The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake by G.E. Bentley, Jr (review)

humanities 405 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 and without a point of view. Bradley=s own third way may be even more inhuman, however, or at least more terrifying: violence might be both inexplicable and ineliminable. The debt of the Republic of Letters to Richard A. Lebrun is great. He is the translator of four of Maistre=s major works, and the author of a critical study and a biography of him, in addition to midwifing and contributing to this fine volume. In his introduction, Lebrun generously identifies one of the contributors, Jean-Louis Darcel, as >the foremost Maistre scholar working today.= Maybe so; but it is hard to believe that Lebrun is not foremost in the English-speaking world. (THOMAS M. LENNON) G.E. Bentley, Jr. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art. xxviii, 532. $39.95 Two biographies of William Blake will long be the >standard= works on their subject: Peter Ackroyd=s Blake (1995) and G.E. Bentley, Jr=s study. Although complementary, they could not be more dissimilar. Ackroyd=s novelistic approach produced a lively and detailed story that Bentley himself calls >a carefully and usually accurate biography with few pretensions to originality.= It is its nature as a tale that makes Ackroyd=s Blake such a delightful read; we follow Blake through the boisterous culture of a London that Ackroyd animates for readers with only limited familiarity with either the history of the times or Blake=s art and aesthetics. An introduction to a culture (and to a cultural moment) as much as it is a biography of Blake the man, Blake anticipates Ackroyd=s paradigm and performance in his spectacular London: The Biography (2001). The Stranger from Paradise is another matter entirely. This is the scholarly account, meticulously documented, especially from sources contemporary with Blake and his circle. In his Blake Records (1969), Bentley reprinted the major documents relating to Blake and his family, adding a meta-narrative of annotated explanatory commentary. Bentley has now fleshed out that narrative account fully while retaining that expansive documentary record as the vehicle for the tale he tells. We encounter Blake directly through his own words and through those of his friends, acquaintances, and adversaries , generally quoted at length and framed by a contextualizing narrative that elucidates these primary materials without intruding upon or overcoding them. This documentary material is, without fail, carefully annotated B often with additional quotations within the notes. Moreover, the narrative is richly enhanced by nearly two hundred illustrations B including some fifty excellent colour reproductions B drawn from Blake=s xxxxxxxxx 406 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 sketches, paintings and watercolours, illuminated poems, and commercial engravings, and from images of his contemporaries, the tools (and the products) of the engraver=s trade, and historical materials like maps and photographs of buildings and sites related to Blake=s life. The resulting work engages readers directly with the artist B both as person and as >working artisan= B in a way that virtually no previous biographical study has done. To an excellent index, Bentley adds two appendices: (1) a concisely annotated bibliography of the principal biographies of Blake, from Benjamin Heath Malkin=s 1806 observations through Stanley Gardner=s 1998 critical study of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and (2) a chronology of Blake=s principal writings, exhibitions, and commercial and other visual works. At the book=s very end appear selections from the manuscript journal of John Clark Strange, the mid-nineteenth-century Quaker who collected some of Blake=s visual works and who began a biography of his own that he gave up when he learned that Alexander Gilchrist had nearly finished his own pioneering 1863 study. Strange=s observations, included in the form of a last-minute addendum inserted literally as the book was going to press, add tantalizing new details to Bentley=s picture of Blake, details that will no doubt feed the efforts of scholars still to come. Amid this abundance of riches, however, perhaps the...