Happy Birthday William Blake

[bawdy-nan]

It's William Blake's Birthday, a visionary poet and artist with local connections.

As a boy he'd wander round these parts, striding out from his home in Soho. Always favouring South London, in later years he wrote to a friends about how a visit to North London would cause him take to his bed for days with a violent sickness.

At the age of 8 or 10 he saw his first vision of angels in a tree on Peckham Rye, "bright angelic wings bespangling every bough, like stars". It's this moment that's celebrated in the mural, by Stan Peskett, on Goose Green.

I made a programme for Radio 4 about it and it's now downloadable as a podcast here: http://bbc.in/2gENw1N

It's also being broadcast again on New Year's Eve at 23.30, so the Radio 4 audience will be spending New Year in SE22 and SE15...

[steveo]

I saw this - the Ghost of a flea - at the Tate the other day. It's very small, exquisite and weird

It wasn't just visions of angels he had

[bawdy-nan]

Well, no...

[Jah Lush]

Good stuff. Thanks for the link.

[edhistory]

> At the age of 8 or 10 he saw his first vision of angels in a tree on Peckham Rye,

There is no evidence for this whatsoever.

[bawdy-nan]

The account occurs in the first biography written by Alexander Gilchrist after Blake's death and drawing on interviews with people who knew Blake. The story is at the beginning of the book and has the feeling of myth. Is it "true"? What does that mean, I wonder? Did he have visions? He certainly described having them and for a while followed Swedenborg ...

Is it a story designed to make the case for the power of the child's imaginative influence on an artists imagination and creative life? Maybe. Is it a fiction? Maybe. But it's a resonance felt by lots of artists and writers and is a kind of imaginative provocation...

[bawdy-nan]

I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen

Guarded by an Angel mild:

Witless woe was ne?er beguiled!

And I wept both night and day,

And he wiped my tears away;

And I wept both day and night,

And hid from him my heart?s delight.

So he took his wings, and fled;

Then the morn blushed rosy red.

I dried my tears, and armed my fears

With ten thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;

I was armed, he came in vain;

For the time of youth was fled,

And grey hairs were on my head.

Here you go, edhistory, David Almond reading this, just for you.

[edhistory]

> The account occurs in the first biography written by Alexander Gilchrist

This book is available as a free pdf from www.archive.org.

As I said, no evidence.

[rendelharris]

So no evidence apart from the evidence of his contemporaries as told to his first biographer. Blake claimed to have had visions of angels etc throughout his life - he was certainly having them when he worked in Westminster Abbey at the age of fourteen - so it's perfectly possible the story's true. And if it isn't it ought to be.

Brideshead Revisited (from memory so apologies if inaccurate):

"You believe in the ox and the ass and the stable and all that?"

"Oh yes, that's a lovely idea."

"But Sebastian, you can't believe in something simply because it's a lovely idea."

"Yes I can, that's how I believe."

[edhistory]

> So no evidence apart from the evidence of his contemporaries as told to his first biographer

Read the text, then comment.

[rendelharris]

"On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in

after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten

perhaps, he has his " first vision." Sauntering along, the

boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright

angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. Re-

turned home he relates the incident, and only through his

mother's intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest

father, for telling a lie."

Apart from that. You may say no reliable evidence, you may say no direct evidence, you may not say no evidence. The "in after years relate" clearly implies he told this story to people who told it to his biographer.

[edhistory]

I can say no evidence, it's belated hearsay, what it now described as a post-truth.

As you must also know what we now call Peckham Rye is a name migration. Even English Heritage acknowledge this in the end-notes to its Peckham Survey, also available at no cost freely on-line.

You can easily check old maps on-line to see where "Peckham Rye" was in Blake' time. It stretched from what is now Warwick Gardens to Rye Lane.

Peckham Rye was next to Dulwich Hill (not the Sydney one).

The land now called Peckham Rye is nowhere near Dulwich Hill.

Peckham Rye Station was built on Peckham Rye, maybe that's why it was given its name.

It was hilarious when members of the Blake Society held a celebration on Homestall Farm land, now part of Peckham Rye Park.

[peckham_ryu]

Erm. So we're discussing the historical evidence for angels in a tree. Good stuff! In other news, Grendel's mother spotted at aquarobics in Dulwich Leisure Centre.

Anyway, enjoyed the radio programme. Listened the other night :)

Being a genius (as I consider Blake to have been) sounds like bloody hard work.

[edhistory]

> Grendel's mother spotted at aquarobics in Dulwich Leisure Centre.

I don't think there's evidence for this either.

[rendelharris]

Georgian and early Victorian biographers did not hold themselves to the standards of modern biography, possibly because there wasn't an army of crabbed keyboard critics hovering waiting to pick any conceivable nit available. Nobody's claiming to know the exact location of Blake's vision, does the fact that for convenience people use the modern location of Peckham Rye as a convenient spot to celebrate Blake invalidate the story? Not really.

