QI The Book of the Dead

resulting from fifty years of inhaling toxic copper fumes as he toiled at his engravings. Catherine was with him, and his very last act was to ask her to pose for him: ‘Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.’ One of his younger admirers, the painter George Richmond, was there too:
    He died … in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven .
     
    He and Catherine had always enjoyed singing together, both old ballads and his own songs, many of which had the simplicity of Shaker hymns. After his death, Catherine lived off his work and kept in close contact with him, ‘consulting Mr Blake’ before agreeing to any deal. She herself died four years later, calling out to him ‘as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now’.
    It took most of a century for Blake’s reputation to rise to the summit of English art and letters. These days, his Songs of Innocence & Experience are recognised as classics and ‘The Tyger’ is the most anthologised English poem of all time. The longer, prophetic poems may be read less often, but the illustrations that accompany them are exhibited all over the world as masterpieces of spiritual art; few people have ever transformed their mystical experiences into such simple and instantly recognisable images. Blake’s philosophy also seems to resonate deeply with the modernage. The last line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , ‘For everything that lives is holy’, reaches out far beyond a narrow Christian interpretation. It would do very well as the slogan for a contemporary environmental charity. But Blake was never a conventional Christian. As he once remarked, relishing the paradox: ‘Jesus is the only God … and so am I, and so are you.’

     
    Blake’s reputation, rather like St Cuthbert’s body, had many adventures after his death. In contrast, the posthumous fate of Blake’s contemporary, the social philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), was planned down to the last detail. The father of utilitarianism (the philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’) wanted to do something useful with his mortal remains. Instead of leaving them to moulder in the ground, he chose to put them on permanent public display. In his will, Bentham left his body to his friend Dr Thomas Southwood Smith with very precise instructions on how to turn it into what he called his ‘Auto-Icon’. It is still visible today, preserved in a glass-fronted wooden cabinet at University College, London.
    Bentham first toyed with the idea of preserving his own body while in his twenties, when he asked a doctor friend to get him a human head so that he could experiment with drying it in his oven. He explained that he wanted to leave his own body to science ‘with the desire that mankind may reap some small benefit by my decease, having had hitherto small opportunities to contribute while living’.
    Six decades later, Bentham got his wish. He had specified in his will that his body was to be offered up for public dissection, a useful thing in itself. At that time, because of the doctrine of theresurrection of the flesh (when Christ will supposedly return at the Last Judgement to open the graves of the dead), there was still a Christian taboo against not burying bodies. This meant there was a general shortage of specimens for pathologists to work on.
    Before the dissection began, at London’s Webb Street School of Anatomy, twenty-eight of Bentham’s friends gathered to say farewell. His corpse lay before them in a simple nightshirt. In a scene straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (then just into its second edition), the funeral oration was dramatically accompanied ‘with thunder pealing overhead and lightning flashing through the gloom’. Once the eulogy had finished, Dr Southwood Smith made sure, as Bentham’s will had specified, ‘to ascertain by appropriate experiment that no life remains’. He then carefully stripped the flesh from the bones and placed the internal organs and ‘the soft parts’ in labelled glass containers ‘like wine decanters’. His cleaned bones were then pinned together