Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
certain points of controversy. She slightly shortened the Adam and Eve’ incident in Chapter 12, in deference to its supposed immorality. She also removed some of Alexander’s reflection on the sexual symbolism of The Daughters of Albion’, the old point of disagreement with Macmillan and ‘flustered Propriety’. Finally she censored a few of his more vivid but risqué phrases, such as the memorable reference to the music hall nude shows near Fountain Court.
Altogether the addition of the new letters, together with Anne’s expanded quotations from the Prophetic Books, and her prudential cuts, gave the second edition of 1880 greater authority as a work of reference. But it also damaged much of its original charm and energy as a biography.
The second edition was longer, slower and more ponderous. The elegant, lively narrative structure with its short concentrated chapters, as Alexander had originally devised it, was weakened and made more conventional. It lost something of the passionate excitement and directness of its original youthful conception. Ironically for all Anne’s sense of holding a sacred trust to her husband’s work, Alexander’s own voice is muted and dissipated. The second edition became more like a standard high Victorian volume of Life and Letters.
Nonetheless, the edition of 1880 continued the task of reestablishing Blake’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Praise for Gilchrist’s heroic work was now universal, and Walt Whitman for one, saluted the rise of a new informal English style of biography, comparing it to the work of J.A. Froude. The Blake book is charming for the same reason that we find Froude’s Carlyle fascinating – it is minute, it presents the man as he was, it gathers together little things ordinarily forgotten; portrays the man as he walked, talked, worked, in his simple capacity as a human being. It is just in such touches – such significant details – that the profounder, conclusive, art of biographical narrative lies.’
Anne would still make no claims other than that of being ‘editor’ of Alexander’s work. Instead she added a long and passionate Memoir, praising his supreme dedication as a biographer. In it she made this thoughtful observation: ‘If I could briefly sketch a faithful portrait of Blake’s biographer, the attempt would need no apology, for if the work be of interest, so is the worker. A biographer necessarily offers himself as the mirror in which his hero is reflected; and we judge all the better of the truth and adequacy of the image by a closer acquaintance with the medium through which it comes to us.’ In the use of that one word ‘medium’, she might, at least unconsciously, have been calling attention to herself.
7
Anne Gilchrist later wrote the Blake entry for Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, and also a well-judged Life of Mary Lamb for the new and influential Eminent Women of Letters series, published by Allen Lane in 1883. She had other literary plans, including Lives of Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. But her heart was broken by the sudden and tragic death of her favourite daughter Beatrice.
This was the child they had nursed through scarlet fever at Cheyne Row, while Alexander was struggling to complete the biography. She was always closely associated in Anne’s mind with the early shared work on Blake. True to her mother’s early leanings towards science, Beatrice had been training in Edinburgh to qualify as one of Britain’s first women doctors. Possibly as the result of an unhappy love affair, she committed suicide at the age of twenty-five by taking cyanide in July 1881. Anne Gilchrist never really recovered from the death of Beatrice, so shortly after the publication of the second edition of Blake. She contracted cancer and died at Hampstead four years later in November 1885, aged only fifty-three, all her other literary plans unfulfilled.
Gilchrist’s original 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.
The text printed here is that of the first edition of 1863, together with the letters to Thomas Butts in an Appendix.
| 1757 | (28 November) Blake born at 28 Broad Street, Soho, London |
| 1766 | Sees angels on Peckham Rye |
| 1782 | Marries Catherine Boucher in Battersea |
| 1784 | Death of father, opens his own printshop |
| 1787 | Death of beloved brother Robert, aged 19 |
| 1789 | Fall of the Bastille in Paris. Engraves Songs of Innocence |
| 1790 | Writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Moves to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth |
| 1793 | Engraves Visions of the Daughters of Albion |
| 1794 | Songs of Innocence and of Experience |
| 1800 | Moves to cottage in Felpham, Sussex |
| 1803 | Returns to London, to 17 South Molton Street |
| 1804 | Tried for sedition and treason at Chichester Begins to write and engrave Jerusalem |
| 1807 | Quarrels with Cromek |
| 1809 | His Exhibition and Descriptive Catalogue, criticized as ‘insane’ Beginning of Blake’s lost decade |
| 1810 | Engraves Milton, with the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ in Preface |
| 1811 | Article by Crabb Robinson, ‘William Blake, Painter, Poet and Religious Dreamer’ published in Germany |
| 1817 | Aged sixty |
| 1818 | Befriended by the young painter John Linnell |
| 1820 | Finishes Jerusalem, his last Prophetic Book, and illustrates Virgil’s Pastorals |
| 1821 | Moves to 3 Fountain Court, Strand |
| 1824 | Adopted by his young disciples, ‘the Ancients’ (including Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham) |
| 1825 | Interviewed by Crabb Robinson, and visited by Coleridge |
| 1826 | Illustrates the Book of Job and Pilgrim’s Progress |
| 1827 | Starts to illustrate Dante’s Divina Comedia Blake dies on 12 August |
| 1828 |
Alexander Gilchrist born at Newington Green, London Anne Burrows born in |