In December 2024 I received the fantastic news that I had been awarded a Stephen Copley award by BARS, allowing me to travel to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to explore their extensive Blake collection. As my thesis was due to be submitted at the end of March the following year, this information came at an opportune moment: offering the promise of a break from writing which would also be extremely beneficial to my research. I certainly couldn’t think of a better way to reinvigorate my PhD project as it approached its ending than immersing myself in some of Blake’s manuscripts, preparatory sketches, and completed illuminated works. It would certainly be more useful than the endless coffees, and the increasingly long sessions staring out of the window, that had punctuated my writing sessions at the time.
By mid-February 2025 I found myself walking to the Fitzwilliam in the morning sunshine, still cold but hinting towards the end of what seemed like a particularly long winter. After navigating the museum’s exhibition spaces, making a mental note to return to them at the end of the working day, I arrived at the research room. Waiting there was Blake’s An Island in the Moon manuscript, completed sometime between 1784 and 1785, which would occupy me for the first day’s research.
Some of the poems which would make their way into Songs of Innocence (1789) began in this work, including ‘Holy Thursday’ and ‘The Little Boy lost’. Blake’s earlier manuscript, however, stands in stark contrast to the pastoral quality of the Songs. An Island satirises the company the young Blake encountered at gatherings held by Reverend and Mrs Mathew in the early 1780s and is characterised by a polyphony of voices and by various references to London’s intellectual, political, and cultural life. In my thesis, I contend that the Songs are more consciously constructed than often stated, that Blake’s immersion in various visual modes as a commercial engraver in the 1780s and the pre-existence of the London-centric An Island allows us to view the Songs in a metropolitan as well as pastoral context. By looking through the manuscript of An Island in the Moon, I was hoping to find textual or visual which would provide an illuminating counterpoint to the highly finished nature of the Songs.
Strikingly, in the section where Blake articulates ‘Holy Thursday’ for the first time (via his character “Obtuse Angle”), Blake erased a significant section of the text by utilising a swirling line which, when viewed in the context of the poem’s description of thousands of charity school children descending upon St Paul’s Cathedral, evokes the idea of a crowd. Where in Songs of Innocence, Blake’s visualises the children as distinct beings, supported by the vine-like sinews of the poem’s text, the manuscript creates the sense of an indistinguishable mass. This visual transformation – the extraction of distinct individuals from a faceless crowd between the two versions of the poem – reflects in various senses my argument that Blake’s Songs stage “picturesque” snapshots of urban society which downplay their economic or social underpinning. This detail in the manuscript counterposes the visual aspects of ‘Holy Thursday’ in the Songs, undermining the self-contained quality of this later work and opening it to other textual and contextual influences.
Reading through this manuscript also reinforced how immersed Blake was in the cultural and social energies of London in the period. Unflattering references to Sir Joshua Reynolds, passing mentions of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and depictions of contemporary scientific demonstrations at the Royal Society all combined to reinforce that Blake’s manuscript emerged from the pen of someone fully engaged in the life of the capital. After spending hours working through the flowing lines of An Island in the Moon, I left the Fitzwilliam with a fuller sense of Blake as a figure situated in a particular time and place, whose illuminated works tell only a partial story of his engagements with his contemporary London.
After a good night’s rest (and a questionable croissant) I returned to the Fitzwilliam the next day, ready to explore Blake’s preparatory sketches for his Book of Job engravings (1823-26). These works were sketched from two sets of earlier watercolours based on the same theme, one for Thomas Butts completed in 1805 and 1806 and one for John Linnell in 1821. Blake’s later engravings differ from the original watercolours in various ways, not least in the intricate borders traced around the images themselves. In viewing these preparatory sketches, I was hoping to gain a better understanding of how the later engravings (which I discuss in Chapter 4 of my thesis) came to find their final form. Seeing these works, roughly sketched in pencil by the elderly Blake, was fascinating in itself, but of particular interest was Blake’s sketch for ‘Job and his Daughters’.
In Blake’s initial watercolour for Butts, Job sits surrounded by his daughters in an outdoor setting. In his later watercolour for Linnell, however, Job sits in a shadowy room, where we can faintly discern some artworks on the furthest wall behind him and his daughters. Blake’s final engraving, however, reveal these artworks fully, showing them to be distinctly Blakean in their composition and encouraging us to draw parallels between Job’s struggles and Blake’s life-long attempts to realise his visions artistically. The preparatory sketch of this final engraving, which I saw up close at the Fitzwilliam, represents the moment in this sequence when Blake seems to pay close attention to this back wall for the first time. This sketch, despite its apparent hastiness, represents an integral moment in Blake’s self-mythologising, it is an important iteration in a series of images tracing the power of the creative act.
After finishing pouring through these sketches, and spending lunch looking through the Fitzwilliam’s wonderful public displays, I returned to the research room to focus on Jerusalem (1804-c.1820), Blake’s longest illuminated poem. I have a particular interest in its frontispiece, which in Copy E depicts the central figure (often identified as Blake’s prophetic figure Los) as a London Watchman. The Fitzwilliam holds two alternative printings of this plate, which allowed me to explore differences between Los as Watchman in Copy E (which I discuss in Chapter 2 of my thesis) and these other renderings of the image. Strikingly, one of these frontispieces (an early printing which has an impression from Europe on the verso) retains various words which are missing from later printings. One quote, stating that Los enters the “Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired”, directly addresses the pictorial aspects of the frontispiece, a discovery which was allowed me to utilise Blake’s own words when describing the significance of this print in my thesis. After some time tracing the differences between these frontispieces, I turned to Copy H of the full poem. Although I was familiar with many of the images in this work, seeing a bound copy of it (printed in 1832 after Blake’s death) was a singular experience. Page after page of intricate textual and visual detail, often interweaving one within the other, washed over me as the day declined outside and my research trip came towards its end.
Overall, this research trip was incredibly useful in allowing me to consult rare archival works which added another dimension to my doctoral research, and which will prove immeasurably useful as I attempt to publish my findings. I would like to thank the BARS committee for making this journey possible, and to all at the Fitzwilliam Museum who were so helpful during my stay in Cambridge.
Jake Elliott is an ECR who has just submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Roehampton. His work explores how William Blake’s depictions of London reflect and resist other contemporary visualisations of the city. He has recently returned from a three-month, UKRI funded fellowship at the Huntington Library in California, and his article “Blake’s ‘Watchman’: Los and the London Police” was published in the European Romantic Review in August 2024.