London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
London Walks connecting you with a Londoner
who saw angels in trees, conversed with the dead, drew the ghost of a flea, thought heaven and hell were much closer together than most people supposed, and wrote what just may be the greatest poem anybody has ever written about London.
Yes, that’s right. William Blake.
Poet. Painter. Engraver. Mystic. Revolutionary. Londoner.
As good a day as any to spend some time with William Blake because this was the day we lost him. William Blake died on August 12th, 1827. He died in London, of course.
Where else?
Blake was London born, London bred, London formed, London battered, London inspired and, finally, London buried.
He was born on November 28th, 1757, at 28 Broad Street in Soho. Today that’s Broadwick Street.
His father was a hosier.
And I like that.
Because before William Blake becomes William Blake, before the angels and the prophecies and the flaming tigers and Jerusalem, he’s the son of a Soho shopkeeper.
This fantastically uncontainable imagination comes out of the London artisan class.
And almost immediately, reality starts behaving rather oddly around young William.
When he was eight or ten he was walking on Peckham Rye.
And he saw a tree.
Nothing unusual there.
Except that this particular tree was filled with angels.
Every branch glittering with them.
Another time he came running home saying he’d seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree.
His mother beat him.
You can see the difficulty.
What do you do with a small boy who comes home from a walk in south London and tells you he’s just bumped into Ezekiel?
His father didn’t think much of the angels either. But, importantly, he did recognise the artistic talent. He bought William casts of antique sculptures to draw, and at ten the boy was sent to drawing school.
At fourteen Blake was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire in Great Queen Street.
And here London hands the young Blake one of the great gifts of his life.
Westminster Abbey.
Basire sent him there to draw the medieval monuments.
Think about that.
Teenage William Blake, hour after hour, day after day, alone among the kings and queens and knights and tombs of Westminster Abbey.
In 1774 he was there when the coffin of Edward I was opened.
Edward Longshanks.
Dead for nearly five centuries.
And there’s William Blake, seventeen years old, looking in.
The Gothic world got into him.
The dead got into him.
Old London got into him.
And it never left.
Nor did new London.
Blake was caught up in the Gordon Riots of 1780. According to his early biographer, he encountered the mob, was swept along at its front and witnessed the storming and burning of Newgate Prison.
That’s quite a London education.
Westminster Abbey and Newgate in flames.
Kings in coffins and prisoners breaking out of gaol.
He married Catherine Boucher in 1782.
She was the daughter of a market gardener. When she signed the marriage register she made an X.
Catherine became absolutely central to Blake’s life and work.
She helped him print. She helped colour his extraordinary illuminated books. She kept the household going.
And she had methods.
When William became too absorbed in eternity to notice something as mundane as dinner, Catherine would apparently put an empty plate in front of him.
Message received.
Or perhaps not. This is William Blake we’re talking about.
There’s a wonderful story from their Lambeth years.
A patron comes calling and finds William and Catherine sitting naked in their garden summer house.
Blake calls out, perfectly cheerfully, “Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve you know!”
They’d been reciting Paradise Lost.
In character.
Now, the story was disputed later, so handle it with care.
But heaven knows it sounds like Blake.
And it was in this period that Blake produced Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Two contrary states of the human soul.
Innocence and experience.
The lamb and the tiger.
And among the poems of experience is one consisting of just sixteen lines.
Four little verses.
It’s called “London”.
I use it to open my London in Poetry walk.
And I think there’s a case for saying that nobody has ever got more London into fewer words. Got more London better.
Here it is.
“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.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”
Sixteen lines.
And what a city.
Listen to the movement of it.
He’s walking.
“I wander.”
That’s how London gives itself up.
On foot.
But wherever he looks, London is constrained. Chartered. Owned. Regulated. Controlled.
Even the Thames has somehow been put in chains.
And then comes that staggering phrase.
“The mind-forg’d manacles.”
Four words and an entire political philosophy.
The chains we carry around inside our own heads.
And Blake hears London.
That’s important.
The poem isn’t just visual.
It cries.
It sighs.
It curses.
The chimney sweep.
The soldier.
The prostitute.
The baby.
Church, palace, marriage, street.
The whole city is implicated.
And notice that Blake doesn’t stand above these people looking down at them.
He walks among them.
That, for me, is why the poem will always live.
This isn’t London as scenery.
It’s London as a human condition.
An X-ray of the city in sixteen lines.
And Blake himself was no comfortable establishment figure throwing stones at the establishment from a safe distance.
He knew poverty.
He knew rejection.
He knew what it was to produce extraordinary work and have almost nobody interested in buying it.
He also knew exactly what he thought.
About almost everything.
This was not a man greatly troubled by self-doubt.
When patrons tried to tell Blake how to make his art, things tended not to go terribly well.
One of them was William Hayley, a successful writer who became Blake’s patron when William and Catherine moved out of London to Felpham in Sussex.
Hayley meant well.
That may have been the problem.
