59 Fun Facts About William Blake

In which London district was William Blake born in 1757?

Blake was born in Soho on 28 November 1757, at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street); the house was demolished long ago.

What was the trade of Blake's father, James?

James Blake was a hosier, selling stockings and gloves from the family shop at 28 Broad Street; William was his third child, and two of the siblings died in infancy.

At what age did Blake leave school, after which his mother educated him at home?

Blake left school at 10, taught afterwards by his mother at home, and was soon enrolled at a drawing school in the Strand.

As a boy on Peckham Rye, Blake claimed to have seen a tree filled with what?

Blake said he saw a tree on Peckham Rye filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough; his father nearly thrashed him for lying until his mother intervened.

Which Old Testament prophet did the young Blake claim had visited him?

Blake told of seeing the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree in a field; at about four he had also seen God put his head to the window.

To which engraver was Blake apprenticed for seven years from 1772?

Blake was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver of Great Queen Street, from 4 August 1772; his father paid £52.10, and Blake later listed Basire among his artistic enemies, then crossed him out.

Sketching the monuments of which building during his apprenticeship shaped Blake's Gothic style?

Sent by his master to draw the medieval tombs in Westminster Abbey, Blake absorbed the Gothic style that shaped his art; a bronze bust of him by Jacob Epstein stands in Poets' Corner.

In June 1780 Blake was swept along by a mob that stormed Newgate Prison during which upheaval?

The Gordon Riots of June 1780, anti-Catholic riots provoked by the Papists Act of 1778, burned Newgate Prison and freed its prisoners; Blake was reportedly carried along at the front of the crowd.

Which institution's founding president, Joshua Reynolds, did the student Blake rebel against in 1779?

Blake entered the Royal Academy schools in October 1779 and despised its first president Joshua Reynolds, yet exhibited there himself, first in 1780 with The Death of Earl Goodwin.

In which church did Blake marry Catherine Boucher in August 1782?

Blake married Catherine Boucher at St Mary's, Battersea, on 18 August 1782; he had met her there the year before, nursing a rejected courtship, and won her by asking 'Do you pity me?'

How did the illiterate Catherine sign her wedding contract?

Catherine Boucher, then illiterate, signed the marriage register with an X; Blake later taught her to read and write, and she helped colour his illuminated books.

What was Blake's first poetry collection, published around 1783 after a dinner-party recital won him patrons?

Poetical Sketches, Blake's juvenile verse, was printed in 1783 after he recited and sang it at the Mathews' salon; John Flaxman and the Rev. A. S. Mathew paid for the printing.

What printing method did Blake invent in 1788, at the age of 31?

Relief etching, which Blake called illuminated printing, raised text and design together on the copper plate; he used it for most of his later books, colouring the pages by hand.

How many poems were in the original Songs of Innocence, first printed in 1789?

The 1789 Songs of Innocence contained 23 poems; four of them, including The Little Girl Lost, were later moved into Songs of Experience, which followed in 1794.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is subtitled 'Shewing the Two Contrary States' of what?

The full title is Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul; Innocence is pastoral, Experience answers it with corruption and injustice.

'The Tyger' was written as the counterpart to which poem from Songs of Innocence?

The Tyger is the Experience counterpart of The Lamb from Songs of Innocence, asking outright 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?'

What metre is 'The Tyger' largely written in?

The Tyger is written mainly in trochaic tetrameter, four stressed-unstressed feet as in 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright', usually with the final unstressed syllable dropped.

Blake's title The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an ironic reference to a book by which theologian?

Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1758) supplied the title; Blake's Marriage, begun about 1790, attacks him directly, declaring that Swedenborg 'has not written one new truth'.

The most famous section of Blake's 1790s Marriage is a list of aphorisms known by what title?

The Proverbs of Hell, around 70 aphorisms such as 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom', are the Marriage's best-known section; Blake's Hell is unrepressed energy, not punishment.

Aldous Huxley took the title of which book from a line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?

Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) takes its title from Blake's line 'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite'.

In Blake's mythology, which bearded figure embodies conventional reason and law?

Urizen, the bearded lawgiver of Blake's myth, embodies restrictive reason; he is pictured with nets and measuring tools, binding humanity in webs of law.

Blake's design The Ancient of Days first appeared as the frontispiece to which 1794 work?

