ABSTRACT
On 10 December 1825, after dining at the house of the painter and socialite Eliza Aders and her husband Charles, in the company of the painter John Linnell, Henry Crabb Robinson was at a loss. As he wrote in his diary: “I will put down as they occur to me without method all I can recollect of the conversation of this remarkable man”; but “Shall I call him Artist or Genius–or Mystic–or Madman? Probably he is all” (Bentley 2004: 420). The remarkable man was William Blake, the fifth member of the dinner party – a poet, prophet, painter, visionary, engraver, and non-academic philosopher, who has exerted a powerful influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought and culture. But in 1825, two years before the end of his life, he had almost sunk from sight. As the essayist Charles Lamb reported, on 15 May 1824, to his friend James Montgomery: “the man is flown, whither I know not, to Hades or a Mad House” (quoted in Bentley 2001: 365). Although Robinson had not previously met Blake, he had viewed Blake’s exhibition of paintings (1809), read the Descriptive Catalogue that accompanied it, and then two years later published in Vaterländisches Museum (vol. 2, pp. 107–31) an essay entitled “William Blake: Künstler, Dichter, und Religiöser Schwärmer” (“William Blake: Artist, Poet, and Religious Enthusiast”). Now, in the comfort of the Aders’s house at No. 11 Euston Square, he set out to draw from Blake “an avowal of his peculiar sentiments” (Bentley 2004: 420).