If you look at this 1766 map http://maps.southwark.gov.uk/connect/Includes/Historical%20map%20scans/200dpi/John%20Rocques%20A%20Plan%20of%20London%201766.pdf, almost exactly contemporary to the Blake story, although Peckham Rye does indeed lie where you suggest, Peckham Rye Common lies pretty much exactly where modern day Peckham Rye lies, at the end of the road which runs east from Goose Green. Perhaps Blake mixed up the areas when telling the story later in life, who knows. Who cares, quite frankly, it's a nice story about one of our greatest poets with a local connection (and I take it you don't dispute at least that he used to walk round here?).

[edhistory]

It's largely teachers who are responsible for this distortion of history and passing it down the generation.

Warwick Gardens or Holly Grove are not inconvenient spots.

Interesting that a roughly contemporary map has Peckham Rye where I "suggest".

Blake's local connection is trudging through raw sewage overflowing from Camberwell Marsh, but that's not so romantic, so let's invent a myth.

[bawdy-nan]

Well here's a detail from a 1746 map (John Roque) which puts "Peckham Rye" close by Goose Green.

But I think the point of the story in the biography is about asserting a kind of myth of origin for the artist. It's the story of an artist who spoke and wrote and sang of visions and constructed a mythology. I think trying to pin down the veracity (and quantity and how many might fit on the head of a pin) of the angel vision and its exact geographical location is splitting the lark. It's a poetic resonance, a story told about a story told about a story told. As much about how it has been told and by whom as anything else.

[bawdy-nan]

edhistory Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Blake's local connection is trudging through raw

> sewage overflowing from Camberwell Marsh, but

> that's not so romantic, so let's invent a myth.

And yet he wrote that it was North London that made him sick ...

?When I was young, Hampstead, Highgate, Hornsey, Muswell Hill, and even Islington, and all places north of London, always laid me up the day after, and sometimes two or three days, with precisely the same complaint, and the same torment of the stomach; easily removed, but excruciating while it lasts, and enfeebling for some time after.?

[edhistory]

> It's a poetic resonance, a story told about a story told about a story told.

Are you saying it's untrue?

John Rocque is not a reliable cartographer. He made things up and put them on his maps. Field boundaries are particularly dodgy. I regret including one of his maps, at least without a caveat, in one of the books I published.

[bawdy-nan]

edhistory Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> > It's a poetic resonance, a story told about a

> story told about a story told.

>

> Are you saying it's untrue?

>

> John Rocque is not a reliable cartographer. He

> made things up and put them on his maps. Field

> boundaries are particularly dodgy. I regret

> including one of his maps, at least without a

> caveat, in one of the books I published.

I'm saying that I think its very hard to say whether this is "true" or not. I know that it is a story that has come to have meaning and importance for lots of people since Gilchrist, so I think that when we talk about that story we're talking as much about how people have come to understand Blake as pinpointing a precise historical fact. Even in the Gilchrist it's vague - "as a boy of 8 or 10".

For John Hartley, the artist, who planted the tree (in association with the Blake Society) that you find hilarious for not being in the correct historical place, it wasn't trying to replicate the "tree" as much as celebrating what the story might mean, now, in Peckham.

What does it mean to have a vision of angels, what might they be noww, in Peckham? This was the same for the artist Sarah Turner whose absolutely, blindingly beautiful film, Public House (about the Ivy House community takeover), recreated the "vision" on Peckham Rye partly because it was a film about celebrating community shared cultural memory.

They seized on this story, I suppose, because it's a powerful image and one to hang Blake's radical ideas about the human imagination.

[rendelharris]

Is that film available online anywhere b-n?

[edhistory]

One thing I've not been able to resolve is whether in Blake's time it would have been possible for oak trees to grow on any of the five distinct "Peckham Ryes".

Can anyone help on this?

And, does anyone have a copy of the Blake Society text that was used in Peckham Rye Park?

[bawdy-nan]

rendelharris Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Is that film available online anywhere b-n?

I don't think so - but it has a website here ... http://www.thepublichousefilm.co.uk/index.html

I;d LOVE to see it again, on a big-screen, at the ED Picturehouse say - it's absolutely wonderful

[bawdy-nan]

edhistory Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> One thing I've not been able to resolve is whether

> in Blake's time it would have been possible for

> oak trees to grow on any of the five distinct

> "Peckham Ryes".

>

> Can anyone help on this?

>

> And, does anyone have a copy of the Blake Society

> text that was used in Peckham Rye Park?

Chris McCabe (who's just published a book about Nunhead Cemetery (Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery) thinks it was a hawthorn. He tracked all the mentions of angels and trees in Blake's poems and letters and found only one instance where an angel's mentioned in a tree and it's a hawthorn ...

WITH 1 Happiness stretch?d across the hills

In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils;

With a blue sky spread over with wings,

And a mild sun that mounts and sings;

With trees and fields full of fairy elves, 5

And little devils who fight for themselves?

Rememb?ring the verses that Hayley sung

When my heart knock?d against the root of my tongue?

With angels planted in hawthorn bowers,

And God Himself in the passing hours; 10

With silver angels across my way,

[Seabag]

He's buried in Shoreditch I think

There's a fig tree over his tomb and I've always fancied baking a Blake Fig Cake

He's buried near to Daniel Dafoe

It's a graveyard worth visiting