Saving Blake
When he died in 1827, William Blake was widely regarded as 'mad'. His reputation was restored by an extraordinary biography, begun by a young lawyer and finished by his wife. Richard Holmes celebrates the work of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist
Saturday May 29, 2004
The Guardian
When William Blake died in London in 1827, he was already a forgotten man. His engraved and hand-painted Songs of Innocence and of Experience had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. His Prophetic Books had disappeared almost without trace. A single mysterious poem, "The Tyger", had reached the anthologies. As a poet - once read in manuscript by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb - he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of disciples, a group of young men who pointedly called themselves "The Ancients". Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, magnanimously dismissed him as "a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius".
As an artist, his reputation was little better. He was chiefly remembered as a one-time commercial engraver of grimly improving texts: Edward Young's Night Thoughts, Robert Blair's The Grave, the dark Biblical drama of the "Book of Job", and Dante's Inferno still unfinished at the time of his death. In 1830 Blake was given a short and gently patronising entry in Alan Cunningham's Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters. Blake was a lovable, minor eccentric: unworldly, self-taught and self-deluded.
Thirty years later, on November 1 1860, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who owned a collection of Blake's unpublished manuscripts, wrote with surprising news to his friend the poet William Allingham. "A man (one Gilchrist, who lives next door to Carlyle) wrote to me the other day, saying he was writing a life of Blake, and wanted to see my manuscript by that genius... I have told him he can see it here if he will give me a day's notice."
When Gilchrist visited him, Rossetti was surprised to encounter a long-haired, dreamy, moon-faced young man who looked rather as if he had stepped out of one of his own Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Alexander Gilchrist was 32, a young writer and art critic, who announced quietly that he had been working on a life of Blake for the past six years. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with the publisher Macmillan.
Who was Blake's unexpected champion? Born in the year after Blake's death in 1828, Alexander Gilchrist had trained as a barrister in the Middle Temple. Restless in his profession, but with great determination and independence of mind, he sought freedom in freelance art criticism. He produced an outstanding article on the unfashionable artist William Etty, once renowned as an exuberant painter of Romantic nudes and erotic scenes from classical mythology. Victorian taste had turned against Etty, and his paintings were scoffingly referred to in Academy circles as "Etty's bumboats". Gilchrist determined to write a full-length biography, and turn back the tide of priggish mockery.
On the strength of a £100 commission, Gilchrist married his 23-year-old sweetheart Anne Burrows in February 1851. They spent part of their honeymoon researching Etty's life in York. They interviewed his friends, and examined his nude studies and historical pictures. This unorthodox nuptial expedition greatly appealed to Anne, who was free-thinking in her views, and impatient with the conventions of her respectable upbringing. She too hoped one day to write. Their first child was born in December 1851, and the controversial Etty biography was published in 1855, when Gilchrist was 27.
The subject of William Blake had probably been in Gilchrist's mind for more than a decade. As a student, Gilchrist had heard rumours of Blake as the eccentric erstwhile occupant of Fountain Court, which he passed through every day on the way to his legal chambers. Initially Gilchrist knew little of the poetry. As an art critic it was a copy of Blake's illustrations to the "Book of Job", found at the back of a London printshop, which first caught his eye. He never lost his sense of their astonishing power, and it was Blake's visual imagination which always remained for Gilchrist the key to his genius. Accordingly, in summer 1855 he decided to write to one of the surviving Ancients, the painter Samuel Palmer, then aged 60.
On August 23 1855, Gilchrist received a long and engaging reply, which he later reprinted entire in his biography. While praising Blake's artistic integrity, Palmer carefully dispelled the notion of Blake's madness, and replaced it with the figure of a gentle, almost Christ-like sage. "He was a man without a mask; his aim was single, his path straight-forwards, and his wants few..." At the same time Palmer hinted at a prophet from the Old Testament, rather than the New: a formidable Blake who could be highly "expressive" and emotional, and with a flashing glance that could be "terrible" towards his enemies. Gilchrist was captivated, and he and Palmer became fast friends.
A year later in 1856, the Gilchrist family moved in next to Thomas and Jane Carlyle at No 6 Cheyne Row. Carlyle, 60-year-old doyen of biographical writing, had admired Gilchrist's study of Etty. This rare mark of approval from the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), confirmed Gilchrist in his new vocation as biographer.
The pursuit of Blake's trail through London galleries, local museums, antique bookshops, and private collections now began in earnest. Gilchrist purchased Blake prints, and borrowed what he could not buy. Anne started her own collection of Blake's watercolours. Together they tracked down Blake's various lodgings and workshops north and south of the river, in Soho and Lambeth, and meticulously researched his three-year sojourn at Felpham, by the sea in Sussex.
