Book Archives - William Blake poet artist visionary radical

‘All Things Begin and End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore’

Finding Blake creator and filmmaker James Murray-White reviews two recent books on Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’, from Jason Whittaker and Edwin John Lerner, exploring Blake’s work and its adaptations as both story and as mental fight.

I’m [re]minded to start this review of two recent books on Blake’s Jerusalem after hearing further controversy on the radio this morning of the trustees of Blake’s cottage in Felpham — where William and Catherine lived between 1800-1803, and he wrote the words for the poem — appealing for further funds (£3 million, I believe) to save the structure from collapse. I have mixed feelings about this trend for writers’ houses to become shrines, unless they offer something really different and entirely in keeping with the visions and aspirations of the artist who lived and created there. The original ambitions of these trustees, at least on their website, were articulated very curiously and boldly, but as time has progressed, while their ownership of the cottage is secure this mirrors the bricks, mortar, beams and thatch becoming more precarious, and the whole project has become more mired in human shenanigans. And now this further appeal for cash.

But, I’ll return to that later.

Professor Jason Whittaker’s book, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the fight for Englishness, is a big, bold exploration that uses Blake’s work as a touchstone for a look at what constitutes Englishness today. I’m a big fan and friend of Jason’s — I admire his journey as a scholar through ‘popular’ culture and his brilliant articulation of how creativity holds the mirror up to us, for better and often for worse. His work in Blake studies, most notably the website Zoamorphosis has been truly inspiring. Particularly the groundbreaking, immediately post-lockdown online Blake symposium, Global Blake, which brought scholars from all over the world and so many disciplines together in virtual space to show how Blake’s work and the artist’s presence in the world has touched into and influenced so many corners, people, and places. And as I type I remember there are many presentations I want to return to and watch again on their archive. ‘Finding Blake’ was screened as part of the event, with a Q&A between Jason and me available somewhere there too.

The second book in this beautiful mix is Jerusalem: The story of a song by Edwin John Lerner. A tour guide and writer from Sussex, he wrote it during lockdown after having been invited into the cottage by the trustees. Lerner articulates his love of the myths of King Arthur and Glastonbury, and indeed the publisher, Chronos, is a historical non-fiction imprint.

So right from the off, I note we are dealing with both a ‘story’ (Lerner), and a ‘fight’ (Whittaker), and am intrigued where both may lead us. I love that two books on this deep subject arrive at roughly the same time — and hopefully, more to come.

Englishness — imagination and aspiration

Starting with Lerner’s Jerusalem, the author quickly flies through a useful potted history of Blake’s life and times, describing his journeying between London and Felpham and back — no more or less than other biographies but with a more specific look at the writing of the epic poem itself in Chapter 8, ‘Journeying to Jerusalem’. He then unleashes what is clearly his true passion; a deeper history of the place and mythological culture of Glastonbury, with all the legends and layered perspectives upon this wonderful Somerset town.

There is so much within this book, it’s clear he has much to share and bottomless energy to delve away into whatever takes his fancy. I learned so much about the composers Elgar and Parry — more than I feel I needed to. I found irksome the amount of space he devotes to the film Calendar Girls: it randomly crops up as an aside in the introduction, then gets almost a whole chapter later. Again, the connection between the original ownership of the song by the Women’s Institute and how they have used it, and as a metaphor for women’s suffrage, in Lerner’s hands all this history becomes too dense.

Given that the Finding Blake project on our website here has been developed because of the finding of the location of Blake’s mortal remains, I was dismayed to read his aside about this tremendous piece of detective work by Luis and Carol Garrido as “rather morbid” (p.14). Finding the location of the remains and the history of how they came to be lost, has in my opinion, sparked a wave of new interest in Blake since 2018, and has been entirely positive in bringing his legacy higher in the mind’s eye of the cultured public. It has also brought interest in Catherine, his wife and muse, which I feel has catalysed the Blake Society to also get behind honouring her remains with a new grave, and promoting her as well.

That aside, Lerner is a gifted storyteller, with a passion to weave his knowledge together and bring us a layered backdrop to how the poem became a song, and how it has filtered through elements of society, class, culture — and all our peculiar British institutionalisation of ourselves — with all the ramifications of imagination and aspiration, and how we all may interpret differently.

