474
PARTISAN
I~£VIEW
information-a mosaic of facts drawn from a wide variety of sources, inter–
spersed with vivid descriptions of Blake's London, vignettes of his friends
and patrons, and some cautious psychoanalytic speculation, all deftly assem–
bled, generously illustrated, and narrated with brio. Ackroyd has a sharp eye
for enlivening small detail: he has noted the decorations on the Grinling
Gibbons font where Blake was baptized, the firmness of his signature in the
marriage register, and the names of three of the seven other Londoners with
whom he shares a common grave in Bunhill Fields. Yet the reader should
be warned that the book contains many small inaccuracies as well as fic–
tional touches based loosely on fact. A few small examples: Ackroyd takes
us on one of Blake's boyhood rambles through the fields north of London,
where he mayor may not have met a maiden lady mounted on a gray mare
who liked to cut small boys' kitestrings with a large pair of scissors-which
mayor may not have inspired his later engraving of "Aged Ignorance" clip–
ping the wings of youthful vision. He pictures Blake the apprentice in
Basire's workshop learning the messy and laborious steps of making an
engraving-though what he describes is clearly an etching. He tells of "The
Great Fiery Meteor" of 1783 which mayor may not have inspired a later
drawing by Blake's younger brother Robert that William copied in 1788 in
"The Approach of Doom," his first relief etching-which Ackroyd twice
labels an engraving. What is more important, the reader looking for a new
understanding of Blake's work, or of the inner drama of the imagination
that produced it, may well be disappointed. In the very profusion of detail
which is the strength of Ackroyd's method the significant outlines of
Blake's creative career tend to be lost.
The conception of Blake's career in modern criticism turns on two
poles which may be described as the systematic and the historical. The first
of these approaches, deriving from Frye's
Feaiful Symmetry,
views Blake's
work (especially his poetry) as the expression of a unified unchanging view
of reality expressed in terms of an original mythological system which
gradually unfolds over the course of his career, self-contained and insulat–
ed from the issues of the age. The critic's task is to tease out the details of
the system and their interconnections, and his goal is to achieve what Frye
described as the "total intelligibility" of Blake's myth. The second
approach locates Blake squarely within his period and views his work as
responding to various intellectual and artistic forces of the times and
reflecting significant changes in his outlook. David Erdman's
Blake: Prophet
Against Empire
led the way in 1954 by charting Blake's relation to the his–
torical and poli tical upheavals of the age, and since then other cri tics have
explored a wide variety of contexts for his work, from the rise of the
English working class to the outbreak of millenarianism in the 1790's.
Their method is to accumulate as much relevant information about the
