The explosion of critical interest in William Blake touched off by Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in 1947 is still reverberating, though it has moved into new dimensions since then. Studies of his archetypal symbolism, explications of his metaphysical system, explorations of his political and religious thought, psychoanalytic interpretations both Freudian and Jungian, close readings of poetic texture, revaluations of his place in English painting, discussions of the “composite art” of text and design in his illuminated books, and most recently close study of his methods as a graphic artist: each approach has widened the scope of our knowledge about Blake’s work and deepened our admiration for his achievement. In all this furor of critical activity only biography has lagged behind: partly because of the magnitude of the task of covering Blake’s three careers as poet, painter, and engraver spread over almost seven decades, but still more because of the sketchy information about his life (1757–1827) as provided by the usual sources of letters, journals, reminiscences and so forth. Not only was his life externally quite uneventful, passed for the most part in poverty and obscurity, but he was so little regarded in his time that few records of his existence were preserved. Alexander Gilchrist’s pioneering biography of 1863, however inadequate it may seem today, is still the source on which most biographers lean most heavily. But in the last few decades the work of editors, bibliographers, cataloguers and historically-minded scholars on many fronts has accumulated a critical mass of information that offers a basis for a new portrait of Blake in all his extraordinary fullness.

Peter Ackroyd, who has previously written the lives of T. S. Eliot, Thomas Chatterton, and Charles Dickens, has now risen to this challenge. His biography of Blake [Blake] is the first to draw on the full range of recent scholarship, and his skillful infusion of this new material adds depth and color to the familiar outlines of Blake’s life. He brings to his task the Blakean traits of energy and enthusiasm as well as an infectious identification with his subject, and his book will appeal to readers who have responded to the legend of Blake while remaining bewildered by much of his work and unacquainted with the man behind it. Blake has long had his small groups of special admirers—wealthy collectors of his paintings and illuminated books, students in the 1960’s claiming him as a fellow revolutionist, even drug addicts fascinated by his hallucinatory power: Ackroyd aims at a wider, more general and more prosaic audience. He gives us a biography for the age of information—a mosaic of facts drawn from a wide variety of sources, interspersed with vivid descriptions of Blake’s London, vignettes of his friends and patrons, and some cautious psychoanalytic speculation, all deftly assembled, generously illustrated, and narrated with brio. Ackroyd has a sharp eye for enlivening small detail: he has noted the decorations on the Grinling Gibbons font where Blake was baptized, the firmness of his signature in the marriage register, and the names of three of the seven other Londoners with whom he shares a common grave in Bunhill Fields. Yet the reader should be warned that the book contains many small inaccuracies as well as fictional touches based loosely on fact. A few small examples: Ackroyd takes us on one of Blake’s boyhood rambles through the fields north of London, where he may or may not have met a maiden lady mounted on a gray mare who liked to cut small boys’ kitestrings with a large pair of scissors—which may or may not have inspired his later engraving of “Aged Ignorance” clipping the wings of youthful vision. He pictures Blake the apprentice in Basire’s workshop learning the messy and laborious steps of making an engraving—though what he describes is clearly an etching. He tells of “The Great Fiery Meteor” of 1783 which may or may not have inspired a later drawing by Blake’s younger brother Robert that William copied in 1788 in “The Approach of Doom,” his first relief etching—which Ackroyd twice labels an engraving. What is more important, the reader looking for a new understanding of Blake’s work, or of the inner drama of the imagination that produced it, may well be disappointed. In the very profusion of detail which is the strength of Ackroyd’s method the significant outlines of Blake’s creative career tend to be lost.

The conception of Blake’s career in modern criticism turns on two poles which may be described as the systematic and the historical. The first of these approaches, deriving from Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, views Blake’s work (especially his poetry) as the expression of a unified unchanging view of reality expressed in terms of an original mythological system which gradually unfolds over the course of his career, self-contained and insulated from the issues of the age. The critic’s task is to tease out the details of the system and their interconnections, and his goal is to achieve what Frye described as the “total intelligibility” of Blake’s myth. The second approach locates Blake squarely within his period and views his work as responding to various intellectual and artistic forces of the times and reflecting significant changes in his outlook. David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire led the way in 1954 by charting Blake’s relation to the historical and political upheavals of the age, and since then other critics have explored a wide variety of contexts for his work, from the rise of the English working class to the outbreak of millenarianism in the 1790’s. Their method is to accumulate as much relevant information about the times as possible, as well as the facts of Blake’s own life and working methods, then bring them to bear on the interpretation of his work.