He wanted to make Blake practical.
Useful.
Commercial.
Blake had other ideas.
He eventually produced this little couplet about his helpful friend:
“Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake
Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.”
There’s a thank-you note for you.
And Felpham produced another magnificent Blake episode.
In August 1803 a soldier called John Scolfield came into Blake’s garden.
There was an argument.
Blake was a small man, but evidently not a feeble one.
He seized the soldier by the elbows and marched him out of the garden and down the road.
Scolfield subsequently accused Blake of uttering seditious remarks against the King.
This was wartime.
Napoleon was threatening invasion.
Sedition was no laughing matter.
Blake went on trial.
And was acquitted.
Then back to London.
Of course.
London was where he belonged.
In 1809 he mounted his own exhibition at his brother’s house in Broad Street.
Sixteen works.
One reviewer called him “an unfortunate lunatic”.
There appear to have been no sales.
There’s Catherine’s heartbreaking and rather wonderful description of life with him during those years:
“I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”
And somebody who visited him found him “still poor still Dirty”.
Probably printer’s ink.
That’s Blake in a nutshell.
Poor.
Dirty.
In Paradise.
And yet the visions kept coming.
Especially the visitors.
Visitors nobody else could see.
In later life he would sit with the artist John Varley and draw them.
Edward I turned up.
William Wallace turned up.
Historical figures.
Spirits.
People Blake had met in his dreams.
More than a hundred “Visionary Heads”.
And then there’s the Ghost of a Flea.
Only William Blake could meet the ghost of a flea and think, yes, I must get his portrait.
There’s something else about Blake I particularly like.
He walked.
He was a great London walker.
When his younger friend John Linnell moved to Hampstead, the elderly Blake would walk up there to see him.
Think of him making that journey.
Out of the crowded streets of central London.
Northwards.
Upwards.
Climbing towards Hampstead and the Heath.
And when he got there he would sing.
Old ballads.
His own poems.
His own tunes.
None of those tunes was written down.
Think what we lost there.
By 1821 William and Catherine were living in just two rooms at 3 Fountain Court, off the Strand.
Money was desperately short.
But something rather beautiful happened in Blake’s final years.
The young found him.
A group of young artists discovered this strange old man and realised what almost everybody else had missed.
They revered him.
To them this poor, disregarded engraver wasn’t a lunatic.
He was a prophet.
Samuel Palmer was just nineteen when he came into Blake’s orbit.
Palmer was so awed by him that he would kiss the bell handle before entering Blake’s home.
I love that.
The establishment largely passes you by.
The critics laugh.
The money never comes.
You grow old in two rooms off the Strand.
And then young artists start climbing the stairs because they think a genius lives up there.
And they were right.
By 1827 Blake was dying.
He was jaundiced.
Weak.
Tottering.
Still working.
Still drawing.
Still imagining.
In April he described himself as an old man, feeble in body but emphatically not in what he called “The Real Man”.
The imagination.
That, he said, “Liveth for Ever”.
And then comes August 12th, 1827.
Fountain Court.
London.
William Blake is sixty-nine years old.
He’s dying.
And in his last days he’s still making art.
According to one account, he colours an impression of one of his greatest images, The Ancient of Days.
And he draws Catherine.
One last portrait of the woman who has been beside him for forty-five years.
And then, according to the account passed on by his young friend George Richmond, Blake said he was going to the country he had wished all his life to see.
His face brightened.
His eyes brightened.
And William Blake began to sing.
He sang of the things he could see in heaven.
And then he died.
There’s something almost impossibly Blakean about that death.
Because everybody else in the room sees an old man dying in two poor rooms off the Strand.
Blake sees another country opening.
He was buried at Bunhill Fields.
And then came one of history’s long, slow reversals.
The man dismissed as mad became one of the giants.
“The Tyger” became one of the most anthologised poems in the English language.
“And did those feet in ancient time” became “Jerusalem”.
His pictures that barely sold became treasures.
A man mocked as an “unfortunate lunatic” eventually got a bust in Westminster Abbey.
The Abbey.
Think about that.
The place where the teenage apprentice had sat drawing the medieval dead.
And outside the British Library today stands Eduardo Paolozzi’s enormous bronze Newton, based on Blake’s image.
London finally caught up with William Blake.
It only took us about a century.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
Blake spent his life seeing things before everybody else did.
Angels in Peckham Rye.
Prophets under trees.
Ghosts in rooms.
Manacles in minds.
Blood running down palace walls.
He looked at London and saw not just streets and buildings but the enormous invisible city inside them.
The city of imagination.
The city of suffering.
The city of eternity.
And perhaps that’s why, two hundred years later, when I want to open the door onto London in poetry, the first voice I reach for is his.
“I wander thro’ each charter’d street…”
William Blake.
Londoner.
Born here.
Walked here.
Worked here.
Dreamed here.
Died here.
And saw more of London than almost anybody who ever opened their eyes.
See you tomorrow.