QI The Book of the Dead

they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate .
     
    Blake’s younger brother Robert had died of consumption when he was twenty-five, a loss that affected Blake deeply. In a scene reminiscent of Cuthbert’s vision of the death of St Aidan, Blake observed his brother’s released spirit ascend through the ceiling ‘clapping its hands for joy’. Robert regularly visited Blake in dreams. One such encounter produced a brilliant advance inprinting technology. In the eighteenth century, pictures called ‘etchings’ were printed in the following way: Copper plates were covered with wax. The artist scratched a picture in the wax with a needle and then dipped the whole thing in acid. The acid bit into the exposed metal but left the wax alone. The wax was then removed by applying heat to melt it, and the copper plate was inked. After being wiped to remove excess ink, so there was only ink in the indented lines, the plate was then pressed on to paper, providing a print of the original picture. Robert’s idea reversed the process. The artist painted directly on to the copper using varnish. When the plate was dipped in acid, the acid cut away the metal around the acid-resistant varnish, leaving the picture standing out in relief. Dispensing with the wax speeded the whole thing up and painting in varnish gave the artist far more freedom of expression than scratching away in wax. Blake’s invention could have made him a great deal of money; instead it brought him only delight and immortality. ‘Relief etching’ allowed him to ‘body forth’ the visions of his imagination and create his illuminated books, the striking combinations of poetry and images for which he is now famous.
    Today, Blake is known as one of England’s most original artists and thinkers, but this was far from the case during his lifetime. He mounted only one exhibition of his work, in 1809. He sold nothing at all and attracted only one review. The Examiner dismissed him as ‘an unfortunate lunatic’ who had published ‘a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain’. It was a view widely held. On being shown some of Blake’s drawings, George III shouted ‘Take them away! Take them away!’ Even the poet Wordsworth thought he was mad – although, to be fair, he qualified this bysaying ‘that there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott.’
    How mad was Blake? It sounds as if he might have had bipolar disorder. He suffered from debilitating fits of gloom alternating with periods of visionary intensity and high productivity. At the age of four he saw God’s head leaning in at a window. As an eight-year-old, on Peckham Rye, he saw a tree full of angels. Blake’s images have a verve and simplicity that makes them feel both wild and oddly real. Today we think of him as ‘imaginative’ rather than ‘mad’.
    In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Blake dines with the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. He asks them how they dare assert that God spoke to them. Isaiah answers that he ‘saw no God, nor heard any’ but that he had perceived ‘the infinite in every thing’. The voice of God, continues the prophet, is nothing but ‘the voice of honest indignation’.
    ‘Honest indignation’ describes Blake to a tee. Short, stocky and ginger, as a small child he had such a temper and hated rules so much that his father didn’t dare send him to school. Instead, William was educated at home by his mother and his own reading. ‘I have a great desire to know everything,’ he once remarked. He had an exceptional gift for languages, teaching himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as some French and Italian. His natural intelligence (and his sudden insights) meant that he never felt intellectually intimidated by anyone. His scribbles in the margins of other people’s works are always lively and often very funny. Annotating the rather pompous Discourses of the great artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, Blake peppers the pages with exclamations like: ‘Villainy!’ ‘A Fine Jumble!’ ‘Liar!’ but can be generous when he agrees with a passage: ‘Well Said Enough!’In one of his own notebooks, Blake suddenly