Ackroyd’s conception of Blake looks in both these directions. He provides a wealth of information about Blake and his milieu, especially from recent sources, and from time to time he sketches in the historical background of the American and French Revolutions and the long war against Napoleon, with its political repression and the sufferings it inflicted on the London poor. Yet he hardly indicates how these events shaped Blake’s lifelong hatred of the Establishment or figured in his work. He distances himself from the view of Blake’s radicalism advanced by Erdman and recently elaborated in terms of intellectual and religious history by Jon Mee and E. P. Thompson. Ackroyd’s lack of interest in the political context may explain the short shrift he gives to the four Continental Prophecies America, Europe, and The Song of Los (including “Africa” and “Asia”) except to praise their magnificent illustrations. These works, which trace the growth of the idea of revolution back to the beginning of time, are Blake’s first venture in writing the universal history that culminated in his last long poem Jerusalem, but Ackroyd views them as little more than popular narrative in an Ossianic idiom. While it may be too fanciful to see his dismissal of the continental poems as a kind of insularity, it is striking how often Ackroyd stresses Blake’s Englishness and places him as a “Cockney visionary” within a line of great London artists such as Turner and Dickens. He opposes Blake’s “English strain of moral seriousness and earnest spirituality” to the infection of “sceptical and deistical” ideas presumably caught from the continent, and he reads the conclusion of almost every one of Blake’s poems from Tiriel onward as a triumph of spirituality over materialism. But this downplays the radical nature of Blake’s religious thought from beginning to end (though Ackroyd associates his liberated attitude toward nakedness with his Dissenting heritage); it also oversimplifies Blake’s religious development, which is the ground base of his entire career as poet and artist.

Ackroyd’s claim that Blake is “the last great religious poet in England” and his stress on the formative influence of the Bible from his childhood onward link him with the critical tradition of Frye and its insistence on the centrality of the Bible and Milton in Blake’s work. Yet he is not especially interested in Blake’s relationship to Christianity, specifically the Dissenting background of his religious thought, which he dismisses as “of no consequence.” He does not spell out the implications of Blake’s antinomianism—his hatred of the Moral Law, his denial of original sin, his conviction that God exists only in individual men; and he hardly mentions Blake’s defense of “sensual enjoyment,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell onward, as the basis of spiritual freedom. Instead he describes Blake simply as “imbued with a religion of piety, enthusiasm, and vision.” Indeed, except for his passing involvement with Swedenborgianism, Ackroyd has less to say about Blake’s Christianity than his interest in mesmerism, alchemy, Freemasonry, and other contemporary forms of occultism. About Blake’s own mythological system, which originated as an alternative not only to classical mythology but to Christianity itself, he provides little more than a cursory introduction to seven or eight of the main characters—Orc, Urizen, Los, and others. Central concepts such as the Divine Humanity or fourfold vision, or even such phrases as “the Hermaphroditic Satanic world of rocky destiny,” are left unexplained. Blake’s gradual conversion from a kind of imaginative deism to an evangelical faith in Christ as “the Friend of Sinners” and his final acceptance of Jehovah as a loving and forgiving Father go almost unnoticed. In the religious dimension as in others, Blake developed and changed; yet Ackroyd gives little sense of this evolution.

Blake’s ideas on the subject of art had both religious and political implications, and here again one might question some aspects of Ackroyd’s analysis. Blake’s early drawings and paintings, like his early poetry, show a striking preference for historical subjects over religious ones—predominantly subjects with radical and anti-monarchical implications drawn from early British history, such as “The Making of Magna Carta” or “The Penance of Jane Shore,” rather than from the classical myth and history sanctioned by Establishment taste or the traditional themes of Christian art. At the same time the style of his paintings up to about 1800 conforms for the most part to the classical modes he had learned as a student at the Royal Academy. Ackroyd, however, sees Blake as committed to a spiritualized Gothic ideal from the time of his apprentice days when he sketched the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey for his master Basire. But it is hard to find any evidence of a “spiritual revelation” in Blake’s meticulous and impersonal renderings of the effigies of the Norman kings (whom he in fact despised), and Gothic motifs are almost entirely absent from his painting till about 1804. To overlook this fact dilutes the importance of the turning point in his artistic career that came in 1804, when he experienced a sudden insight that the true way to art was to be found in the austere Gothic style he had encountered years earlier in Westminster Abbey rather than in the opulence of the grand style exemplified by Sir Joshua Reynolds. This crystallized his hostility to academic painting, or what he called “Venetian and Flemish ooze,” and set him on a path that led farther and farther away from contemporary acceptance.

