Growing Up

British Museum

Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

 

William Blake was different from his earliest years, and he knew it
well. Partly it was innate: his sheer intellectual quotient had to
be awesome. The concept of a spiritual quotient (in a child!) is
illusive, but in this case it should be looked at. A unique up-
bringing removed him further from his contemporaries. And finally
he inhabited a social environment very different from anything we
know today.

          

At the age of four young William ran screaming from his
nursery to report to his mother that he had seen God looking in
the window. That was the first of many such bizarre confrontations.
(They went on for forty years before he satisfactorily and defini-
tively identified God.) A happier event occurred at the age of
eight when he sighted a tree full of angels. Eagerly he reported
this vision as well; this would have earned him paternal chastise-
ment except for the intercession of a compassionate mother. No
doubt he learned from the experience that in social intercourse one
must take into account differences of perceptibility.

We know little about Blake's parents, but their care of him 

proves unusual understanding; they must have been fully aware
that they had a genius on their hands. Perhaps their most import-
ant decision came on William's first day in school. In accordance
with prevailing pedagogical custom the schoolmaster severely
birched a student. Young Blake, acting upon his keen sense of
moral outrage, rose from his desk and made an immediate exit. It
was his first and last experience with formal education. 

 

His father showed amazing respect for the child's judgment.
That decision meant that Blake missed the usual brain-
washing, or call it social conditioning, that modern psychologists
understand as the primary function of general education. It
meant that he never learned to think society's way. Instead he
thought, he saw, heard, tasted, and touched through his own 

windows of perception, and they retained their childlike clarity
throughout his life. Child, youth, or old man he always knew
whether or not the emperor had clothes on.

Instead of school he directed his own education, primarily 

centered in the Bible. In the place of ordinary social
conditioning Blake was Bible soaked. The stories of Ezra and
Ezekiel were as real to him as childhood games. He must have
known large portions of the Bible word for word because line after
line, digested, assimilated, and recreated, appear in the poetry
he wrote throughout his life. You can bet that made a difference!
 

Although by no means wealthy Blake's father enrolled him
at the age of ten in Pars Drawing School. He intended to give the
boy first class training as an artist, but William with character-
istic sensitivity declined to be favored this way at the expense
of his brothers. Instead he proposed apprenticeship to an engraver,
a more modest financial undertaking. His father took him to see
William Ryland, the Royal engraver, and prepared to put down a
princely sum for the apprenticeship, but the child objected on the
basis of Ryland's looks; he told his father that he thought the man
would live to be hanged. Once again the elder Blake respected the
child's judgment, and sure enough, twelve years later Ryland was
hanged for forgery.

At fourteen Blake began a seven year apprenticeship with
James Basire, an old fashioned but respectable engraver. Blessed
with understanding parents the young artist was equally fortunate
in the choice of a master. Basire, too, carefully preserved the
boy's individuality and sensitivity against the downward drag of
the world. When he found his other apprentices exploiting Blake's
innocence, he sent the child to Westminster Abbey to sketch the
gothic art found there.

For the next five years Blake spent his days in this and
other religious monuments communing with the images of legend and
history. His imagination was nurtured and strengthened by the
spiritual treasures of his country. One day he saw Jesus walking
with the Twelve--and painted them. On another occasion he was
present, the sole artist as it happened, when the embalmed body
of a King Edward of the 15th Century was exhumed for inspection
by the Antiquary Society.

Some of Blake's formative experiences he shared with
his contemporaries but not with us. For example 18th Century
measures against crime were rather repressive by modern standards;
petty crimes such as picking pockets were punished by hanging. A
few blocks from Blake's home was Tyburn, the public gallows. In
all likelihood on at least one occasion the impressionable lad wit-
nessed a ten year old child being hung for his crimes. Tyburn be-
came one of the mature poet's continually recurring symbols; he
often equated it with Calvary, and he conceived of Satan as Accuser
and Avenger.

When Blake was nineteen, the American colonies declared

their independence. His feelings, like those of many other London-

ers, resembled the feelings of American liberals 190 years later

about another war. At 23 he was swept along with a crowd that

stormed Newgate Prison and set the prisoners free, eleven years

before Bastille Day. Many in London devoutly hoped that the Amer-

ican revolution might spread to England. Blake saw this in his

mind's eye because thirteen years later in his poem, 'America',

he imaginatively described it.