Abstract
In autumn 1824, when beginning his Dante illustrations, Blake was living up a wainscotted staircase, in a two-roomed apartment in 3 Fountain Court on the south side of the Strand, surrounded by warehouses. From the back window he peered ‘down a deep gap between the houses of Fountain Court and the parallel street, in this way commanding a view of the Thames with its muddy banks, and of distant Surrey or Kent hills beyond’. While the river was ‘like a bar of gold’, Crabb Robinson referred to ‘the squalid air, both of the apartment and [Blake’s] dress’, and to the ‘dirt, I might say filth’ that Blake and his wife existed in (BR 564–7, SP 393). Here he worked — ‘too much attach’d to Dante to think of much else’ (letter to Linnell, 25 April 1827, E. 784, K. 879) — until his body, ‘the Machine’ (E. 778, K. 873), as though it, like the tyger, was part of an industrial manufacturing process, proved ‘incapable’ in August 1827.
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Notes
The numbering of Albert S. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1953), referred to in the text as Roe, followed by page-number.
See also Milton S. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante (New York: Harmony Books 1980), and Butlin, vol. 2, pp. 554–94.
For criticism: Rodney M. Baine, ‘Beatrice’s Dante in a Different Light’, Dante Studies 105 (1987), 113–36, which contests the view that Beatrice is to be seen as the Female Will (the essay concentrates entirely on the last two cantiche, and has nothing to say about Inferno);
David Fuller, ‘Blake and Dante’, Art History 11 (1988), 349–73,
which argues against Roe; Jeanne Moskal, ‘Blake, Dante and “Whatever Book is for Vengeance”’ , Philological Quarterly 70 (1991), 317–35.
See Eugene Paul Hassar, Illustrations to Dante’s Inferno (New Jersey: Associated Universities Press 1994)
and Steve Ellis’s Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983).
For Flaxman’s Dante, see David Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755–1841: Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (New York: Rizzoli 1979), pp. 94–105.
Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), p. 323.
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London: Longman 1959), p. 211.
On the relation of the Romantics to politics, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics: Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981).
For the speculation and financial collapse of these years see Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), pp. 43–59.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1971), p. 49.
Links between Utilitarian and radical thought and the Evangelical ascend-ancy are made by Elie Halévy, England in 1815 trans. E.I. Watkin and D.A. Barker (1913, 2nd rev. edn 1949, London: Ernest Benn 1949), pp. 585–7;
compare Humphry House, The Dickens World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1942), pp. 74–6;
Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the British Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), pp. 91–105. The reference to ‘surveillance’ recalls Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979).
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt ed. P.P. Howe, after A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover vol. 11 (London: J.H. Dent 1932), p.13.
See Andrew Wright, Blake’s Job (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) for the 21 engravings plus title-page. Commissioned by Linnell, Job was published in 1826.
Norman Gash, Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel to 1830 (London: Longman, 2nd edn 1985), p. 479. For forgery, see pp. 478–85.
Charles Dickens, Sketches By Boz ed. Dennis Walder (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995), p. 74.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield ed. Jeremy Tambling (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1996), 47, p. 626.
Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (London: Faber 1985), pp. 33–8.
See on Crompton Robert J. Corber, ‘Representing the “Unspeakable”: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990), 85–101.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton University Press 1947), p. 199.
On Blake and Byron, see Leslie Tannenbaum, ‘Lord Byron in the Wilderness: Biblical Tradition in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel’, Modern Philology 72 (1975), 350–64;
and Leslie Tannenbaum, ‘Blake and the Iconography of Cain’, in Robert V. Essick and Donald Pearce (eds) Blake in his Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1978), pp. 23–34.
Quoted, David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press 1974), p. 37.
See V.A.C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English people, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994), p. 20. (I cannot reconcile Gattrell’s figures with those that Gash gives in his biography of Peel, p. 486. In the seven years after 1822, in England and Wales, according to Gash, 433 people were hanged; in 1829, 17 in London and Middlesex, a figure which was steadily declining (from 56 in 1783, and from 731 overall in the seven years prior to 1822). Gash’s figures seem considerably lower, but I have chosen to opt for Gatrell.)
J.S. Mill, Autobiography ed. Jack Stillinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1971), p. 61. See also Gash, p. 334.
