Blake After Two Centuries

The value of centenaries and similar observances is that they call attention, not simply to great men, but to what we do with our great men. The anniversary punctuates, so to speak, the scholarly and critical absorption of its subject into society. From this point of view, a centenary date might well be more impressive for those interested in William Blake than his birth on November 28, 1757. The year 1857 would bring us to a transitional point in the life of Alexander Gilchrist, who had recently got a life of Etty off his hands, married, moved to Chelsea to be near his idol Carlyle, was busy winding up some family business, and was preparing to start in eamest on The Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus. This last was no empty phrase. Scattered notices of Blake had appeared in collections of artists' biographies, but nothing like a full volume had been devoted to Blake in the thirty years since his death. Blake was fortunate in his first posthumous group of admirers. Gilchrist was a remarkable person, his wife Anne equally so, and Rossetti and Swinburne, if not exactly emancipated spirits, were at least sufficiently free of the more lethal Victorian virtues to admire Blake without undue inhibitions. They make an instructive contrast to the Ruskin who cut up one of the two coloured copies of Jerusalem, the anonymous worthy who apparently destroyed the great "Vision of the Last Judgement," and the member of the Linnell family who erased the genitalia from the drawings on the Four Zoas manuscript.