Читать книгу Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist - Richard Holmes - Страница 11

Anne Gilchrist later wrote the Blake entry for Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, and also a well-judged Life of Mary Lamb for the new and influential Eminent Women of Letters series, published by Allen Lane in 1883. She had other literary plans, including Lives of Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. But her heart was broken by the sudden and tragic death of her favourite daughter Beatrice.

This was the child they had nursed through scarlet fever at Cheyne Row, while Alexander was struggling to complete the biography. She was always closely associated in Anne’s mind with the early shared work on Blake. True to her mother’s early leanings towards science, Beatrice had been training in Edinburgh to qualify as one of Britain’s first women doctors. Possibly as the result of an unhappy love affair, she committed suicide at the age of twenty-five by taking cyanide in July 1881. Anne Gilchrist never really recovered from the death of Beatrice, so shortly after the publication of the second edition of Blake. She contracted cancer and died at Hampstead four years later in November 1885, aged only fifty-three, all her other literary plans unfulfilled.

Gilchrist’s original Life of William Blake, with its combative subtitle Pictor Ignotus (The Unknown Painter’), is one of the most influential of all the great mid-Victorian biographies. It rescued its subject from almost total obscurity, challenged the notion of Blake’s madness, and first defined his genius as both an artist and visionary poet combined. It set the agenda for modern Blake studies, and remains the prime source for all modern Blake biographies. It remains wonderfully readable today, and salvaged from death, it still vibrates with extraordinary life.

Yet like so many works of art, it was produced at great cost, and under mysterious conditions. In the absence of an original manuscript of the 1863 biography, the mystery will always remain just how much of this first, ground-breaking text we really owe to Alexander Gilchrist or to Anne; or to some indefinable Blakean collaboration between the two.

The text printed here is that of the first edition of 1863, together with the letters to Thomas Butts in an Appendix.