaborate — Swinburne’s critical style is as ornate as his verse — but the analytical intelligence is genuine. His readings of individual poems and passages remain valuable, and his argument for Blake’s coherence as a thinker was ahead of its time.
Collecting William Blake: A Critical Essay
First edition (John Camden Hotten, London, 1868): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100