Blake in Theatreland: Fountain Court and its Environs

Abstract

When William and Catherine Blake moved to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, sometime in 1821, far from entering a London area suitable for a quiet semi-retirement, they found themselves relocated to the very centre of the capital’s theatreland and radical press industries.¹ This chapter examines the Blakes’ close physical proximity to a vigorous and rapidly changing local culture. Angus Whitehead’s recent essay has considerably enlarged our understanding of the circumstances surrounding their occupation of the Fountain Court premises, not least in bringing to light that their landlord, Henry Banes, made William a legatee (78–9). This essay extends Whitehead’s findings by arguing that their new premises at the eastern end of the Strand brought them tantalisingly close to London’s latest developments and to a subterranean culture of poetry, music and song. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of the proximity of the encounter between Blake’s image-making and the local popular culture of the Strand comes in the appropriation in 1822 by the radical William Benbow of Blake’s stipple engraving with mezzotint, ‘Mrs. Q.,’ after Jean François Marie Huet-Villiers (Worrall 1998).