WILLIAM BLAKE, the 250th anniversary of whose birth in Soho is being
celebrated this year, is a master spirit of London. He is a great Cockney
visionary who saw the infinite world, the fiery world, in the streets of the
capital. He understood, and helped to fashion, the symbolic presence of the
city. He loved the theatrical and spectacular elements of London but, more
importantly, he divined the spiritual being of the city.
He described it as a “human awful wonder of God”, and wandered its alleys and
courtyards in a state of exultation. He left London only once but why would
he need to? It was his inheritance, the landscape of his imagination.
From the beginning he was the child of the dream of London. As a boy he walked
everywhere. He walked south from Soho towards Dulwich and Camberwell. He
walked north as well as south. He crossed the Oxford Road towards Tottenham
Court Road, where he turned left into St Giles High Street. He passed Hanway
Street and Percy Street and Windmill Street before coming to the turnpike
that marked the crossing of the New Road from Paddington to St Pancras. He
had so much energy that he could not help but walk. Yet he was propelled by
his own sense of destiny, inescapably caught up in his experience of London.
He was chosen to understand the city.
He knew the deep and hollow roads; he knew the serpentine streets and the
suffocating courts. He knew the ballad singers and the begging soldiers, the
boys with trays of meat on their shoulders and the hackney-chair men. He saw
the heads of the condemned rotting on Temple Bar. He crossed the brooks and
rivulets of Lambeth; he observed the mulberry trees of Peckham Rye. It was
in the branches of these trees that he first saw angels. He knew, then, that
London was blessed He was so sensitive to the presence of London that
various areas affected him differently. He rarely travelled to Hampstead or
to High-gate because these neighbourhoods provoked in him a “torment of the
stomach”. He knew the whole city. He was a citizen of the whole city.
As an apprentice he lived in Great Queen Street , now off the thoroughfare of
Kingsway but in Blake’s time part of a warren of streets and paths. He lived
at No 31 Great Queen Street, opposite what was then (and in altered form
still is) the hall of the Freemasons. Thus he became acquainted with one of
those urban superstitions that thrive in the dark city. He would walk from
there to Westminster Abbey, where he was sketching the tombs of the great
dead. For him London was always in part an antiquarian city, where the
monuments and ruins of the past existed side by side with the manifestations
of contemporary life.
He knew the people of London, too. He knew the mobs at first hand, having been
taken up by one during the Gordon Riots of 1780. He was swept up at Long
Acre and was hurried down Holborn towards the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison,
There he witnessed one of the most ferocious popular demonstrations in the
city’s history, when the prison was burnt down and its inmates freed. He had
no illusions about Londoners. They were as pugnacious, and as vigorous, as
he was. They could be violent, too, and there was a streak of violence in
his own nature. No one could survive in 18th-century London without an
element of toughness. The weak and weary were overwhelmed.
After his apprenticeship, he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy
Schools. The Academy is now off Piccadilly, but in Blake’s lifetime it was
along the Strand and then in Somerset House. As an eager student of the
arts, Blake was familiar with the stairs and corridors of what is now the
Courtauld Gallery.
After his marriage to Catherine Boucher, a young woman from Battersea, he
moved to Green Street;it has disappeared but it was by the southeastern
corner of Leicester Fields, now Leicester Square. Green Street has another
claim to feature within urban memory. It was the site of Dickens’s Old
Curiosity Shop.
Once he had left the Royal Academy Schools, Blake was obliged to earn his
living. With a young man he had known in his apprentice days, he set up a
printing business. Their premises were at No 27 Broad Street, next to the
house in which he had been born and raised. So Blake, at a slightly later
date, moved his printing shop only two or three streets away to No 28 Poland
Street. The ground floor, where Blake set up the counter for his trade, is
now a hairdressing salon.
As a young man he travelled all over London in search of employment and
entertainment. We know that he used to attend soirées at the house of a
family in Rathbone Place, now Rathbone Street. More importantly he attended
weekly dinners at the offices of the publisher Joseph Johnson in St Paul’s
Churchyard.
Far from being the relatively quiet space beside the present cathedral, it was
a hive of activity where most of the London publishers and bookshops were to
be found.
He also travelled to Great East Cheap, in the heart of the City, where he
attended a five-day conference at the Swedenborgian chapel along that
thoroughfare. Swedenborgianism still survives as a faith in London, with its
headquarters in Bloomsbury, but Blake was one of its first adherents. He did
not remain a devotee for long – he could never walk in the shadow of another
man’s religion – but for a while he was impressed by Emmanuel Swedenborg’s
visions of Heaven and Hell. Swedenborg conversed with angels and spirits, as
Blake did; there was a true spiritual affinity between them. Swedenborg was
an honorary Londoner – he lived for much of his later life in Clerkenwell,
and died in Wellclose Square.
