HOWZAT

Blake lived for ten years at No. 13 Hercules Buildings. The house was torn down in 1918, and in its place today on Hercules Road is a Sixties block of council flats. Who decided to call it the William Blake Estate? Bring them to me so I can slap them. Bookending the Hercules Buildings houses in Blake’s time were two pubs – the Hercules Tavern and the Pineapple. Miraculously, the Pineapple still exists (though in a later, Victorian building), but when I put my head around the door and confronted the pool table, the telly tuned to a sports channel and a row of men glaring at the female intrusion, I backed out. Blake was not much of a drinker anyway.

I found so little of Blake in today’s Lambeth that I stopped going, taking refuge once more in scholarship. Then I struck lucky: for once the academics crawling all over Blake’s life produced information I could use. Scholar Michael Phillips has, through patient detective work, figured out the dimensions of his garden and the rooms in his house, and had drawings commissioned to re-create how they would have looked. That concrete detail was more helpful to me than a barrowful of books trying to explain what Blake’s work meant.

Maps from the period have also proved immensely helpful. There is a marvellous map of London made by Richard Horwood between 1792 and 1815; in comparing the various editions of this I discovered a little street near Blake’s house that had been called Lovers’ Lane and became Cut-Throat Lane. I jumped on the detail, and it became crucial to the story in Burning Bright.

Other facts helped me to build the story. For example, in a small mansion behind Blake’s house lived the colourful circus impresario Philip Astley, who built an amphitheatre at the end of Westminster Bridge. His shows had a big impact on Lambeth. Indeed, he built Hercules Buildings to house some of his workers, naming them after his circus strongman. His neighbourly proximity to Blake was a gift I couldn’t refuse, and I used Astley as an earthy counterpoint to Blake’s otherworldly headiness. Although the two were not friends, they knew of each other. According to an early biography, Blake once saw one of Astley’s workers, a young boy, dragging a log attached to his leg. Furious at what he saw as degrading treatment, Blake took Astley to task, and the two men had a shouting match, which nearly came to blows but somehow ended in mutual respect. I couldn’t resist such a scene and filched it, larding it with my own characters and purposes.

For that is what I like to do – weave together fact and fiction, hoping no one will be able to detect the seams. Burning Bright is full of real incidents – an explosion in Astley’s fireworks laboratory that killed a carpenter, the funeral of Blake’s mother, the formation of the Lambeth Association which went door to door demanding inhabitants sign an oath of loyalty to King and government.

Wandering through these moments are purely imagined characters. I can’t do whatever I want with Blake – his biography gets in the way – but I can with the characters I create. Blake and his wife are naked in their garden? What if a boy and a girl are watching from next door? The Lambeth Association is demanding loyalty oaths? Let’s see what happens when they get to Blake’s door. It is through these created characters and their responses to real events that we can begin to explore our own responses to William Blake, and maybe come to accept and appreciate his continued presence in our British lives.

Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier is published by HarperCollins on Monday and is available from BooksFirst priced £14.39 (RRP £15.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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