ABSTRACT
I blame the Reverend Doctor John Trusler, and I think Blake Studies agrees with me.1 The much-quoted letter that Blake wrote him in 1799 has ensured Trusler’s status as scapegoat for all our professional misgivings about reading Blake’s work. Trusler, we can infer, had been found wanting as a reader, having apparently complained about the lack of “Explicit” meaning in the drawing he had commissioned:
You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. . . . But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity[.]
(qtd. in Erdman 702-03)2
The trouble with Trusler was that, unlike us, he was seeking the wrong sort of elucidation: he had obviously asked for the kind where the prefix “e” indicates the application of hermeneutic illumination ab extra, presumably by the grown-up “somebody” found wanting in Blake’s visions. To enter into true Blakean elucidation, we must intuit, is to become as those “Chil - dren” who have called out the internal light of his works by virtue of their “delight” in contemplation.
