Blake’s Pronunciation

William Blake was sensitive to dialect and made dialect jokes himself.

Flaxman: How do you get on with Fuseli? I can’t stand his foul-mouthed swearing. Does he swear at you?

Blake: He does.

Flaxman: And what do you do?

Blake: What do I do? Why—I swear again! and he says astonished, “vy, Blake, you are svaring!” but he leaves off himself!¹

And he illustrates the Yorkshire accent and French affectations of his bête noir Robert Hartley Cromek in

English Encouragement of Art Cromeks opinion put into Rhyme If you must Please Every body you will Mennywouver both Bunglishness & skill

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When you a look at a picture you always can see If a Man of Sense has Painted he[.] Then never flinch but keep up a Jaw About freedom & Jenny Suck awa’

(Notebook, 41)

But what dialect did Blake use? What did he sound like when he spoke?

Blake’s contemporaries did not call him a Cockney², but some modern critics have done so. For instance, David Punter refers to “the Cockney, in which he [Blake] wrote and, no doubt, spoke.”³ However, I find no trace of Cockney pronunciation, such as the treatment of aspirates (e.g., “hartist” and “‘orse”), in Blake’s writings or in the records of his speech. Sometimes the justification for the term involves a wanton redefinition of “Cockney” apparently without regard to speech habits. Peter Ackroyd describes Blake as a “Cockney visionary,”⁴ but for him “Cockney” apparently means a lover of London [like Samuel Johnson?] and is not related to speech habits.⁵

One of the few pieces of evidence pointing toward Cockney pronunciation in Blake’s family is the mistranscription of “Armitage,” the name of the first husband of Blake’s mother, as “Harmitage” when she married Blake’s father.⁶ The error must be due to the second church clerk, for when the couple wrote separate letters applying to join the Moravian Church Congregation in 1750 they signed themselves “Tho.^s Artmitage” and “Catherine Armitage,” though the Moravian records refer to them indifferently as “Armitage” and “Hermitage.”⁷

Blake is plausibly, but on remarkably little biographical evidence,⁸ said to have learned his letters at his mother’s knee. His mother’s only surviving letter⁹ indicates that she was a far more erratic orthographer than her son; she writes “allways,” “Bretheren,” “frale,” “halfe,” “hapy,” “hould” (for “hold”), “I shall be very thanku,” “itt,” “know” (for “now”), “lay” (for “lie”), “littell,” “nor never,” “pore crature,” “rit” (for “written”), “rite” (for “write”), “satsfy,” “Savour” (for “Saviour”), “Sistors,” and “tast.” Her son improved enormously on her teaching, though often his orthography is old-fashioned as in “tyger” and “compleat.”¹⁰ Her spelling may indicate something of the pronunciation she learned in her native village of Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire—“pore crature,” for instance—which her son probably echoed. In Blake’s poetry he rhymes “poor” with “door,” “floor,” and “more” as his mother would have done. Further, he rhymes “Creature” with “Nature,” indicating that he pronounced “Creature” as his mother apparently did. Blake usually spells as I do, but manifestly he does not sound as I do—see the table of Blake’s Imperfect Rhymes, below. However, his contemporaries did not allude to his pronunciation, suggesting that it did not differ greatly from that of those who reported his speech.

In some respects, Blake’s pronunciation is less like ours—or at least like mine—than it is like the county-speak of the English huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ squirearchy. Like them, he often drops the terminal “g” in past participles, with “sobbing-robin” and “reason-teazing.” He omits the “l” before “t” as in “vault-fraught,” “health-death,” and “halter-water.” (Note the analogy of the silent “l” in “could” and “walk.”) Perhaps most strikingly, he minimizes the “r” at the end of a syllable,¹¹ as in “dawn-scorn,” “here-Arimathea-queer,” “Meletus-curse,” “quartering-slaughtering,” and “girl-small” (English county-speak: “gel,” U. S. rural-speak: “gal”). And he may have pronounced a terminal “thes” as “v,” as when he makes “breathes” rhyme...