William Blake, Remote by the Sea

Adapted from William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, which sometimes assimilates quotations, preserving the original spelling and punctuation.

In the autumn of 1800, as the swallows were flying past his window bound for Africa, William Blake was preparing for a new career in a new town. He was forty-three years old and in need of a change. So he set off south himself, sixty miles to the sweet Heaven of Sussex, leaving the terrible desart of London behind.

With him was his beloved Catherine, his heroine, Kate. She was like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she heard their destination named, he said. They travelled light, with sixteen boxes of belongings, as embarking on a voyage to the ends of the earth. Inside were all their worldly possessions and many unworldly ones too: all the prints Blake had been unable to sell (that is, most of them), together with the engine of anarchy that gave them birth—his printing press.

William Blake is a perfect name, most excellent. Plain and no-nonsense. Like his tradesman’s clothes, the best disguise for a man with such a wild mind. You might imagine a purveyor of hardware, or of socks, as indeed his father was. Unlike other people in this story, he did not come from a wealthy family. He had to advertise himself. “William Blake” starts like the wind, rises to a pitch and ends in an ache. It suits its owner’s own true heart: his one pure being of hope, of whirling prophecies for life here on earth. It could almost have been anyone standing there that night in Soho when the star of inspiration fell out of the sky. Blake just happened to be in the right place at the right time, ready to take the call.

He had the air of innocence and experience, a faerie child or a candle flame. A subtle, gentle smile that seemed somehow interior and knowing. Huge pale blue eyes that saw into the far distance but looked right into you, too. Red hair that stuck up like a cockscomb in his youth. An aura of quiet power within. But no one could have expected this stubby Londoner, barely five-foot-five, to arrive in this sleepy seaside village, bringing with him intimations of revolution and wild desire.

When the Blakes appeared in Felpham, it was a shock for the villagers, like discovering new age hippies had moved in overnight. It was a shock for William too: the invitation, arranged by his friend, the artist John Flaxman, had come from the renowned but not entirely inspired poet and biographer of John Milton, William Hayley, who wanted Blake to illustrate his work. Hayley lived in the Turret, a villa topped with a grandiose tower almost as high as the church. He called it his little marine hermitage, complete with a warm sea-bath. He had bought the field between the villa and the shore to ensure his view of the sea. It spoke of his lordly demeanour, and did not augur well for Blake.

Felpham may have been a dozy place of barely two dozen homes, but already Londoners were arriving in their droves, taking summer cottages to escape the city’s smoke and noise. That was why the Blakes’ landlord, Mr. Grinder, the Dickensian owner of the Fox Inn across the street, could charge them twenty pounds per annum for his Rose Cottage. Any old place with a lick of paint demanded a premium from the carriage trade.

It was the sea that drew them here; the same sea that had only recently begun its transformation from a place of terror to a site of nature worship. Saltwater bathing hit as a fever, as it had up and down the coast as hydrophilia took hold. A body to receive other bodies, the union of flesh and seawater could cure anything from an upset stomach to a rent in the fabric of your soul. The sea-as-therapy also subverted Albion’s defensive shores. Its beaches faced not the French and their monkeys and their Antichrist, but an invasion of homegrown bathers, announced twice daily with the tides. War stopped all frivolous travel. You couldn’t get any further than this. It’s why Blake never left England. And it was why the sea leapt from fearful element to frivolous entertainment. It was the new dispensation and people came here for the cure, as they still do.

If you half-closed your eyes on Felpham’s genteel shore, you could just about ignore Bognor, not yet Regis, next door. It was not yet Piccadilly-by-the-sea, as Constable saw Brighton, nor Byron’s Venice, his Sea-Sodom. Nor ugly and repulsive, either, as Blake’s admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti complained when he moved to Bognor in the 1870s. But things were changing fast. Rather than a new Jerusalem, Sir Richard Hotham built a hotel with its own warm sea bath and a trio of Georgian mansions with a tea room under a golden dome. It wasn’t quite Kubla Khan, more hot tub and cocktails. The facilities were designed to lure people of quality: the Prince of Wales duly arrived to visit his mistress, Lady Jersey, but they didn’t spend the night together.

Felpham dozed through all this furore. It had its own bathing machines, admittedly, from which bathers might be launched naked into the sea. But as Bognor, like Brighton, Southampton, and Weymouth, turned into a site of watery outrage, a decadent resort for gouty bodies and youths in fearfully made garb, the village held out against those marine villas busy rising in Regency allure. Rose Cottage, set at right angles to a sandy lane, had a thatched roof that sloped steeply at the back; it clamped the house down to the land like a limpet, and provided a summer home for swallows. There were just four and a half rooms, two up, two down, with a kitchen extension for that sort of thing. The Blakes weren’t interested in domesticity.

Tucked up in their cozy nest, they preferred to peer out from under the eaves, over the fields of corn and down to the sea. It was the first time Blake had seen it with his own eyes. He’d imagined it endlessly in his art, in his head; now it was at the end of his lane. He could walk down there in his dressing gown and slippers, if he so desired. The sea hung there like a perpetually unfolding panorama, an unignorable flicker in the corner of his eye. Always different, always the same. The sea had no limits and neither did he. It promised everything. So did he.

The Blakes’ cottage rivalled any Palace of Magnificence, William announced. Nothing can be more Grand than its Simplicity & Usefulness. It was the Spontaneous Effusion of Humanity, he said.

For a visionary, Blake could often sound like Mr. Micawber. The sweet air & the voices of the winds make this a dwelling for immortals, he told Thomas Butts, his Dear Friend of the Angels whose wealth lay in the business of coal and who used it to buy Blake’s works so often he might have had a weekly subscription. Whenever poverty overwhelmed the Blakes, Butts had fuel delivered to their door; pictures for coal. No one had seen the sea before Blake. He got the sixpence. But what would his spirits say as he set up home in his own marine hermitage?

Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates, he enthused, as if reading out the particulars from an ethereal estate agent; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen. The Cottage was a Shadow of their heavenly houses, he said, for all that it was rented from the landlord of the local pub.

He called the cottage their mundane shell, as if his skull echoed with the sound of the sea, and even as he wrote, Kate and his sister Catherine were down on the shore, courting Neptune for an Embrace. The sea’s terrors that morning had made them afraid, he told Butts, but the ocean’s mildness was often Equal to his terrors. The Blakes had arrived at the autumn equinox, and in the softness of September, when the English sea is finally starting to get warm, the two women took advantage of the spirit of the age to dip in. I don’t know whether William joined them as their bodies were borne up in the swell, but as Hayley recommended