For more specific discussion of Blake’s work, Ackroyd makes good use of recent research on Blake’s methods as painter and printmaker in an appreciative account of his art in general. He gives a perceptive description of the two series of Biblical paintings Blake executed for Thomas Butts, with his classical handling of structure, light, and color in the first and his approach to Gothic forms in the second. He provides an informed summary of the development of Blake’s graphic style, from the linearity of the early engravings through the tactile exuberance of the color prints of 1795 to the tonal richness of the 1825 Illustrations to the Book of Job. He mentions Blake’s uncomfortable relationship with the Royal Academy, though hardly suggesting the extent of his lifelong ambition to be recognized by the Academy and his bitterness at being rejected. He recounts at length the sorry story of Blake’s falling out with his agent Robert Cromek and his old friend Thomas Stothard, whom he accused (unjustly, as has recently been shown) of stealing his idea for the painting of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Pilgrims.” Ackroyd’s description of individual works, however, remains mostly on the surface: he does not really explain why, for instance, the figure of Job had such central importance in Blake’s art from his 1785 drawing “The Complaint of Job” to the 1825 Illustrations, or how his interpretation of the story challenged the orthodox view of Job’s repentance, or how it deepened over the years with his changing conception of God.

By and large Ackroyd is not as much interested in Blake’s poetry as in his art. His discussion of the Poetical Sketches, the volume of Blake’s juvenilia, is too brief and allusive to give a clear sense of the range and virtuosity of Blake’s earliest poems, from Elizabethan limpidity and bardic vigor to Shakespearean heroics and Spenserian pastoralism. So also with the Songs of Innocence and of Experience: he offers generalities about Blake’s style rather than exploring the significant contrasts between the two sets—the joyous world of childhood Innocence, suffused with trust and love, counterpointed to the troubled world of Experience, of adolescent protest against the restrictions of adult authority. In two short chapters examining two of the Songs more closely, he discusses “The Chimney Sweeper” of Innocence largely in terms of the cruel exploitation of the hapless children sold into the trade, and relates “The Tyger” of Experience chiefly to real or symbolic tigers Blake might have met in menageries or in books or paintings or even in newspaper reports comparing the French revolutionaries to a “tribunal of tigers.” The central question of the poem, what kind of Creator can have made such a creature, is not considered, while “The Chimney Sweeper” with its arresting and ironic conclusion “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm,” is dismissed as sanctimonious or “destructive and ignorant innocence.” Blake once defended the seeming obscurity or indirection of his work because it “rouzes the faculties to act”: yet Ackroyd rarely moves the reader to reflect on the deeper meaning of the samples of Blake’s poetry that he quotes. In discussing the autobiographical prophecy Milton he makes a number of pertinent comments on Blake’s lifelong sympathy with Milton, the contemporary vogue of Miltonic painting and recitation, the allegorical union of Blake and Milton within the poem, and so forth: but he does not confront the central message of “this long and sometimes difficult work”—Blake’s climactic denunciation of the false art and false religion and false philosophy of his age and the reassertion of his prophetic mission against all challengers. His account of Jerusalem is more illuminating: yet it too does not define the vital core of the poem. Albion’s deliverance from spiritual sickness through forgiveness and self-annihilation.

At times the multiplication of contexts in Ackroyd’s discussion of Blake’s work makes for a lack of direction in his narrative. With a Blakean disregard of chronology he often juxtaposes events that might better be kept separate. For example, in describing the apprentice engraving copied from a copy of a figure from Michaelangelo that Blake afterward entitled “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion,” he reads into it a wealth of significance—religious, artistic, political—that it did not take on for Blake till thirty years later. He is consistently vague about dates, which enables him to argue, for instance, that the lucidity of the “Pickering Manuscript” poems, written around 1803, proves that Blake was not suffering from any serious mental instability in 1809 or 1810. He conflates the famous 1799 exhibition of paintings belonging to the Duc d’Orléans, which inspired Blake to return to painting after an interval of fourteen years, with an earlier exhibition of 1793. He credits Blake’s patron William Hayley with “genuine enthusiasm” for his art, but the record shows that Hayley never bought an original painting of Blake’s or a single copy of the illuminated books. Inaccuracies such as these are usually hard to spot since Ackroyd’s documentation is slight and often slipshod. For instance, the curious reader is not told where to find the two anonymous fifteenth-century engravings which Ackroyd believes Blake recalled in his illustrations to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, or the mysterious notebook containing a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax which Ackroyd attributes to Blake on hearsay evidence. Many of the articles from journals and collections on which he draws are not mentioned in his notes or bibliography; within the notes page references are occasionally lacking, or the names of authors or essential dates of works cited; or a wrong title may be given, or the wrong edition, or a wrong page—as when a familiar quotation from Keats’s letters is referred to a non-existent page in Robert Gittings’s biography.