What I feel he doesn’t do well is filter out some of the padding, or hone all this research down into a strong and cohesive narrative. Where he writes to excess on the history and outcomes of the three Olympic Games London has hosted, he loses this reader. When he is sleuthing around Elgar’s house, Brinkwells, in deepest wooded Sussex, or Parry’s Grade 1 listed 800-year-old pile, Shulbrede Priory, Lerner brings colour to his mapping, but I wonder if he’s just filling more pages for the sake of it.

“… the words of Jerusalem are easy to remember and it was not too much of a stretch to shoehorn them into an anthem sung to promote the cause of female suffrage. That is the great beauty of Jerusalem: it could be adopted by radicals and conservatives alike, both camps finding something in it to support their preferences. Radicals love Blake’s mystical worldview and his outsider status. Conservatives love the patriotism. Both sides enjoy belting out a good song.” (p. 77)

England cricket’s ‘Barmy Army’ performing ‘Jerusalem’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpScDWXEkFY

A second Bleakean clip on the radio this morning touches into this deep dive: ‘The Barmy Army’ are musical supporters of the English cricket team, cheering the team on and buoying up the crowd of supporters. As the Test Match is underway, Billy was invited on to national morning radio to play Jerusalem on trumpet — to inspire the rest of us to continue with “mental fight”?

I will not cease from mental fight

Mental fight: Showing the cover of Jason Wjittaker's book, 'Jerusalem'

Whittaker’s book, however, is much more details-focused and, with his academic eye and gift for exposition, is framed upon his argument that Blake and Parry’s versions of Jerusalem are both strange and at the same time familiar to those who invoke its vision. Whittaker is not shy from getting into the Brexit debate and seeking to untangle the poem/hymn from its use in that thorny arena, and its hijacking by a right-wing agenda for a nationalist view of what might constitute Englishness. Here’s a scholar willing to use his skills in a fight to rescue a cultural hijack.

Before he unpicks that, I really like chapter 5: ‘Bring me my bow: Empire’s End 1945-1976’, as he gets into the diversity of representations of the song across many mediums. He has done extensive listening to probably every recording and rendition, from folk versions (I looked for ages for British folk busker Don Partridge’s version but alas could not find it), to how it has been used in various films, theatre productions — including the magnificent ‘Jerusalem’ (2009) by Jez Butterworth, also reviewed by me on this site — books and every medium that exists. The level of detail he pours into this is extraordinary, and he makes his research a seamless river of creativity, with every nuance explored — from David Bowie and Mark E. Smith, to Morrissey’s caustic interventions.

He clearly differentiates between highbrow and pop culture, and uses of the words and themes, and dives into what resonates. I share this quote from singer Chris Wood, whose 2013 version I deeply love:

“It’s not the voice of many but a solitary voice. It’s the voice of a human reaching into himself to find a reason to carry on. The voice of a man shaken by the depth of indifference the world has for him and all that he believes in.” Chris Wood, None The Wiser.

There’s a willingness throughout the work that is not afraid to highlight the darkness inherent in Blake’s vision, which Parry’s hymn largely glossed over in its big-picture pitch for identity rooted in place. Whittaker knows it in Blake’s bigger work, and crucially he highlights where artists (of all genres) find it too and respond to it, as with Wood, and Marc Almond’s 2014 The Tyburn Tree (Dark London) (with John Harle). I’d like to highlight his elucidation of the inspiring writer Ben Okri’s 1999 poetry collection Mental Fight, which universalises Blake’s desire into a clarion call “to everyone, especially those who have been oppressed in any way, to engage in mental fight, to rise from a fallen state into redemption”.

Whittaker works hard to rebut the darkness of Blake-Parry’s hymn being adopted by the far right as well as the lumpen middle (in my view exemplified as much by the paradox of ‘New Labour’ as by the current Conservative government and the dying kicks of capitalism itself) and then dissects its tragic entwining around the paradigm of Brexit, and where the reality of this leaves us culturally with all our human friends in any other country around this world.

