William Blake's Networks
Lead Research Organisation:
University of York
Department Name: English and Related Literature
Abstract
William Blake and his wife Catherine never had children. And Blake's own childhood encounters with other children were no doubt limited by his withdrawal from schooling at the age of ten to attend drawing classes. Yet Blake depicted and wrote about children with considerable frequency. For this proposed component of my PhD, I would examine archival, visual and literary material to recuperate a sense firstly of the children that Blake knew and who formed a part of his networks, and secondly of Blake's views on childhood as reflected in his art, poetry and especially his political ideas, comparing and contrasting his attitudes with contemporary political and reformist views on childhood, advanced by figures including Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and Bentham. I shall also consider Blake's relationship to the 'cult of sensibility,' postulating that Blake's views on childhood represent an important encounter between 'sensibility' and political reform. This study would contribute to a larger scholarly attempt-exemplified by G. E. Bentley's important Blake Records (1969) and Angus Whitehead's work (2011-12) on Catherine Blake-to challenge a widespread characterisation of Blake as a completely isolated and melancholic genius existing somehow outside of time.
This study would therefore form an apt component of the York-Tate studentship, and would be well furnished by my on-going interest in the many networks within which Blake operated. For example, my first-class research-essay undertaken at the Warburg Institute on Blake's previously neglected maps in Jerusalem has stimulated my interest in Blake's position within networks of scientists and geographers. Moreover, my art-historical training at the Warburg has equipped me to ground my study with an awareness of the artistic networks that Blake inhabited as a painter and engraver. Advances have been made to establish Blake's workshop practices and, to a degree, his position within the art world (see, e.g., Viscomi, 1993; Sung, 2009), but these considerations still hover on the margins of much Blakean scholarship.
Blake's personal correspondence attests to his connection with children within his network of friends and patrons, and to the indirect but important role that children played in stimulating his artistic production. In a series of letters between Blake and William Hayley in April-May 1800 the men discussed Blake's production of a medallion portrait of Hayley's terminally ill son Thomas Alphonso Hayley, after a design by John Flaxman. Thomas died, aged 19, on 2 May 1800. Blake wrote a letter of condolence on 6 May, wherein he refers to his engraving as 'the Shadow of the departed Angel,' reflecting on his own earlier loss of his younger brother Robert (Keynes, 1956: 43). Blake also executed a tempera portrait and a graphite drawing of Thomas, indicating the strong presence of this departed youth in these years of his career.
In October 1800, Blake and Catherine executed etchings for Hayley's poem Little Tom the Sailor, a broadside ballad conceived in a charitable spirit: 'Printed for & Sold by the Widow Spicer of Folkestone for the benefit of her Orphans: October 5, 1800' (Keynes, 1956: 60), giving some indication of Blake's and Hayley's concern for the welfare of children in need, which also resonates strongly with Blake's poetry.
A few years later, Blake was involved in the production of his friend Benjamin Heath Malkin's A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), designing the frontispiece portrait and engraving the late child Thomas Williams Malkin's map of the fictional realm of 'Allestone'-an image that could also be connected with Blake's lifelong interest in 'visionary' map-making and imaginative geography.
This study would therefore form an apt component of the York-Tate studentship, and would be well furnished by my on-going interest in the many networks within which Blake operated. For example, my first-class research-essay undertaken at the Warburg Institute on Blake's previously neglected maps in Jerusalem has stimulated my interest in Blake's position within networks of scientists and geographers. Moreover, my art-historical training at the Warburg has equipped me to ground my study with an awareness of the artistic networks that Blake inhabited as a painter and engraver. Advances have been made to establish Blake's workshop practices and, to a degree, his position within the art world (see, e.g., Viscomi, 1993; Sung, 2009), but these considerations still hover on the margins of much Blakean scholarship.
Blake's personal correspondence attests to his connection with children within his network of friends and patrons, and to the indirect but important role that children played in stimulating his artistic production. In a series of letters between Blake and William Hayley in April-May 1800 the men discussed Blake's production of a medallion portrait of Hayley's terminally ill son Thomas Alphonso Hayley, after a design by John Flaxman. Thomas died, aged 19, on 2 May 1800. Blake wrote a letter of condolence on 6 May, wherein he refers to his engraving as 'the Shadow of the departed Angel,' reflecting on his own earlier loss of his younger brother Robert (Keynes, 1956: 43). Blake also executed a tempera portrait and a graphite drawing of Thomas, indicating the strong presence of this departed youth in these years of his career.
In October 1800, Blake and Catherine executed etchings for Hayley's poem Little Tom the Sailor, a broadside ballad conceived in a charitable spirit: 'Printed for & Sold by the Widow Spicer of Folkestone for the benefit of her Orphans: October 5, 1800' (Keynes, 1956: 60), giving some indication of Blake's and Hayley's concern for the welfare of children in need, which also resonates strongly with Blake's poetry.
A few years later, Blake was involved in the production of his friend Benjamin Heath Malkin's A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), designing the frontispiece portrait and engraving the late child Thomas Williams Malkin's map of the fictional realm of 'Allestone'-an image that could also be connected with Blake's lifelong interest in 'visionary' map-making and imaginative geography.
