We discover that London always seemed like a riot waiting to happen, and that public licentiousness at all class levels was common. We’re walking with him on a London street when he gets caught up in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that led to looting and the destruction of Newgate Prison (nine years before the Bastille was stormed in Paris). We see Blake growing up in a “ Dissenting” household (people who did not belong to the Church of England). And William Blake.Īckroyd gives us Blake in his historical context, and “historical” is defined in its broadest terms-historical, philosophical, literary, social, and economic. Eliot, Sir Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Poe, Geoffrey Chaucer, J.M.W.
And he’s written biographies of Charles Dickens, T.S. He’s retold the stories of the legend of King Arthur and The Canterbury Tales. He’s in the process of writing a multi-volume history of England. Amateur historian and biographer he may be, but few living writers today can equal his output, erudition, and insight. Damrosch used Ackroyd’s biography in his own research, and calls it one of the best ever written about Blake.īlake: A Biography is classic Ackroyd, whom we in the United States would call a popular as opposed to academic writer but who occupies a different position in Britain.
Although the two works are separated by 20 years (Ackroyd’s in 1995 and Damrosch’s in 2015), they form a cohesive understanding of Blake and his work. British writer, historian, biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd, and Harvard professor Leo Damrosch, have both written studies of the poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827).
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