To zoom in upon the specifics, back to Felpham and the area around Blake’s cottage and the origin of the work, I find it tragic to read that:

“The Arun District, of which Felpham is a part, voted by nearly two-thirds to leave the EU in 2016, one of many towns and regions dissatisfied with modern life, part of which dissatisfaction was the desire to ‘take back control’ of a modern world which seemed to have changed beyond all recognition.” (p. 194)

Awake! Awake! Awake!

I lived in the city of Jerusalem for five years, and while my time there felt very vibrant and energising, the divisions within the city — nationalities, contested spaces, polarities between right and left, religious and secular, notions of ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’ — and (for me) the impact of all this upon the land and all the natural resources, made me examine this intense focus upon this place, and the value of that.

Whittaker refers to the “multiple battle lines” of the fight for the meaning of Englishness. Blake wasn’t wanting to replicate a place but something inherent in its spiritual underpinning, and this now to me feels an issue that Parry’s version ignores, or that much of the recent appropriations fail to see. The aim and ethos were never about a physicality, but about our shared humanness and the values we have as a species. And whether we have enough integrity and connection to the divine to ascend those steps or staircase into Blake’s vision of the eternal. It’s crucial to stress the brilliance in Blake’s work at pointing us to an interiority that needs to be found — the mental fight, and wielding the sword within, and without. Awake! Awake! Awake!

Concluding, I think again of the cottage in Felpham where Blake birthed this epic.

While Jerusalem is entwined with our cultural psyche, as explored through these two works, what of the bricks and mortar, with its mixed history and its place in the present, and all the future dreaming that creatives, directors, architects and historians can do? Is it simply about the money, or the will? Does three million quid to save, restore and revamp feel justified right now? I don’t need to write of the straitened times of this age, as we’re all in it and swamped or touched in some way. Britain right now feels divided, and the national psyche ruptured. Awake! Awake! Awake!

Beneath the 1804 poem, Blake inscribed a Biblical quotation:

“Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets” (Numbers XI. Ch 29.)

Mental Fight: Showing William Blake's preface to Milton, with the poem 'Jerualsam' — By page of Blake’s book Milton, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15925662

Notes

Jason Whittaker’s Blake, Parry, and the fight for Englishness is published by Oxford University Press (UK, 2022).

Edwin John Lerner’s Jerusalem: the story of a song is published by Chronos Books (UK, 2022).

Zoamorphosis – The William Blake Blog is devoted to the afterlife and reception of Blake’s art and poetry, looking at how generations of writers, artists, musicians and other cultural figures have adapted his ideas. And the associated Global Blake is an international network of scholars working on William Blake and all aspects of his poetry and art.

You can find Jason Whittaker’s Global Blake interview with James Murray-White here on YouTube, and James’s review On Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ & Our Fallacy of Albion here on Finding Blake.

Chris Wood’s adaptation of Jerualsam is on his album None The Wiser (RUF Records, UK 2013) and you can see a live performance here on YouTube.

Going Global – Blake’s Afterlife

Scholar Jason Whittaker, who has written extensively on William Blake over a period of thirty years, shares his first encounters with the work of this visionary and why they led him to explore Blake’s reception in the contemporary world as well as in Blake’s own times. It’s a lifelong interest he shares with so many others that now brings us Global Blake, a new project and an online conference.

It was in a darkened room at Tate Britain – in the final days of the old millennium – that I saw the light.

This isn’t a metaphor. I was attending the Blake exhibition at the Tate in 2000, and the final installation was ‘Cleave 00’ by the conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans. Overhead, a glitter ball was pulsing with light, flakes of reflected phosphorescence shining as they fell away across the shadows of the walls. Those pulses were significant – Morse Code projections of Blake’s poetry, according to the catalogue description. The installation itself was inspired by one of Blake’s small watercolour and pencil sketches, ‘The Inspiration of the Poet (Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall)’, in which the prophet (or, perhaps, Blake himself) was depicted seated at a table, a glowing globe above him as he wrote down the words dictated to him by an angel. The strange, bare perspectives of the room within a room remind me of a Giorgio de Chirico painting or a Rachel Whiteread cast – and I was mesmerised.

