Blake

This biography follows William Blake from his childhood in eighteenth-century London through his apprenticeship as an engraver, his marriage to Catherine, and his working life as a printmaker, poet, and painter who invented his own method of illuminated books. Ackroyd reconstructs the Soho and Lambeth years, Blake's trial for sedition, his relations with patrons and fellow artists, and the prophetic books in which he built a private mythology of innocence, experience, and political-religious revolt. The narrative stays close to workshops, streets, and surviving plates and poems. It is a life of an artisan-visionary, not a general history of Romantic poetry.

Bound in beige cloth blocked on cover and spine with a black title and gold design. Black slipcase.