Ackroyd’s most dramatic error occurs in his account of the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which Blake took a part that most of his biographers have tried to paper over. The Riots began on June 2nd as an orderly demonstration by some sixty thousand members of the Protestant Association opposing a bill in Parliament easing restrictions on Catholics. The Government responded by delaying tactics, then arrested and committed five of the leaders to Newgate following attacks on two Catholic chapels (one of them on Warwick Street, four blocks from Blake’s house). These arrests touched off more anti-Catholic incidents that gradually escalated into a full-blown riot by the London poor against wealth and power in general. Ackroyd’s account of the “general madness” of that week owes more to Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge than to sober historical research such as that of W. E. H. Lecky or George Rudé. He pictures a drunken mob rampaging into Broad Street, Westminster on the night of June 2nd, plundering and setting fires and engaging in a pitched battle with the militia “a few yards” from Blake’s own home. But Ackroyd has mistaken both the date and the place of the scene he describes, which he bases on a famous engraving by James Heath. This engraving, entitled “The Riots in Broad Street on June 7th, 1780,” depicts the bloody climax of the Riots that occurred not on June 2nd but five days later on Broad Street, Holborn, over half a mile from Blake’s home in Westminster, where the militia finally opened fire on the crowds. Ackroyd suggests that Blake reacted in panic to these events, producing a recurrent anxiety about and rejection of politics expressed in his later work. But this does not square either with the tone and message of Blake’s work as a whole or with his action at the time. At the height of the Riots on June 6th, as reported by Gilchrist, Blake was in the front ranks of a crowd that marched on Newgate to free the five leaders and ended by sacking and burning the hated prison itself. This event, the formative political experience of his life, resonates throughout his poetry and illustrations, all the way from the images of broken chains and liberating flames in America to the beatific vision of “dungeons burst & the Prisoners set free” in the last chapter of Jerusalem.

Ackroyd’s misreading of this event raises a question about his use of his sources, which tends toward the uncritical but where, given the fragmentary and often unreliable nature of the original accounts of Blake’s life, a sceptical approach is required. It appears that his recounting of the riot on Broad Street is based on the biographer Michael Davis’s careless reference to Heath’s engraving (omitting the date) rather than on more trustworthy reports. Ackroyd also repeats, without examining their bases, the story of Blake’s adolescent vision of a procession of monks in Westminster Abbey and the legend that he died “Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven.” Like Gilchrist, on whom he relies heavily, he rarely names the informants he quotes, yet he refers respectfully several times to Frederick Tatham’s “Life” of 1832, which of all the early memoirs was the most prone to pious exaggeration—seen most dramatically in its description of the room resounding with “the beatific Symphony” of Blake singing on his deathbed. Ackroyd mentions that Blake himself was “a wonderful fabulist,” whose memories are not always to be trusted, but he does not pursue the interesting implications of his remark—that all the early accounts of Blake, from Malkin through Tatham to Gilchrist, need to be far more carefully scrutinized than they have been. Some years ago, David Erdman exploded the most famous of these fabulations, Blake’s prophetic warning to Tom Paine in 1792 that he should flee to France to escape Government pursuit; Ackroyd alludes to this as a “report” but does not actually deny it.

In the end, in the absence of significant original research or a fresh slant on existing evidence, Ackroyd has not offered a genuinely new portrait of Blake. A wealth of information, however skilfully deployed, does not quite correspond to insight, and the multifarious details of his account do not quite cohere into the compelling inner drama of Blake’s life that speaks through his poetry and painting. Indeed, Ackroyd’s version, highly readable though it is, seems oddly like updated Gilchrist with his picture of the visionary child, the faithful husband, the hard-working painter and mostly impenetrable poet, honest, pious, and sane. Blake the radical, the “dangerous” Blake whom the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has recently described as incoherent, obscene, and quite possibly mad, or “terrible Blake in his pride” as he once described himself, is largely overlooked. And yet, in spite of his shortcomings, Ackroyd has fashioned from the expanded store of our present knowledge of Blake a more rounded and substantial picture of Blake the man in his time than any previous biographer has done. Blake’s favorite word, as the Concordance shows, was “all,” and one of his earliest aphorisms was “Less than All cannot satisfy Man.” Perhaps no biography can ever do justice to his complexity and inclusiveness. Nevertheless, Ackroyd has taken a large step in the right direction, and his lively and ambitious portrait should win new admiration with many readers for a very great man.