Showing A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet (Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall) circa 1819-20? William Blake 1757-1827 — A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet (Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall) circa 1819-20? William Blake 1757-1827 Purchased with assistance from the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Edwin C. Cohen and Echoing Green 1989 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T05716

While there was part of my brain that was reading the explanation of ‘Cleave 00’ and thinking, “Very clever” in a slightly mocking fashion, I was also enjoying it as an immersive sensorium – somewhat akin to the kind of experiences felt in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms or standing beneath Olafur Eliasson’s ‘The Weather Project’, a huge glowing orb that lit up Tate Modern in 2003. I’d also long been inspired by the very same ‘dreamachines’ that had been part of an earlier exhibition by Evans. The stroboscopic devices first created by Brion Gysin were intended to induce hypnotic states – to open the doors of perception, as it were – and I’d had a great deal of fun as a student cutting out sheets of card before affixing them to turntables into which a light was suspended in order to bring on my own hallucinations.

The Tate exhibition of 2000 opened my eyes to Blake in several ways, one of which was also extremely significant – and not one intended by the curators. Outside the museum, on the black iron railings that surround the steps leading to the old entrance, someone had affixed a sheet of photocopied A4. On this piece of paper was one of Blake’s images for J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, showing an African woman being whipped and with a caption protesting some of the sponsors at Tate for pharmaceutical exploitation in Africa.

I was visiting Tate with a good friend of mine, Shirley Dent, who at that time was completing a PhD on Blake’s reception in the nineteenth century, and these two episodes – Cerith Wyn Evans’s ‘Cleave 00’ and the photocopied poster outside the museum – became the opening and closing vignettes of the book that we would write together, Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827.

Placing Blake – past and present

My own initial encounters with Blake had begun more than a decade before while I was an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham. I’d left school with a sketchy notion of the poet of The Tyger and London, and was aware that he had produced some paintings, but it was at university that my perceptions of the artist were transformed. Two of his works electrified me: the first was the image of ‘The Ancient of Days‘, which I kept as a poster on the wall of my room; the second was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I had been raised as a good Catholic boy, and to read a prophet who dined with Ezekiel and Isaiah while proclaiming that true poets were of the devil’s party quite literally turned my world upside down. I was nineteen, and I often tell people who ask about such things (which happens on a fairly regular basis, considering my professional interest in Blake) that reading The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was the moment that the lights went on in my mind – and that they have never gone off since.

In the intervening time before visiting the Tate 2000 exhibition, I had immersed myself in Blake’s esoteric visions of British history, eventually converting my PhD into a book, William Blake and the Myths of Britain. A key factor in this first decade of my Blakean life, however, was that I tended to firmly place him in the past. Like many literary scholars of the time, particularly those working in fields such as Romanticism, I had become a confirmed historicist (at a time when it was still fashionable enough to be called the New Historicism – capitalisation required). To understand Blake, or any writer and artist, fully, we must study them in the environment that created them. I do not disagree with this as an important principle of scholarship, and it has been very important to my most recent book, Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake, in which I very much seek to place Blake within the fascinating world of London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But this obsession with the historical Blake was beginning to resemble that other obsession of an older generation of scholars with the historical Jesus as opposed to the living Christ.

Blake's reception: Showing the cover of 'Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake', by Jason Whittaker — ‘Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake’, by Jason Whittaker

During the decade I had been working on Blake, I noticed from time to time that plenty of other writers, artists and musicians I was interested in expressed their own fascination with the engraver and poet. Whether it was William Burroughs, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, the Surrealists, Chris Ofili, Patti Smith or Julian Cope – all of them had intriguing things to say, and not always complimentary. Indeed, this spirit of contrarieties was something I would grow more and more to appreciate about Blake, that just as he had attacked and rewritten Milton and the Bible out of his love for them, so plenty of later artists and writers would attack and rewrite Blake – as well as emulate him – out of their love for him.