The Ancient of Days was the frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy (1794), showing a bearded creator crouched within a sun, reaching down to measure the void below.

Blake's 1795 print Newton shows the scientist drawing on a scroll with which instrument?

Newton (1795) shows the scientist bent over a scroll, drawing a geometric figure with a compass, absorbed in measurement and blind to the rock and the world around him.

Blake's Newton is one of twelve large colour prints that also includes images of which Babylonian king?

Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king crawling naked on all fours in his madness, is one of Blake's twelve large colour prints of 1795, the series that includes Newton.

Which sculptor's 1995 bronze Newton, after William Blake stands in the British Library piazza?

Eduardo Paolozzi's bronze Newton, after William Blake (1995) turns Blake's colour print into a three-dimensional seated figure bent over his measurements in the British Library piazza.

In which Sussex village did Blake spend his only three years outside London?

Felpham, near Bognor on the Sussex coast, was Blake's home from September 1800 to 1803, the only years he spent away from London.

In 1800 Blake moved to a Sussex cottage to illustrate the works of which minor poet?

William Hayley, a popular but minor poet, brought Blake to Sussex in 1800 to engrave illustrations for his books; Blake came to resent him as wanting only 'the meer drudgery of business'.

A soldier's claim that Blake shouted what led to his 1804 trial for sedition?

The soldier John Scolfield swore Blake had said 'Damn the King' while ejecting him from his garden in August 1803; Blake was acquitted at Chichester Quarter Sessions in January 1804.

The poem now sung as the hymn 'Jerusalem' comes from the preface to which of Blake's epics?

He began the work in his Felpham cottage; its title page is dated 1804.

Who set 'And did those feet in ancient time' to music in 1916?

Hubert Parry composed the setting in March 1916 for a Fight for Right meeting at Queen's Hall, despite misgivings about the movement's jingoism; he later withdrew his support.

Whose 1922 orchestration of 'Jerusalem' is usually heard at the Last Night of the Proms?

Edward Elgar orchestrated the hymn for a very large orchestra for the 1922 Leeds Festival, and his version became the standard one heard at the Last Night of the Proms.

Which organisation held the copyright of the hymn 'Jerusalem' from 1928 to 1968?

The composer gave the copyright to the suffragists' NUWSS in 1918; when that body wound up it passed in 1928 to the Women's Institutes, who kept it until it expired in 1968.

The Albion Flour Mills, often linked to Blake's 'dark Satanic Mills', stood in which district?

The Albion Mills stood in Southwark beside Blackfriars Bridge, across the river from Blake's later home; the steam-driven factory burned in March 1791 and its ruin is often tied to 'dark Satanic Mills'.

Which political party used 'Jerusalem' as a campaign slogan in the 1945 general election?

Labour campaigned in 1945 under the banner of building 'a new Jerusalem', Clement Attlee's promise of a welfare state that swept the party to power.

Which king said on first hearing the orchestral 'Jerusalem' that he preferred it to 'God Save the King'?

George V reportedly said, on hearing the 1922 orchestral version, that he preferred 'Jerusalem' to 'God Save the King'; it has often been proposed as England's anthem.

Blake's 1809 exhibition was meant to sell an engraving of characters from which work?

Blake's 1809 exhibition at the family shop in Broad Street promoted an engraving of the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales; its one review, in The Examiner, called him a lunatic.

Which patron bought many of Blake's Bible illustrations, seeing him more as a friend than a serious artist?

Thomas Butts, a clerk in the Commissary of Musters, bought Blake's biblical watercolours and temperas for years, valuing him as a friend more than as an artist, the common view in Blake's lifetime.

Which young artist, met in 1818, commissioned Blake's late masterpieces including the Dante engravings?

John Linnell, a painter thirty-five years Blake's junior, met him in 1818 and paid for the great projects of his last decade, including the Dante series; a plaque at Old Wyldes, Hampstead, remembers them both.

How many of Blake's Dante engravings had reached proof when he died in 1827?

Only seven of the planned Dante engravings reached proof state before Blake died in August 1827; the 102 watercolours for the series were mostly unfinished.

Samuel Palmer belonged to a group of young Blake admirers who called themselves what?

The Ancients, often called the Shoreham Ancients after the Kent village where Palmer lived, were young painters including Edward Calvert and George Richmond who revered Blake as a prophet.

