The Rival "Canterbury Pilgrims" of Blake and Cromek: Herculean Figures in the Carpet

Abstract

Out of his long list of enemies, William Blake came to hate none more passionately than the engraver-turned-publisher Robert Hartley Cromek. He came to regard Cromek as someone determined to obstruct his artistic advancement and, more broadly, as representative of a self-serving strain of entrepreneurship infecting the English marketplace. Alexander Gilchrist and subsequent biographers have uncritically accepted Blake's charges against Cromek and have repeated them without documentary support.' New information relating to their rival projects to publish by subscription prints of paintings both titled The Procession of Chaucer's Pilgrims to Canterbury shows, however, that the idea to paint an illustration of the Canterbury pilgrims and make an engraving of the painting originated with Cromek, not Blake; that everything Blake did in his Canterbury Pilgrims project was an attempt to surpass corresponding parts of Cromek's project; and that Blake allegorized his version of his dispute with Cromek in Milton. In fact, the problems Blake encountered during this period caused not so much by Cromek as by the economically and aesthetically inhospitable climate for all artists, and especially for engravers, in early nineteenth-century England. But apart from the question of whether Blake is justified in his hatred of Cromek, it is unquestionably the case that Blake's Canterbury Pilgrims project can be understood only in the context of Cromek's Canterbury Pilgrims project-and of Blake's consuming enmity toward Cromek. To many other contemporaries, however, Cromek was an energetic figure with much to recommend him. After his marriage to his first cousin, Elizabeth Charge, on October 24, 1806 in Wakefield, Cromek and his bride moved into a house at 64 Newman in London. Cromek, then thirty-six, was ready to make his mark as a publisher and editor, having toiled as an engraver of indifferent talents for more than a decade. Mrs. Martha Eastwick recalled in a letter to Cromek's son many years later that the bride and groom were handsomeyour father, in particular, had a small Classical head, with most gentlemanly manners, and took much in society.2 Cromek no doubt had chosen his new residence with an eye to its social and professional advantages. Newman was popularly called Artists' Street because about forty painters, sculptors, engravers, and others practicing the arts lived along its two-block length. Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy,