William Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical…

March 1791 CE

William Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, had been printed around 1783.

After his father's death, William and former fellow apprentice James Parker had opened a print shop in 1784, and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson.

Johnson's house is a meeting-place for some of the leading English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Richard Price, artist Henry Fuseli, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine.

Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake has great hopes for the French revolution and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but will despair with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France.

In 1784, Blake also composes his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.

Blake is the illustrator of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788; 1791).

They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence proving without doubt that they actually met.

In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake had begun to experiment with relief etching, a method he will use to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems.

The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints.

Illuminated printing involves writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium.

Illustrations can appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts.

He then etches the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name).

This is a reversal of the normal method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method.

Relief etching (which Blake also refers to as "stereotype" in The Ghost of Abel) is intended as a means for producing his illuminated books more quickly than via intaglio.

Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast from a wood engraving, but Blake’s innovation is, as described above, very different.

The pages printed from these plates then have to be hand-colored in water colors and stitched together to make up a volume.

Blake uses illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), The Book of Thel (1789-90), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).

Thomas Paine, having taken work as a clerk after his expulsion by Congress, had eventually returned to London in 1787, living a largely private life.

However, his passion had again been sparked by revolution, this time in France, which he had visited in 1790.

Edmund Burke, who had supported the American Revolution, does not likewise support the events taking place in France, and writes the critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, partially in response to a sermon by Richard Price, the radical minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church.

Many pens rush to defend the Revolution and the Dissenting clergyman, including Mary Wollstonecraft, who publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Men only weeks after the Reflections.

Paine had completed the text of Rights of Man, an abstract political tract critical of monarchies and European social institutions, on January 29, 1791.

On January 31, he had given the manuscript to Johnson for publication on February 22.

Meanwhile, government agents have visited him, and Johnson, sensing dangerous political controversy, reneges on his promise to sell the book on publication day.

Paine quickly negotiates with publisher J.S.

Jordan, then goes to Paris, per Blake's advice, leaving three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Holcroft, charged with concluding publication in Britain.

The book appears on March 13, three weeks later than scheduled, and sells well.