The Ghost of a Flea was painted for 'Visionary Heads' commissioned by which watercolourist and astrologer?

The two men held late-night sessions in which Varley tried to summon historical spirits for Blake to draw.

The Ghost of a Flea is notable for its innovative use of what?

Blake painted The Ghost of a Flea in tempera heightened with gold leaf on a mahogany panel only about 21 by 16 cm; the gold gives the creature's scales their glitter.

Where did Blake spend his final years, in a property later demolished for the Savoy Hotel?

Blake lived from 1821 at 3 Fountain Court, off the Strand, and died there on 12 August 1827, singing of what he saw in heaven and promising Catherine he would always be near.

Blake was buried in which burial ground for religious dissenters, alongside Bunyan and Defoe?

Bunhill Fields in Finsbury, the dissenters' burial ground, holds Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe; Blake was buried there in an unmarked common grave on 17 August 1827.

Blake's true grave was finally marked in which year?

The Blake Society laid a new stone on the exact grave on 12 August 2018, the 191st anniversary of his death, after years of research into the burial records; the older marker stands some 20 metres away.

Which Irish poet edited an edition of Blake's collected works in 1893 and drew on him for ideas?

W.B. Yeats, with Edwin Ellis, edited a three-volume Works of William Blake in 1893 and absorbed Blake's symbolism into his own mystical system.

Which poet said Blake's madness interested him 'more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott'?

William Wordsworth's remark, recorded by the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, was that Blake's madness interested him more than the sanity of Byron and Scott; Wordsworth had copied several of Blake's Songs into his commonplace book.

Blake believed his artworks were personally commissioned, read and enjoyed by whom?

Blake wrote that archangels instructed and encouraged him to make his works and that the same archangels read and enjoyed them; he described visions from childhood to his deathbed.

Which uncompleted prophetic book, begun in 1797, is the first to name the Four Zoas?

Vala, begun in 1797 and never finished, introduces the four Zoas, the aspects into which the primal man Albion split at his fall; Blake kept revising the manuscript for a decade.

Which 2019 exhibition gave particular focus to Catherine Blake's role in her husband's work?

Tate Britain's 2019 exhibition, the largest Blake show in a generation, highlighted Catherine Blake as the partner who printed, mixed colours and coloured his illuminated books.

Blake had great hopes for the French Revolution and reportedly wore what in solidarity?

Gilchrist records that Blake alone among his circle dared to wear the Phrygian cap, the red bonnet of liberty, in the London streets; he put it away for good after the September Massacres of 1792.

Which 1960s rock frontman is among the songwriters who cited Blake as an influence?

Jim Morrison of The Doors drew on Blake, whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell supplied, via Huxley, the band's name; Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Allen Ginsberg also cited him.

Which artist ran the drawing school in the Strand that the young Blake attended?

Henry Pars ran the drawing school in the Strand where Blake studied from 1767, copying casts of antique sculpture; his father also bought him prints and plaster casts.

Which dealer, hearing Blake's plan for a pilgrims picture, hired Thomas Stothard to paint it instead?

Robert Cromek, an engraver turned publisher, took Blake's idea for a picture of the pilgrims to Thomas Stothard in 1806; Blake, feeling robbed, broke with both and staged his own 1809 exhibition.

Roughly how many copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience had Blake sold by the time he died?

Blake sold fewer than 30 copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in his lifetime; each was printed, hand-coloured and stitched at home, which kept the output tiny.

Vaughan Williams's 1931 masque for dancing was based on Blake's illustrations of which biblical book?

Blake's engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job, published in 1826, inspired Vaughan Williams's Job: A Masque for Dancing of 1931; Ruskin ranked their handling of flickering light above Rembrandt's.

Which acquaintance allegedly burned Blake manuscripts he thought heretical after joining the Irvingites?

Frederick Tatham, a young sculptor who became Catherine Blake's employer and heir, joined the Irvingite church and is said to have destroyed manuscripts he judged blasphemous.

In Blake's mythology, which of the Four Zoas represents the heart and love?

Luvah is the Zoa of the heart, love and passion, whose fallen form is Orc; the other three govern reason, the senses and the imagination.

Blake was baptised at St James's Church, Piccadilly, even though his family belonged to which sect?

The Blakes were English Dissenters, and Blake himself was eventually buried among dissenters at Bunhill Fields.