‘New matter’: Mona Wilson’s The Life of William Blake 85 Years On

Abstract

Despite numerous attempts to successfully capture and recount the life of William Blake, Blake studies still lacks a definitive biography of the poet-printer-painter. Recently, scholars such as Mark Crosby, Michael Phillips, Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies have unearthed important new contextual data concerning the minute particulars of the historical William and Catherine Blake.1 Those discoveries, derived almost entirely from archival research, incidentally throw into relief the hitherto minimal spadework attempted by Blake’s eighteen biographers since Alexander Gilchrist.2 Blake’s modern biographers’ almost complete neglect of archaeological-archival research goes some way in explaining (as much as does the often cited argument of a ‘simple lack of evidence’) why Blake remains the only one of the ‘big six’ romantic poets to lack a definitive scholarly biography. I hope in this chapter to capture something of the troubling and hitherto unexplored complexity of Mona Wilson’s ‘popular’ 1927 biography of Blake. If Wilson’s The Life of William Blake foreshadows James King’s subjecting of Blake to fashionable theory,3 it should be recalled that Wilson’s is also the last Blake biography to feature significant and fundamental ‘new matter’. And thereby hangs a tale. Post-1969, most Blake scholarship discussing Blake’s life has turned not to fresh research, or modern biographies of the poet-artist, but to G.E. Bentley Jr’s Blake Records.