Having established friendly contact with the affable Samuel Palmer, Gilchrist moved on to the other surviving Ancients. His greatest diplomatic triumph was to pierce the peppery reserve of the retired journalist, Henry Crabb Robinson, then in his 80s. Robinson - once the intimate friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb - had kept extensive diary accounts of the whole Romantic circle during his time. They were admiring, but sceptical and extremely shrewd. In 1811 he had published a rare appreciation of Blake's work in a German magazine: "William Blake: Artist, Poet, and Religious Dreamer."
In the winter of 1859, Gilchrist submitted an outline draft of his life of Blake to the publisher Macmillan and was offered a contract. Members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were excited by the prospect of the forthcoming book, and Dante Gabriel's brother, the art critic William Michael Rossetti, encouraged Gilchrist to think in terms of an even more ambitious project. After the biography, perhaps he could edit a companion volume of Blake's poems, and a catalogue of his art work? Spurred on by these late supporters, Gilchrist promised to deliver the completed biography by spring 1862.
But after six years, the work was now close to exhausting him. Money was short, and by now the Gilchrists had four children. Gilchrist's constitution, never strong, began to fail. Sometimes he collapsed, unable to work on Blake for days on end. It was during this growing professional crisis that Anne Gilchrist began quietly to assert herself.
Anne had probably been working as Alexander's part-time research assistant ever since the Etty days. But now she became his full-time amanuensis. She took dictation, copied Blake's manuscripts, checked facts and dates at the British Museum, and prepared an index.
The book was lucidly organised in 38 short chapters, and Gilchrist sent the first eight to the printers in September 1861. He promised to send in the next batch by November, with the aim of having the complete work in proof by the following spring. But on November 20 1861, Gilchrist wrote to his publisher that he had been unable to send the next "big mass of copy".
He explained that "domestic troubles have during the last month stood in the way". For six weeks his eldest daughter, seven year old Beatrice, had been lying dangerously ill at Cheyne Row with scarlet fever. Anne had insisted on a "rigid quarantine", remaining alone in the child's sickroom to carry out all the nursing herself. A week later, just as little Beatrice began to pull through, Gilchrist was himself struck down. Ten days after he had sent his desperate letter, Alexander Gilchrist slipped into a coma.
Anne later wrote: "The brain was tired with stress of work; the fever burned and devastated like a flaming fire: to four days of delirium succeeded one of exhaustion, of stupor; and then the end; without a word, but not without a look of loving recognition. It was on a wild and stormy night, November 30th 1861, that his spirit took flight."
Alexander Gilchrist died at the age of 33. His great biography of Blake, his labour of love, had been wonderfully researched and written. But it was unfinished.
With her peculiar force and independence, Anne Gilchrist immediately determined to finish the biography for him. Less than a week after Alexander's death, she wrote to Macmillan on December 6 1861: "I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the Book. I was his amanuensis."
She packed up his papers, returned a mass of borrowed pictures and manuscripts, refused Jane's invitation to move in with the Carlyles, and took the children and the unfinished book down to a clapboard cottage in tiny village of Shottermill, a mile from Haslemere in Sussex.
To understand what happened next, we have to turn to Anne Gilchrist's own story. She was born in February 1828 in Gower Street, London, but partly brought up in the country at Colne in Essex. Anne's father was a London lawyer, strict and demanding, who died when she was only 11. From then on, the family were on their own, and Anne was in some sense a liberated spirit. They moved to Highgate, where Anne went to school, a handsome tomboy, clever and rebellious.
In 1847 she was devastated by the death of her "angel brother" Johnnie. A year later, aged 20, she announced her engagement to one of Johnnie's friends, Alexander Gilchrist, "great, noble and beautiful". He was probably a substitute brother. She deeply admired him, but from what she said later, she was never truly in love.
After the birth of their four children she set herself to earn additional household money by writing small pieces for the monthly magazines, and Chambers Encyclopaedia. Unexpectedly, she made a speciality of popular science subjects. Moreover, she was remarkably successful. In 1859, the year of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, she wrote a controversial article on the newly discovered gorilla, "Our Nearest Relation", comparing its skills and habits to homo sapiens.
Anne claimed the work on the biography came to her as a kind of posthumous collaboration. "Alex's spirit is with me ever - presides in my home, speaks to me in every sweet scene; broods over the peaceful valleys; haunts the grand wild hill tops; shines gloriously forth in setting sun, and moon and stars." This may have been true, but she was also driven by other, though no less powerful emotions. Essentially, she seems to have felt guilty about Gilchrist's death.
Nearly a decade later, in September 1871, she wrote a remarkable confession of her own. "I think... my sorrow was far more bitter, though not so deep, as that of a loving tender wife. As I stood by him in the coffin, I felt such remorse [that] I had not, could not have, been more tender to him - such a conviction that if I had loved him as he deserved to be loved he would not have been taken from us. To the last my soul dwelt apart and unmated, and his soul dwelt apart and unmated."