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (1959, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990), p. 162.
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens ed. J.W.T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer 1928) 1.2., p. 25.
See Michael Allen, Charles Dickens’s Childhood (London: Macmillan 1988).
Deborah Dorfman, Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats (New Haven: Yale University Press 1969),
Suzanne R. Hoover, ‘William Blake in the Wilderness: A Closer Look at his Reputation 1827–1863’, in Morton Paley and Michael Phillips (eds) William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973)
and G.E. Bentley Jr, William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1975). In addition, there is Carlyle’s knowledge of Blake (he possessed a copy of Wilkinson’s edition of the Songs (1839)),
and Richard Monckton Milnes, who planned an edition of Blake in 1838: see T. Wemyss Reid, Life, Letters and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes (London 1891), 1, pp. 220–21. He conversed with Crabb Robinson about Blake, evidently planning (see Robinson Books and their Writers, 2, p. 717), an edition of Blake in 1852. He was consulted for Gilchrist’s and Swinburne’s biography of 1869.
Steven Marcus, Dickens From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto & Windus 1965), pp. 65, 70.
F.R. Leavis, Introduction to Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966).
In F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus 1970), Leavis’s chapter on Little Dorrit is called ‘Dickens and Blake’.
See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press 1873), pp. 149, 215–47. For a recent attempt to link Blake and Dickens,
see Dominic Rainsford, Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce (London: Macmillan 1997).
Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), pp. 206–29.
T.N. Talfourd, supposed to be an original for Traddles, associated with Steerforth at the school, was one of the early (favourable) reviewers of Cain, in The London Magazine in 1822. See Truman Guy Steffan, Lord Byron’s Cain: Twelve Essays and A Text with Variants and Annoations (Austin: University of Texas Press 1968), pp. 348–53.
See Lawrence Frank, Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1984), pp. 60–94.
Derrida in Glas, quoted Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature: Derrida: Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1981), p. 60.
Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), pp. 3–12, discusses changes in the treatment of suicide: in 1823, Peel passed legislation to end the custom of burying the dead in a public highway with a stake through the heart, a practice literally associating the dead with trees and vegetative existence.
Keith Kyle, ‘London: the Unlooked for Conflict’, in Seamus Dunn (ed.) Managing Divided Cities (Ryburn Publishing: Keele University Press 1994), pp. 53–63.
Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oakes, California: Pine Forge Press 1994), p. 154. The post-industrial definition comes from H.V. Savitch, Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, Paris and London (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988). Manuel Castells’s work began in 1972 with La question urbaine (Paris: Maspero), and David Harvey’s in 1973 with Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold). John Friedman discussed what he called ‘the world city hypothesis’, in Paul Knox and Peter J. Taylor, World Cities in a World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), pp. 317–31.
Philip Ogden (ed.), London Docklands: The Challenge of Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), p. 9.
Michael Hebbert, London: More By Fortune Than Design (Chichester: John Wiley 1998), pp. 105–6.
Anthony D. King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalisation of London (London: Routledge 1990), p. 145.
Quotations taken from Kevin Robbins, ‘Whatever Could a Postmodern City Be?’ New Formations 15 (1991), 1–22.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair Stevenson 1990); Blake (London: Sinclair Stevenson 1995); London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus 2000).
Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and the Labyrinthine Text (London: Macmillan 2000), pp. 170–211, see Ackroyd’s work as quasi-deconstructive: ‘What Peter Ackroyd strives to make us familiar with is that London remains ineffable. It resists definition, by being nothing other than the voices, the texts, the traces of itself, endlessly reconfigured and performed, time and time again’ (210). I see his London as more esssentialist and ahistorical. For a review of Blake, see Morton Paley, Blake: An Illustrated News-letter 30.2 (1996), 58–60.
Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta 1997), p. 208. Further references in the text. The Blake passage he refers to is Jerusalem 31, 14–17. It is discussed by Ackroyd, pp. 315–17.
Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Ken Knabb (ed.) Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets 1981), pp. 5, 6–7.
On psychogeography, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1998)
and Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situ-ationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 58–60.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage 1988), pp. 327–8.
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© 2005 Jeremy Tambling
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Tambling, J. (2005). Dante’s ‘Deep and Woody Way’. In: Blake’s Night Thoughts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505612_7
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