ABSTRACT
The writing, engraving, printing and colouring–even the mixing of the pigments–was all William Blake’s work; the binding was done by Mrs Blake, who also learned to take off impressions from the plates. A radical in politics, Swedenborgian in religion, with no interest whatever in making money, Blake was clearly destined for worldly failure. True, The French Revolution, an unreadable verse narrative and commentary whose turgid style recalls Thomas Carlyle’s later prose work of the same name, was actually set up in type by Blake’s friend and employer Samuel Johnson the radical bookseller; but it was then considered too dangerous to publish. Blake first used the method of ‘illuminated printing’ in about 1788. A contemporary account tells of visionary aid. When Blake’s brother Robert had died in 1787, Blake had seen his spirit rising ‘through the matter-of-fact ceiling, “clapping his hands for joy”’.