Anne already knew much of Alexander's method of working, and his perfectionism. What she did not know was whether she could match it. She wrote to Macmillan: "Many things were to have been inserted - anecdotes etc. collected during the last year, which he used to say 'would be the best things in the book'. Whether I shall be able to rightly use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fittest places I cannot yet tell."
Who, then, finally wrote Gilchrist's Life of William Blake?
Anne regarded the text of the biography as sacred to Gilchrist's memory. She was its sole guardian. "I think you will not find it hard to forgive me a little reluctance," she wrote to William Rossetti, "that any living tones should blend with that voice which here speaks for the last time on earth."
But how far she herself added new materials from Alexander's notes, or made stylistic changes, must remain problematic. In April 1862 she was speaking of "incorporating all the additional matter contained in the notes" into a final draft, which sounds quite radical. But to the end of her days Anne insisted that she was nothing more than her husband's "editor". Since Gilchrist's original manuscript has not survived, there is no way of knowing precisely how she understood this role.
The Life was finally published in two volumes in October 1863. Two thousand copies were printed, and reviews appeared rapidly. There were some initial doubts whether the biography would, as Anne put it, "shock devout minds". One reviewer observed: "a more timid biographer might have hesitated about making so open an exhibition of his hero's singularities." But it was soon clear that the book would be a triumph. It was widely admired by the entire Pre-Raphaelite circle: Robert Browning wrote a fan letter, and Samuel Palmer spoke for the Ancients when he described it as "a treasure".
The great strengths of the work, which Anne had so faithfully preserved, were quickly apparent. Gilchrist's approach is lively, personal, enthusiastic and often humorous - quite unlike much over-earnest mid-Victorian biography. The quick, informal, darting style of his prose lends a sense of continual discovery and excitement to the narrative, and yet allows for virtuoso passages of description and summary.
He also quotes brilliantly throughout from Blake's own works, both prose and poetry, much of it quite unknown to contemporary readers, such as the early "Notes on Lavater" and the "Proverbs of Hell". He was, too, the first Victorian writer to pick out and reprint in full Blake's great "Jerusalem" hymn from the Preface to Milton, "And did those feet in ancient times".
Gilchrist reverts continually to Blake's visions: calmly asking what exactly they were, how Blake described them, and how they should be accounted for. Much apparently outlandish behaviour, such as the "scandalous" Adam and Eve nude sunbathing incident at Lambeth, is given a reasonable and detailed explanation, in this case with a amusing reminder about the poet Shelley's enthusiasm for the early naturist movement.
Chapter 35, boldly entitled: "Mad or Not Mad?" is in many ways the psychological key to the entire biography. Here Gilchrist carefully defines the "special faculty" of Blake's imagination, and vindicates the profound spiritual sanity of the "gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic". One after another, he calls to witness all Blake's circle of friends, from Flaxman and Fuseli to Palmer and Linnell.
In a robust passage Gilchrist rejects any modish Victorian interpretation of Blake's visions. "No man, by the way, would have been more indifferent or averse than he (wide and tolerant as was his faith in supernatural revelations) towards the table-turning, wainscot-knocking, bosh-propounding 'Spiritualism' of the present hour." Instead Gilchrist finally champions Blake in terms that Carlyle would have recognised: "Does not prophet or hero always seem 'mad' to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world...?"
Gilchrist had a gift for evoking particular London streets, characteristic clusters of buildings or courtyards, and beyond them certain rural landscapes and secluded villages, where Blake had lived and worked. In this way, the biography first gave Blake's extraordinary imaginative life "a local habitation and a name". The descriptions of the gothic interior of Westminster Abbey, or of Hercules Building (and its garden) in Lambeth, or of the cottage and seashore at Felpham and the last, hidden lodgings at Fountain Court are especially evocative. The final picture of Blake "chaunting Songs" to Catherine, as he lay on his deathbed in the little upper room above the Thames, is unforgettable.
Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, with its combative subtitle Pictor Ignotus (The Unknown Painter), is one of the most influential of all the great mid-Victorian biographies. It rescued its subject from almost total obscurity, challenged the notion of Blake's madness, and first defined his genius as both an artist and visionary poet combined. It set the agenda for modern Blake studies and remains the prime source for all modern Blake biographies. It remains wonderfully readable today, and salvaged from death, it still vibrates with extraordinary life.
Yet like so many works of art, it was produced at great cost, and under mysterious conditions. In the absence of an original manuscript of the 1863 biography, the mystery will always remain just how much of this first, ground-breaking text we really owe to Alexander Gilchrist or to Anne; or to some indefinable Blakean collaboration between the two.
· This is an edited extract from Richard Holmes's introduction to The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist, to be published by Harper Perennial in August
· Richard Holmes appears at the Guardian Hay Festival on Friday. Box office 0870 990 1299. www.hayfestival.com
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