Mapping Blake’s reception

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Radical Blake. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was just how much of the subsequent two decades would be given over to mapping out the reception of Blake in art, literature, music and culture. I had blithely assumed that there would be one, maybe two books to write covering the subject, but over the intervening years I have both contributed to and greatly enjoyed seeing other academics produce works that show the ways that William Blake has shaped the modern world. Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki demonstrated just how important Blake was to twentieth-century Japan, while Colin Trodd explored his influence on the early modern art world, Linda Freedman traced his impact on American literature, and Sibylle Erle and Morton Paley drew together scholars from across Europe to illuminate his afterlife on the continent. The list goes on – and there are others, including Roger Whitson, Tristanne Connolly and many, many more, who have become good friends through our shared (often contrarian) love of William Blake.

For much of the past decade as well as writing more formally about William Blake I have often shared my thoughts on the poet and artist through a blog, Zoamorphosis.com. While I have occasionally lamented the obscurantist tendency which caused me to register that particular domain name (taken from a 2007 paper I had given on the mutations and transformations of Blake in popular culture), I am also rather fond of what I have come to think of as a playground for Blake studies, where experimental ideas regarding his work and reception can be explored and enjoyed. The site has recently been updated and refreshed – most of the work has been done behind the scenes to bring it up to date with contemporary technologies, but there is also a new approach to projects, both current ones such as a series of short videos I’m producing about Blake’s work, Zoavision, and as a site for future work, such as on Blake-inspired music and a new book on the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

Global Blake

One significant project that is ongoing, and represents a high point for me in terms of reception studies, is Global Blake, an international conference taking place this month. The original notion to bring together different visions of Blake from around the world was proposed to me by David Worrall, back in 2006, but credit for the current conference must go to Sibylle Erle, my co-organiser and the person who, more than anyone, has worked to bring Blake scholars from around the globe to explore what this Romantic artist and poet means to them in different countries and continents. We have been overwhelmed by the responses and wealth of rich detail produced by our original call, and we hope that Global Blake can serve to drive the intellectual appreciation of this once-neglected artist in an international context. After two decades exploring what Blake means in the two centuries after his death, I’m looking forward to many more years finding new Blakes in new locations.

Notes

For more information on the Global Blake project, visit globalblake.zoamorphosis.com. The free online conference runs from 11th to 13th January 2022 and features an array of keynote speakers and panel sessions. 

NB: On Wednesday 12th January (8pm) there is a special live screening of 'Finding Blake', the film, with an introduction and Q&A with James Murray-White, its director and the founder and creative force behind our own project. James discusses the completion of the film in this Finding Blake blog post.

Jason Whittaker is Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. He is also managing editor of VALA, The Journal of the Blake Society and co-organiser of Global Blake with Sibylle Erle. He regularly blogs about Blake’s reception at Zoamorphosis, where you’ll find articles and links to various other projects by Jason.

Jason’s latest book, Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021), is published by Reaktion Books. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness will be published by Oxford University Press in May 2022.

Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 by Shirely Dent and Jason Whittaker (2002) is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Jason’s book William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999) is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Jason mentions several other scholars’ work on Blake:

The Reception of Blake in the Orient, edited by Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki (2014, Bloomsbury) brings together research from international scholars focusing attention on the longevity and complexity of Blake`s reception in Japan and elsewhere in the East. “It is designed as not only a celebration of his art and poetry in new and unexpected contexts but also to contest the intensely nationalistic and parochial Englishness of his work, and in broader terms, the inevitable passivity with which Romanticism (and other Western intellectual movements) have been received in the Orient.”

Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830-1930 by Colin Trodd (2012, Liverpool University Press) explores how William Blake achieved classic status. “What aspects of his art and personality attracted and repelled critics? How was the story of his afterlife coloured by debates and developments in the British art world? Moving between visual and literary analysis, [it] considers the ways in which different audiences and communities dealt with the issue of describing and evaluating Blake’s images and designs.”

William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture by Linda Freedman (2018, Oxford University Press) covers a wide range of forms including prose, newspaper and periodical publication, the novel, music, theology, film, visual art, and poetry.

The Reception of William Blake in Europe edited by Morton D. Paley and Sibylle Erle (2019, Bloomsbury) “is the first comprehensive and systematic reference guide to Blake’s influence across Europe. Exploring Blake’s impact on literature, art, music and culture, the book includes bibliographies of major translations of Blake’s work in each country covered, as well as a publication history and timeline of the poet’s reception on the continent.”

