Читать книгу Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist - Richard Holmes - Страница 7

With her peculiar force and independence, Anne Gilchrist immediately determined to finish the biography for him. Less than a week after Alexander’s death, she wrote to Macmillan on 6 December 1861, ‘I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the Book. I was his amanuensis…’

She packed up his papers, returned a mass of borrowed pictures and manuscripts, refused Jane’s invitation to move in with the Carlyles, and took the children and the unfinished book down to a clapboard cottage in tiny village of Shottermill, a mile from Haslemere in Sussex.

To understand what happened next, we have to turn to Anne Gilchrist’s own story. She had always been an independent spirit. She was born Annie Burrows in February 1828 in Gower Street, London, but was partly brought up in the country at Colne in Essex. Here, when she was nine years old, her beloved elder brother Johnnie saved her life. The incident, as re-told, has a curious fairy-tale-like quality. While exploring a secret part of the garden, little Annie fell backwards into a deep well, and would have certainly drowned, had not Johnnie reached down and just managed to hold her up by the hair, until help finally came. Over thirty years later she put this strangely symbolic tale of survival into a children’s story, Lost in the Woods (1861).

Anne’s father was a London lawyer, strict and demanding, who died aged fifty-one in 1839, when she was only eleven. From then on, the family were on their own, and Anne was in some sense a liberated spirit. They moved to Highgate, where Anne went to school, a handsome tomboy, clever and rebellious. She was musical, well-read, and free-thinking. At seventeen she was surprised by the local vicar, when reading Rousseau’s sexually explicit Confessions on a tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. Embarrassment was avoided (according to Anne) when the vicar misheard the title as St Augustine’s Confessions.

At nineteen she became fascinated by scientific ideas, a further unladylike development. She announced to a friend that the intellectual world was divided between Emerson and Comte, between the spiritual and the materialist, and she was tending towards the latter.

In 1847 (the year Rossetti bought the Blake manuscript), she was devastated by the death of her ‘angel brother’, Johnnie. A year later, aged twenty, she announced her engagement to one of Johnnie’s friends, a handsome young law student, Alexander Gilchrist, ‘great, noble and beautiful’. In a way, he was probably a substitute brother. She deeply admired him, but from what she said later, she was never truly in love. What Alexander offered was the chance of freedom and independence. Their unorthodox Etty honeymoon was a promise of things to come.

After the birth of their four children – Percy, Beatrice, Herbert, and Grace – she set herself to earn additional household money by writing small pieces for the monthly magazines, and Chambers Encyclopaedia. The first of these, ‘A Glance at the Vegetable Kingdom’, was published in Chambers in spring 1857, shortly after they moved into Cheyne Row.

Unexpectedly, Anne made a specialty of popular science subjects. Moreover, she was remarkably successful. In 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, she wrote a controversial article on the newly discovered gorilla, ‘Our Nearest Relation’, comparing its skills and habits to homo sapiens. It was published in Charles Dickens’ magazine, All the Year Round. Next she wrote on Whales and Whaling’, and in the following years she produced several further young person’s guides to scientific topics: What is Electricity?’, ‘What is a Sunbeam?’, and The Indestructibility of Force’. Her ability to research, organize and explain technical subjects for the general reader was highly unusual.

Her role as Gilchrist’s amanuensis was therefore more that it might superficially appear. She seems to have become a genuine literary partner. Anne claimed the subsequent work on the biography came to her as a kind of posthumous collaboration. ‘Alex’s spirit is with me ever – presides in my home; speaks to me in every sweet scene; broods over the peaceful valleys; haunts the grand wild hill tops; shines gloriously forth in setting sun, and moon and stars.’

This may have been true, but she was also driven by other, though no less powerful emotions. Essentially, she seems to have felt guilty about Gilchrist’s death. She felt that she had never been his true wife. Nearly a decade later, in September 1871, she wrote a remarkable confession of her own. ‘I think…my sorrow was far more bitter, though not so deep, as that of a loving tender wife. As I stood by him in the coffin, I felt such remorse I had not, could not have, been more tender to him – such a conviction that if I had loved him as he deserved to be loved he would not have been taken from us. To the last my soul dwelt apart and unmated, and his soul dwelt apart and unmated.’

Her drive to complete his biography of Blake was, therefore, far more than a show of pious sentiment, a widow’s tender offering. It was more like an uneasy debt of honour, the recognition of a difficult but sacred trust. Anne already knew much of Alexander’s method of working, and his perfectionism. What she did not know was whether she could match it. She wrote to Macmillan: ‘Many things were to have been inserted – anecdotes etc. collected during the last year, which he used to say would be the best things in the book. Whether I shall be able to rightly use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fittest places I cannot yet tell. He altered chapter by chapter as he sent it to the printers…’

Three months later, in March 1862 she again wrote Macmillan that, to her surprise, she had completed sorting and arranging all of Alexander’s remaining material for the book. It would be faithfully completed. ‘You shall not find me dilatory or unreliable; least of all in this sacred trust.’ Fiercely defensive of every word of Alexander’s existing text, she carefully began to pull together the drafts of the outstanding chapters. She made regular visits to the British Museum, catching the London train up from Haslemere station. She checked his facts and polished his style. She defended him against Macmillan’s charges of sometimes writing too flamboyantly, like Carlyle.

Most crucially, she turned for help to the Rossettis. She did not want them to touch the text of Alex’s biography, but she wanted help with the companion volume: the catalogue of Blake’s pictures and an anthology of his poetry. She proposed to Macmillan that he commission a second volume, to consist of an annotated catalogue of Blake’s visual work compiled by Michael Rossetti, and a selection of Blake’s poetry edited by Dante Gabriel. This was agreed, and the whole project now advanced rapidly on its new footing.

The sudden death of Dante Gabriel’s own wife, Lizzie Siddal, that same spring of 1862, added a peculiar intensity to the work of selection. (‘I feel forcibly’, he wrote to Anne, ‘the bond of misery that exists between us.’) He moved back into bachelor lodgings, which he shared with Meredith and the young Swinburne, and they too acted as unofficial Blake readers and selectors. Even Christina Rossetti came to stay at the Shottermill cottage.

So not only had the whole Rossetti family now rallied round Anne’s ‘Herculean labour’, but the two volume work had almost become a group enterprise, a Pre-Raphaelite project to restore Blake, and to do honour to his young idealistic biographer. As Dante Gabriel wrote to Anne, ‘I would gladly have done it for Blake’s or gladly for your husband’s or gladly for your own sake, and moreover, had always had a great wish of my own to do something in this direction…’

The twin volumes were to be delivered twelve months later, in spring 1863.