William Blake was born in London on 28 November 1757 and was christened on 11 December in St. James’s Church. His mother, born Catherine Wright, was married twice. Evidence has recently emerged that she and her first husband, a hosier named Thomas Armitage, were members of the Moravian Church (Davies and Schuchard), and some readers have detected echoes of Moravian hymns in Blake’s poems. After Armitage died, Catherine left the Moravians and married James Blake, also a hosier. The Blakes kept a shop at 28 Broad Street and were in their mid-thirties when William arrived. Of his brothers and sisters, Robert (1762-87) was Blake’s favorite. His eldest brother, James (1753-1827), and a sister, Catherine (1764-1841), also figured prominently in his later life. As a child, Blake viewed the world in the light of what Wordsworth, in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, would later call a “visionary gleam.” When he was about nine, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks; he later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered in the hay (Gilchrist 1: 7). Unlike the child in Wordsworth’s poem, however, Blake never outgrew these visions. He was past fifty when he described seeing the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Erdman 566).
Blake’s artistic ability also became evident while he was still a child. At age ten he was enrolled in Henry Pars’s drawing school, where he learned to sketch the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient statues. His father encouraged his interest and even bought him some casts of his own. The influence of his early exposure to Greek and Roman sculpture can be seen in Blake’s later work. The Farnese Hercules, for example, is the model for the figure of Giant Despair in Christian and Hopeful Escape from Doubting Castle, one of Blake’s illustrations to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1824-27). In his last illuminated work, Laocon (c. 1826-27), he surrounds a well-known classical sculpture with his own commentary on art, religion, and commerce. (Blake Archive)