It is often believed that Blake was a perpetual exile from the life of the
late 18th century, a lonely and innovative rebel who formed no relationship
with his contemporaries. But that is not the case. In his beliefs he was
part of a group of Londoners – many of them printers and engravers as he was
– who extolled the significance of esoteric knowledge. Some practised
mesmerism or sexual magic, some were Freemasons or Jacobites, some were
cabbalists or occultists, but all believed in the primacy of the spiritual
world. Theirs was a London faith, a devotion springing from the poverty and
darkness of the city.
In the course of Blake’s lifetime the city went through various states or
stages. In every generation, the nature of the city undergoes a sea-change.
Whether this is induced by external circumstances, or by the wholly private
moods and instincts of the people, is a matter for conjecture. So it was in
the late 18th century. In the years of Blake’s childhood and youth it was a
city of unease and irresponsibility; contemporary moralists saw in
it all the marks of effeminacy and luxury. But in the 1780s and 1790s, at the
time of the Revolution in France, came a change. The atmosphere in London
became more overtly political and polarised. London was a radical and
egalitarian city. There was great sympathy with the revolutionaries, and
various democratic “clubs” and debating societies were instituted to welcome
what was believed to be a new age in the history of the world. Blake shared
that enthusiasm.
In this period he travelled across the river to Lambeth, where he lived with
Catherine at No 13 Hercules Buildings. (The ivy-covered house has now been
replaced by an unlovely block of flats.) Blake’s removal was, in London
terms, a giant transition. But Lambeth was cheap if not exactly convenient.
It was also a centre of radical political activity, and a haven for
eccentrics and “outsiders” of every description. Blake was attuned to the
nature of the territories in which he lived. And, at Lambeth, he completed
some of the most innovative and revolutionary work of the 18th century. He
wove Lambeth into the very texture of his poetry, heralded by the line that
“there is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find”.
London enters his poetry in many different contexts. He reveals that: The
corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street languishes To Great Queen Street &
Lincolns Inn, all is distress & woe.
These were the places where he earned his bread, and for him they were
neighbourhoods of sorrow. In the greatest of his epics, Jerusalem,
Blake, carrying the sun as a lamp, travels through London as a pilgrim. He
sees “an aged woman raving along the streets” and hears “the cry of the poor
man”; he passes the beggar at the corner who “in his hallowed centre holds
the heavens of bright eternity”. The streets of the city are avenues into
the spiritual world.
That is why the “dark Satanic mills” of the now famous hymn Jerusalem
can be found in the very heart of the capital. They are emblems of eternity,
but have a specific and local identity. While Blake was living in Lambeth,
the Albion Mill, a short distance away on Blackfriars Bridge, was burnt down
by arsonists. It was notorious as the first great factory in London, powered
by steam engines and producing 6,000 bushels of flour each week. It was the
type of thing Blake detested. After its destruction it remained a blackened
shell for years, one which Blake often passed on his way to the City. It
entered his imagination as the symbol of the crushing wheels that create
night and division.
The palm for urban lament, however, must go to the poem from Songs of
Experience entitled London: I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Thus the experience of London becomes deep and sonorous. It becomes the hue of
the world.
Blake’s residence in London, after Lambeth, was at No 17 South Molton Street.
He and his wife rented two rooms on the first floor, in a narrow street just
south of where Oxford Street became the Tyburn Road. Behind the house was
Poverty Lane, but from his window Blake could see the outline of Hyde Park.
The apartment is still there, although South Molton Street is now a
fashionable appendage to New Bond Street.
His next home, No 3 Fountain Court, lay in a small alley runnning from the
Strand to the river. From his window, the Thames seemed to be a bar of gold,
and the laughter of the children in the alley was the music of eternity.
Fountain Court still exists; it is largely unknown and unvisited, a dark
lane between the large buildings of the Strand. Yet it is a blessed place.
Here Blake died, singing.
His last residence in London is in the soil of Bunhill Fields graveyard, near
Old Street. Blake is buried near Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan, and this
small cemetery can claim to be the spiritual home for the dissenting
tradition in England. It is one of the most poignant spots in London, but is
unfortunately little known. Yet, each week, a small bunch of flowers is
placed upon his grave.
Blake once wrote that “I labour upward towards futurity”, and his significance
for modern London is at last being properly understood. In his work, if we
look closely enough, we may still see the lineaments of what he called
“infinite London” and “the spiritual fourfold London eternal”.
Guided walks of Blake’s London take place on Sundays at 3pm. Meet where
South Molton Street joins Oxford Street. E-mail: thewilliamblakewalk@yahoo.co.uk
or call 07722163823
The life
William Blake was born the son of a haberdasher, on November 28, 1757. He
trained as an engraver and his most famous poems are in Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, which include London and The Tyger.
The hymn Jerusalem is part of the preface to Milton, inspired
by Paradise Lost. He died on August 12, 1827, aged 69.
