Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
Gilchrist’s perfectionism, always pursuing one more source or reference. But sometimes she felt he would never complete the book at all.
Nonetheless, by late summer 1861, Gilchrist told Macmillan that he had a draft of the whole biography. Although he was continually slipping in extra materials and anecdotes, the basic structure of the book was secure. It was lucidly organized in thirty-eight short chapters, and he was ready to start sending it in batches to the printer, for setting up in proof. This was the usual procedure for a large book.
Macmillan was delighted and urged him to begin. Accordingly, Gilchrist sent the first eight chapters to the printers in September 1861, taking Blake’s Life up to the Poetic Sketches and the ‘Notes on Lavater’ made when Blake had just turned thirty. He promised to send in the next batch by November, with the aim of having the complete work in proof by the following spring. He was under great pressure, but believed that with Anne’s help he could just about fulfil his deadlines.
On 20 November 1861, Gilchrist wrote to his publisher that he had been unable to send the next ‘big mass of copy, consisting of the next dozen or so chapters (taking Blake up to forty and his most productive years). 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. His wife Anne had insisted on a ‘rigid quarantine’, remaining alone in the child’s sickroom to carry out all the nursing herself. There was great fear of infection. Gilchrist was only allowed in once an evening, to make up the fire, while Anne stood back by the window. Meanwhile, he tried to look after the other three young children with the help of one (frequently drunk) domestic.
At the end of his letter, Gilchrist unburdened himself to his publisher.
We have been in great misery at times, aggravated by our having a doctor in whom we had not implicit confidence…My wife has during all this time been confined to the sickroom, without help!…Of hired nurses we have a horror, our friends have mostly children and others regard for whom makes them dread crossing the threshold of a scarlatina infected house. Forgive this closing matter.
Yours faithfully,
Alexander Gilchrist.
A week later, just as his little daughter Beatrice began to pull through, Gilchrist was himself struck down. Jane Carlyle sent notes offering help to Anne, and Thomas Carlyle brought a fashionable physician, who looked at Gilchrist from the distance of the sickroom door and hastily departed. After that, events unfolded quickly. Ten days after he had sent his desperate, apologetic letter to his publisher Macmillan, 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 widiout a look of loving recognition. It was on a wild and stormy night, 30 November 1861, that his spirit took flight.’
Alexander Gilchrist died at the age of thirty-three. His great biography of Blake, his labour of love, had been wonderfully researched and written in draft. But it was unfinished.
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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 6 December 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 had always been an independent spirit. She was born Annie Burrows in February 1828 in Gower Street, London, but was partly brought up in the country at Colne in Essex. Here, when she was nine years old, her beloved elder brother Johnnie saved her life. The incident, as re-told, has a curious fairy-tale-like quality. While exploring a secret part of the garden, little Annie fell backwards into a deep well, and would have certainly drowned, had not Johnnie reached down and just managed to hold her up by the hair, until help finally came. Over thirty years later she put this strangely symbolic tale of survival into a children’s story, Lost in the Woods (1861).
Anne’s father was a London lawyer, strict and demanding, who died aged fifty-one in 1839, when she was only eleven. 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. She was musical, well-read, and free-thinking. At seventeen she was surprised by the local vicar, when reading Rousseau’s sexually explicit Confessions on a tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. Embarrassment was avoided (according to Anne) when the vicar misheard the title as St Augustine’s Confessions.
At nineteen she became fascinated by scientific ideas, a further unladylike development. She announced to a friend that the intellectual world was divided between Emerson and Comte, between the spiritual and the materialist, and she was tending towards the latter.
In 1847 (the year Rossetti bought the Blake manuscript), she was devastated by the death of her ‘angel brother’, Johnnie. A year later, aged twenty, she announced her engagement to one of Johnnie’s friends, a handsome young law student, Alexander Gilchrist, ‘great, noble and beautiful’. In a way, he was probably a substitute brother. She deeply admired him, but from what she said later, she was never truly in love. What Alexander offered was the chance of freedom and independence. Their unorthodox Etty honeymoon was a promise of things to come.
After the birth of their four children – Percy, Beatrice, Herbert, and Grace – she set herself to earn additional household money by writing small pieces for the monthly magazines, and Chambers Encyclopaedia. The first of these, ‘A Glance at the Vegetable Kingdom’, was published in Chambers in spring 1857, shortly after they moved into Cheyne Row.
Unexpectedly, Anne made a specialty of popular science subjects. Moreover, she was remarkably successful. In 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, she wrote a controversial article on the newly discovered gorilla, ‘Our Nearest Relation’, comparing its skills and habits to homo sapiens. It was published in Charles Dickens’ magazine, All the Year Round. Next she wrote on Whales and Whaling’, and in the following years she produced several further young person’s guides to scientific topics: What is Electricity?’, ‘What is a Sunbeam?’, and The Indestructibility of Force’. Her ability to research, organize and explain technical subjects for the general reader was highly unusual.
Her role as Gilchrist’s amanuensis was therefore more that it might superficially appear. She seems to have become a genuine literary partner. Anne claimed the subsequent 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. She felt that she had never been his true wife. 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 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.’
Her drive to complete his biography of Blake was, therefore, far more than a show of pious sentiment, a widow’s tender offering. It was more like an uneasy debt of honour, the recognition of a difficult but sacred trust. Anne already knew much of Alexander’s