You can view John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) online at the British Library. John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch army officer, joined hundreds of other troops to fight against and suppress armed rebellion in Surinam. His diary of his voyage and time in the colony formed the basis of his Narrative, and William Blake made the engravings, based on Stedman’s own drawings.

The Tygers of Wrath – a Lesson in Dissent

Tamsin Rosewell is a bookseller and illustrator and sees Blake’s influence in both these spheres today, through the primacy of the imagination and the coming together of word and image. And she values Blake’s dissent and challenge to authority and orthodoxy, and his example of prophecy as revealing the world as it truly is.

I like to think of myself as Blakean. I’m a bookseller, illustrator, broadcaster and, through those things, an activist. Blake is very present in a modern bookshop; I’ve seen several generations of writers refer to, or be inspired by, Blake. There are direct references to Blake’s life and work in novels by great writers such as Tracy Chevalier, Julian Sedgwick, Malorie Blackman, SF Said, Thomas Harris, Marcus Sedgwick, Philip Pullman – and there are many others. I’ve heard writers talk in different ways about how they feel that Blake’s existence has somehow given them leave to create entire mythological worlds, permission to accept that contrary to what we are taught in the classroom, it is stories that hold their shape over time and continue to grasp a higher truth and sense of purpose, while ‘facts’, ‘accepted history’ and ‘the truth’ are shadowy and insubstantial. As a bookseller I am also very conscious of the primacy of the imagination – that is, in effect, what I trade in: the power of other people’s imagined worlds.

I’m also an illustrator – and I see Blake as one of the founding creators of the modern way of illustration. At a time when beautiful, illustrated books for adults are one of the biggest growth areas in the book market (after a period when they seemed to be designed to look as bland as possible to ‘compete’ with the concept of an ebook), I recognise that Blake’s books are some of the first in which we really cannot separate word and image. Today’s illustration isn’t about drawing scenes from stories; it is about adding to them, giving the written word another layer of interest and imagination. Many illustrators today will add things into a story through the images, things never mentioned in the words and often things only the child being read to will notice, because they’re the one looking at the pictures; or details that will only reveal themselves if the reader takes time to read the images as well as the words.

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction

As an artist I refer to Blake constantly: for the power of expression in his figures, for his use of image and word combined, for his joy in being unorthodox, for the encouragement to challenge accepted teaching and authority. There’s also something about the confidence with which Blake expresses anger in which I find reassurance. There is a lot of pressure today to stay away from the arguments, be positive and smiling and peacefully mindful all the time. This is not my natural state and I find that being angry, allowing yourself to become that furious ball of dissenting energy can be a powerful and positive thing. It is anger that led to the abolitionist movement, and to women’s suffrage, to the campaign against apartheid – those things didn’t come about by people staying out of arguments. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

I believe that as a creative spirit, and someone with a loud and clear voice in my field, I have a responsibility to use my art and my choice of books to challenge authority, to be unorthodox, and to add fire to the many stale traditions that my own industry holds so dear, the way that Blake added something bigger and bolder to the dry and dusty Anglicanism of his own time, and wore the bonnet rouge when it was dangerous to do so. I’m a deeply committed pacifist, but I do feel that I have a duty to take up the arms of intellect and imagination, and to fight when I see cruelty and injustice – bring me my bow of burning gold.

Hope and dissent

Recently I gave a lecture to a group of creative writing Masters students; one of the questions I was asked was “Do you think that hope is important in children’s fiction?” The answer is obviously ‘yes’, no book that was utterly without hope would sell well, and no adult walks into a bookshop and says: “I’d like a book for my child, but I’d like it to be really bleak and without any sense of hope, please”.

However, the question troubled me and I kept thinking about it for several weeks because I felt it was the wrong question. “Where do we find hope in children’s fiction?” is a much more pertinent question. It isn’t cheery, saccharine hope that children necessarily look for, it is the recognition of their dark and burning sense of injustice. Novelist, Diana Wynne Jones wrote this very well – she captured in her books that desperate childhood anger of not being listened to by authority, or of adults not seeing the full picture, when they – the children – can see the way things really are.

