flying twigs

For four years William Blake lived in a cottage in Felpham, far from his life and friends in London.

Blake is, of course, known for his drawings and his writing equally. They went together as he developed his ideas of freedom. In his world, freedom was what man was born for. And sometimes that clashed with the authorities, as when he found a soldier relieving himself in his garden.

Blake moved from London when he was forty-three to live in a cottage in the village of Felpham outside Chichester on the south coast of England.

Blake was born in 1757 in Soho in the heart of London, and except for his four years in Felpham he lived in London all his life.

By train today it takes less than two hours to travel from Chichester to London. The journey is made slightly longer than it otherwise might because of the route the rail line takes to navigate the river that runs to the sea to the east of Chichester.

In Blake’s day, Chichester must have been the best part of a day’s travel from London.

Relief Etching

As an artist Blake is, of course, known for the way his powerful visual imagination and his utopian vision. What is less well known is that in the late 1780s he developed the printing technique known as relief etching. And the technique subsequently became important in commercial printing.

Unlike most engraving techniques that create the image by filling the page with the engraver’s marks, Blake’s method left large areas of the paper untouched, to be subsequently hand-coloured. The etching process etched away the majority of the plate, leaving the parts to be inked standing proud, or in relief – hence relief etching.

Blake and his wife hand-coloured the prints he made and I cannot help but picture them hand colouring together in their sitting room.

In the early 1780s Blake’s work had attracted the attention of one of the founders of the National Gallery. And as Blake’s reputation increased he opened a print shop and began working with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Blake was a well-known supporter of social justice and that included the right of women to take a full and equal place in marriage and in society.

So it was only natural that he met and mixed with some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the period, from Thomas Paine to John Henry Fuseli to William Wordsworth, all of whom met at Joseph Johnson’s house.

Felpham

So it is strange or interesting that in 1800 Blake moved to this cottage in Felpham, a small village in Sussex, far away from the intellectual stimulus of the people he had mixed with in London.

In Felpham he began work on illustrations for Ballads founded on Anecdotes of Animals by Wiliam Hayley and worked on his own poem Milton.

William Hayley was an English writer, best known as the biographer of the poet William Cowper. He was born at Chichester and went to university in Cambridge, and then to live in London. He was wealthy and on his retirement in 1774 he went to live on the family estate at Eartham, which is about eight miles from Chichester. And Felpham is nine miles from Eartham. So Blake evidently felt the need to be near Hayley while he made the illustrations for Hayley’s book.

Blake Is Charged With Sedition

Then in 1803 Blake was tried in Chichester Assizes for sedition. He was tried for saying words ‘aimed at upsetting the established order’. What happened was that he found a soldier relieving himself in his garden, and made remarks about the King and the army. In the event, Blake was acquitted, principally on the unreliability of the testimony of the soldier.

Felpham is pretty, even today. And it’s easy to see how Blake would have liked the rural scenery. What is less clear is why he would have left the intellectual stimulation of his friends in London for the task of working on Hayley’s book. In any event, within a year of his acquittal Blake returned to London to live, and stayed there until his death in 1827 at the age of seventy.

Chichester Assizes court was housed in one of the buildings that formerly formed part of the Priory that dated back to the early Medieval period. It sits atmospherically in a park in the centre of Chichester. and the last time we saw the building, in about 2006, it stood empty save for a few museum pieces.