QI The Book of the Dead

goes off on a tangent about Jesus’ nose:
    I always thought that Jesus Christ was a Snubby … I should not have worship’d him if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle nosed rascals .
     
    What really got Blake’s honest indignation going was injustice. No less than the Shakers, he was enraged by the class system, by slavery and by the urban poverty he saw around him in London. The values of his society seemed to him to be upside down. What mattered in England was not
    whether a man had talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & Obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art & Sciences. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be Starved .
     
    Blake didn’t exactly starve, but he certainly struggled to make ends meet. His parents were both in the clothing trade – his mother’s first husband had died leaving her a hosiery business in Soho and Blake was born above the shop. He had no desire to join the family firm: he was ‘totally destitute of the dexterity of a London shopman’. When he was ten, his parents encouraged his natural love of sketching by sending him to a drawing school in the Strand, where he was nicknamed the ‘Little Connoisseur’. As a teenager, he spent hours drawing in Westminster Abbey (where he had more visions of Christ and the Apostles) and set out to be apprenticed as an engraver, a relatively humble profession at the time. While casting around for the right master, his stargazing skills came in handy. He turned down one position flat, declaring: ‘I do not like the man’s face, it looks as if he will live to be hanged.’Sure enough, twelve years later, the engraver, William Ryland, was hanged for forgery – the last person ever to be executed at Tyburn.
    Blake showed great talent as an engraver and soon received a regular flow of commissions, particularly from booksellers wanting illustrations. By the mid-1780s he had earned enough money to buy his own press. But the business didn’t last long. Blake wasn’t really interested in money and he lived so much in his own head that deadlines were always a problem. He couldn’t bear his clients telling him what to do, and resented the shallow tastes of ‘Fashionable fools’. He refused to be pigeon-holed: he didn’t care for the romantic school’s obsession with landscape and was equally contemptuous of neoclassical life-drawing, which he described as ‘looking more like death, or smelling of mortality’. Blake had honed his technique by relentlessly copying the works of the Renaissance masters – Dürer, Michelangelo and Raphael – but his subject matter came directly from his own luminous daydreams. For him, the visible world was just the outward ‘mortal’ manifestation of an eternal reality. Where others saw the sun rising as ‘a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea’, Blake saw ‘an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.”’
    Wondrous as all this was, it wasn’t exactly commercial. He and his wife Catherine lived from job to job, subsidised by handouts from friends, for the whole of their married life. When Blake met Catherine (or Kate, as he always called her) in 1781, he was recovering from rejection by another woman and was vague and distracted. She, on the other hand, was instantly smitten – so much so that she fainted on being introduced to him, knowing instantly that this was the man she was meant to marry. They were wed within the year.

    Catherine was illiterate: like Ann Lee, she signed her wedding contract with an ‘X’. She ran the household and made Blake’s clothes; he taught her to read and write and she learnt to help him with his engraving and colouring. They had no children but it was a warm and happy marriage. In periods of financial hardship, she would put an empty plate in front of him at mealtimes as a hint, but she supported him through all his mood swings, missed deadlines and aborted grand plans. In forty-five years, they spent less than a fortnight apart.
    Not that there weren’t tensions. During some of Blake’s more fevered raptures, Catherine would sit up at night and keep him company; at others, she would leave him to it. In the long and painful gestation for the most ambitious of his prophetic books, Jerusalem (1820), she confessed to one of his fellow artists: ‘I have very little of Mr Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.’
    There is a persistent rumour about