Children always have a very profound sense of justice; I’m 48 and I still remember the unfairness of school and the dismissive behaviour of adults. The children are the Prophets. The word ‘Prophecy’ has come in our use to mean something like ‘foretelling’, we use it to mean that x or y will happen in the future. Its truer, and earlier, Biblical meaning is more complex than that – it is also about revelations, interpretations and inspirations from the divine – perhaps more like ‘forth-telling’. In the Bible, the words of the Prophets that do involve a prediction of the future, usually also contain a message about the outcome being conditional on human conduct. Prophecy is about revealing the world as it truly is, often to those who have steered their world along the wrong path. It is the children who are often the ones who speak of the world as it really is, and the adults who veil it in layers of often unnecessary complexity and hide the bits about which they are uncomfortable. We spend a lot of time as adults telling children to control their anger and to recognise it as a negative thing that can harm other people. But what if anger and hope could be seen as connected? Can we not teach instead to remember the anger you felt at injustice? There is hope if we use that energy to dissent.

Permission granted

When I look at Blake’s work, both his printing and his painting, there is much I don’t understand. I’d love to know exactly how he worked that gold leaf into the paint of The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth, a great painting in a small room at the top of Tate Britain. And I’d love to know exactly how he layered his inks, at what consistency, and in what order, in his star wheel printing press. If I knew how he created those images the temptation would be to replicate. But the fact that I can’t know his process means that I have the energy and the frustration to keep searching. I find that acceptance of not understanding very liberating too. When I was making a radio series about Blake I worried, as I’m not a Blake scholar in any formal way, that I didn’t know enough to be allowed to make such a radio series. The most helpful advice I was given was by a true Blake scholar who said “Anyone who claims to understand Blake almost by definition doesn’t”. To try to ‘understand’ Blake is possibly to miss the point. To me the point is the mystery, the consent for the imagination to be what it is, irrational and huge beyond understanding.

A recreation of William Blake’s star-wheel printing press, made by BLAM Furniture Makers fas part of the recreation of Blake’s Lambeth studio for the Apprentice and Master exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2014-15). Image: BLAM Furniture Makers

Blake’s encouragement to be unorthodox is hugely important to me both as a bookseller and as an illustrator. Publishing is a copycat industry – the success of one book spawns a hundred similar books, all created to try and grab a portion of that first book’s success. And yet often that one book that became so copied was itself something unconventional in its first moment, something that publishers couldn’t have quite anticipated catching fire. You can’t bottle and market something if you can’t anticipate what it is in the first place. And in 15 years as a bookseller, I’ve never seen any of the copycat books gain quite the same interest and success as the maverick managed before it was copied. Which leaves booksellers wondering why publishers bother with the copycat dance when it has never produced anything more than temporary, superficial interest. To produce the unconventional in our industry you need to have a measure of exasperation at publishing’s outdated traditions and etiquettes; and a level of anger at the way it treats authors and is dominated by a cliquey and privileged class of person.

One interesting moment came during the first lockdown with the publication of a book called The Unwinding – or rather with its companion title, The Silent Unwinding. The Unwinding is a collection of stories and previously unpublished illustrations by one of our greatest illustrators, Greenaway-Gold Medal-winning artist, Jackie Morris. With her (delightfully unorthodox and impishly maverick) publisher, Unbound, it was decided to publish the same book, but to remove not all the illustrations, which would be the conventional thing to do, but to remove instead the words. What is left is a sort of blank book, peppered with extraordinary and inexplicable illustrations: a woman wrapped in silk and fur dreaming of giant sky-swimming fish; a child curled up in a wilderness landscape, reading a book to a pack of protective wolves; a dragon bearing a palatial, royal tent occupied by an antlered woman and three polar bears. No explanation. It is a small and beautiful object, not unlike The Songs of Innocence and of Experience in size and format. Small enough to fit into a bag or pocket. It isn’t a great heavy art book, and nor is it a flimsy handbag notebook. It is what it is.

Jackie Morris’ idea for the book was to allow it to be a journal, a sketchbook, a dream diary – basically whatever its owner wanted of it. But for it to be that its owner would also need to feel comfortable drawing or writing on top of the art of one of our country’s great illustrators. That itself is an interesting challenge and raises questions about what printed, published art can be for. Is it just to revere, or can we accept that it is also there to urge others on, to be defaced by someone else’s imagination?

