Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830–1930 by Colin Trodd (review)

When “[William] Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was nobody to hear it,” Arthur Symons wrote in 1907. Colin Trodd’s long and deeply thoughtful study traces the slow process by which some learned to hear Blake’s voice in the century after his death. By the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Symons, Blake’s message was “slowly remaking” the world (qtd. in Trodd 393). It is the paradoxical claim that Blake spoke a new century but could not speak to a new century that this book explores. Blake becomes a creator unable to talk to his creation. Limiting his study to “the Art World,” Trodd also, by implication, sees the artist as legislator of the world. As Trodd seeks to understand the period’s view of the artist, he assembles the views of a host of both well known and lesser known poets, artists, critics, and commentators. Unlike Jason Whittaker and Shirley Dent’s Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (2002), however, Trodd’s art world is overwhelmingly male.

Rather than offer a chronological account of critical reception, Trodd organizes his giant study according to loosely defined topics. He is particularly good on the anomaly of Blake’s epic subject matter and miniature scale, writing of his confusing ability “to put meaning into form through an internal economy of scale and size” (20). There are many wondrous things in Visions of Blake as the idea of art and the artist break down under his fierce questioning to reveal the shifting needs of a culture redefining itself.

For there is a sense in which Blake is not really the subject—or the sole subject—of the book. As Trodd puts it, “Blake can be used as a kind of cultural petrie dish to discuss how artistic vision and value relate to modern experience” (10). Trodd puts under his microscope the cultures growing in that dish, offering not only tour-deforce readings of works by Blake, such as the color print Newton (1805) (analyzed in terms of surfaces), but also extended discussions of works that seem to Trodd to share qualities with Blake’s art, such as Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1865) and G. F. Watts’s Hope (1886). Yet as the probing, ruminative commentary teases new meanings out of familiar works, clarity can be lost. In a blizzard of adjectives this account reveals grotesque forms of energy.

It’s a strength of the book that Trodd seeks to understand the period’s view of the artist by drawing equally on “Blake’s disciples and detractors.” Although Michel Foucault does not appear in the index, this is an extended analysis of discourses; as Trodd warns, “those expecting a record of the stories of Blake’s afterlife through a detailed account of the Victorian and Edwardian art market must wait for someone with a greater understanding of empirical sociological or social history” (10). For me at least, though, some of the most fascinating moments are those in which the material intrudes. For instance, it is extraordinary to discover that the British Museum bought The Whore of Babylon (1809) as early as 1847. Even more delightful is the news that The King of Babylon in Hell (1805) was bought by the Royal Collection around 1862. How were these works understood? Trodd’s accounts of Blakean influences on graphic design and book illustration are excellent, including a discussion of “the proliferation of Edwardian picture books in which various illustrators set out to adapt Blake’s designs for the Songs [of Innocence and Experience] to middle-class children” (407).

Trodd refers to a place called “Blakeland,” and whereas chronology is lost in the early chapters, place often stimulates the best writing (69). There’s a wonderful discussion of Frederic Shields’s picture William Blake’s Work-room and Death-room (1880) that provides the back story to the work...