The Examiner calls him an ‘unfortunate lunatic’. Years of increased obscurity follow, although Flaxman and Butts continue to befriend Blake.

1814

Engraving Flaxman’s designs for Hesiod.

1815

Napoleonic wars end. Blake engraving Wedgwood china designs.

1816

L’Allegro and Il Penseroso designs.

1818

Probable date of ‘Everlasting Gospel’ fragments in Notebook. Water-colours of Job commissioned by Butts. Friendship with the young artist John Linnell. Linnell and a group of others, calling themselves ‘The Ancients’, will become Blake’s admirers and supporters in his last years.

1820

Jerusalem engraved. Woodcuts for Thornton’s Virgil.

1822

The Ghost of Abel engraved.

1824

Friendship with Samuel Palmer. Linnell commissions Dante designs.

1825

The diarist Crabb Robinson visits Blake and records his conversation.

1827

12 April, writes to Cumberland: ‘I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering but not in Spirit & Life not in the Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever.’ 12 August, Blake dies.

Further Reading

EDITIONS

Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Complete Writings of William Blake, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of William Blake, with Related Documents, 1968; 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, 1980.

David V. Erdman (ed.), The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Doubleday, New York, 1970. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Rev. edn, University of California Press, 1982.

W. H. S. Stevenson (ed.), The Poems of William Blake, Longman, 1971. Text by Erdman. Fully annotated.

David Bindman, assisted by Deirdre Tooney, Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, Putnam, 1978.

FACSIMILE EDITIONS

Among the many facsimile editions of Blake’s illuminated writings, of particular excellence and value are the series done by W. Muir, printed by the Blake Press at Edmonton in the 1880s, and those printed for the William Blake Trust by the Trianon Press, London, during the 1950s through to the 1970s. Each volume of the latter contains a bibliographical note by Geoffrey Keynes. The Illuminated Blake, annotated by David V. Erdman, Doubleday, 1974, presents Blake’s complete illuminated works in black and white, with commentary, in a single volume. Most recently, Princeton University Press has published, under the general editorship of David Bindman, The Illuminated Books of William Blake, under the titles Jerusalem, Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Early Illuminated Books, The Continental Prophecies, Milton, a Poem and The Urizen Books. Each volume includes colour reproductions of the original plates, transcriptions of the text, and plate-by-plate commentaries.

Facsimile editions of texts in manuscript form are:

Tiriel. Facsimile and Transcript of the Manuscript, Reproduction of the Drawings, and a Commentary on the Poem, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr, Oxford University Press, 1967.

The Notebook of William Blake (facsimile and transcription), ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch, 1935.

The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile, ed. David V. Erdman, Oxford University Press, 1973.

Vala; or, The Four Zoas.