Jackie dropped me a note and asked me to add some of my own pictures alongside hers, and share them on social media, to indicate to people that they had permission to add to her work. I did. But I wouldn’t have done if she hadn’t specifically asked me to! It was a surprisingly big leap to pour my own painting on top of hers, so that our art combined and it is hard to tell which fragments she painted and what I added. I chose to illustrate moments in Shakespeare’s The Tempest for no other reason than I was thinking about it at that moment, and it seemed to fit with the strange images already in the book. I made a conscious decision to refer to Blake in those images, there are figures in positions that I’ve lifted straight from Blake’s pages and put into this odd world that Jackie and I created between us. My copy of The Silent Unwinding literally drips with ink.

Permission granted - dissent. Showing The Silent Unwinding by Jackie Morris. — Tamsin’s copy of The Silent Unwinding, crinkled and dripping with ink
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

‘Hail many-coloured messenger’ – Iris, one of Prospero’s spirits
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

‘Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises’
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

Ariel helps raise the storm’
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

Ariel trapped in the tree by the witch Sycorax ‘Thou hast howled away twelve winters’
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ Prospero and the enslaved Caliban
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

‘Wast done well?’ Ariel seeks release from Prospero.
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

End papers: ‘On the bat’s back I do fly..’ Ariel flies off in search of summer.
Tamsin Rosewell and Jackie Morris in collaboration © 2021

Others followed. We saw people use The Silent Unwinding to write notes for future novels, for private poetry, as a diary during the worst times of fear and isolation during the pandemic, and as an art pad to express themselves. A strange little book, but a powerful one. And a lesson in dissent.

Blake’s biggest influence on my world is probably his permission. Permission to dissent? Permission to be unorthodox? Permission to challenge authority? Permission to defend others from injustice? Permission to subvert tradition?

Permission granted.

Notes

Tamsin is a bookseller at 55-year-old independent bookshop, Kenilworth Books, in Warwickshire. She has been a judge of reading panels for children’s reading charity BookTrust, and an advisor on the Arts Council-funded Pathways into Illustration, which seeks to bring people from a more diverse range of backgrounds into mainstream publishing. She judges the Stratford Salariya Book Prize and lectures regularly to publishing and creative writing students.

Look out for more work from Tamsin Rosewell in The Blake Society‘s publication, VALA later this year.

Tamsin’s three-part radio series The Poet and the Prophet, about William Blake, and her three-part series Apocalypse – The Idea of The End, both made for Resonance FM, can be found on her podcast page and listened to on most devices, free, here: Tamsin Rosewell | Mixcloud

More of Tamsin Rosewell’s art work can be seen on her Instagram Page, Hobs Lantern: @hobs_lantern.

You can find out more about The Unwinding and The Silent Unwinding by Jackie Morris and Unbound Publishing at The Unwinding and The Silent Unwinding.

You can read an account of William Blake’s innovative design and printing process in “Printing in the infernal method”: William Blake’s method of “Illuminated Printing” by Michael Phillips, published in the Interfaces journal.

The photograph of the recreation of Blake’s star wheel printing press is taken from the case study, A Press, by the furniture makers BLAM. The Apprentice and Master exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2014-15), featuring Blake’s Lambeth studio, was curated by Michael Phillips.

In The Science of Life as Art and Dissent for Lady Science (2/7/21), a magazine for the history and popular culture of science, Christopher Martiniano discusses William Blake in the context of the authoritarianism of the government of William Pitt and the growing dominance of Enlightenment science. “To counter Pitt, English poet William Blake (1757-1827) challenged the Enlightenment thinking embedded in Pitt’s political philosophy and oppressive legislation. As a political and religious radical, Blake infamously undoes the Enlightenment’s mechanism of binary thinking, claiming that “[w]ithout contraries is no progression.” Blake believed in the necessity for opposites, not domination of one over the other. … Offering an alternative to the Enlightenment thought that animated Pitt’s authoritarianism, Blake associates vital, generative power with biology and imagination…”