Alex Leith on Blake, Felpham, and the imagination as witness

The angel and the whale

I’m standing in the garden of Blake Cottage in Felpham, West Sussex, where the poet and his wife Catherine lived between September 1800 and September 1803. I look up past the half-thatched roof into a mild January sky, pale blue and lightly flocked with clouds. One of them resembles a whale.

It was here, in this same garden, that Blake experienced a far more powerful vision: a cosmic revelation, no less. Above the roof he saw Ololon, an angelic presence formed from a cloud of heavenly maidens. He later depicted the moment – or rather, depicted himself witnessing it – on plate 36 of Milton, the 45-plate poem printed in various versions between 1810 and 1818.

He describes the encounter simply: ‘Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld The Virgin Ololon & addressed her as a Daughter of Beulah’.

But the scene is even more layered than that. In the poem, the small figure of Blake standing before his cottage represents not only the artist but also the spirit of Milton, who has descended from heaven as a falling star and entered Blake’s body. Milton is undergoing ‘self annihilation’: a process of recognising and undoing the errors of his earthly life.

Ololon appears to Milton – through Blake – to urge him away from Puritan dualism, patriarchal moralism, self-righteousness, and bodily repression, and toward humility, imaginative freedom, the feminine, and the sacredness of embodiment. Milton’s regeneration, spiritual and political, becomes Blake’s way of realigning his poet-hero’s moral philosophy with his own: that ‘good’ is creative freedom, and ‘evil’ is energy misused.

Back in the present, the whale-cloud dissolves into a shapeless puff. A young thatcher rises into view from the far side of the roof’s ridge, gives a cheerful wave, and is briefly haloed by the sun. He’s part of the team restoring the cottage ahead of Blake’s bicentenary in 2027. A first-storey Victorian extension has already been removed; the garden is strewn with wheatsheaves, flint, and wooden lathes. A trench cuts across the lawn where archaeologists are analysing what once grew here. I wave back.

Arrival

So what was William Blake, a born-and-bred Londoner who had never previously left the city, doing in Felpham? Enter William Hayley, an esteemed poet and essayist who had recently moved into a rather grander house in the village. Hayley stood at the centre of a circle of artistic friends that included the troubled poet William Cowper, the painters George Romney and Joseph Wright of Derby, and the sculptor John Flaxman. It was through Flaxman, then an artist of international renown, that he met Blake in 1800.

By then Blake had already self-published his illuminated poems Songs of Innocence and Experience, but was little known as a fine artist beyond a small circle of admirers. He did, however, have a reputation as a skillful engraver, and Hayley had engaged him, on Flaxman’s recommendation, to produce a portrait of his 19-year-old son, Thomas Alphonso Hayley.

Before Blake could complete the commission, Hayley was struck by a double tragedy. On Friday 25 April 1800, his great friend and protégé William Cowper died, after a long period of depression and physical decline. Six days later, on Thursday 1 May, Thomas Alphonso died in Felpham, after two years of debilitating illness caused by a severe curvature of the spine.

Hayley was deeply moved by Blake’s portrait of his son, and equally taken with Blake himself (‘he has infinite Genius, with a most engaging simplicity of character’). In July of that year he made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: if Blake were to move to Felpham, he would guarantee him ‘twelve months work … & a great deal more in prospect’, along with unlimited access to his well-stocked library. Blake, struggling to make ends meet in London, accepted. A cottage was found (at £20 a year rent) a stone’s throw from Hayley’s house, and in September he arrived with his printing press, his tools, and Catherine.

Illusion, and disillusion

At first, Blake loved his new surroundings. In a letter to John Flaxman dated 21 September 1800, he exulted: ‘One thing of real consequence I have accomplish’d by coming into the country… I have collected all my scattered thoughts on Art & resumed my primitive & original ways of execution… which in the confusion of London I had very much lost.’ To Flaxman’s sister he sent a poem celebrating Felpham as a place where ‘the ladder of Angels descends through the air’ and where ‘the Bread of sweet Thought & the Wine of Delight’ nourish the village day and night.

But the idyll did not last. Hayley was generous with work, but the commissions themselves – portraits of his circle, and engraved plates for The Life of Cowper, the moralistic Ballads, The Triumphs of Temper, and a biography of George Romney – soon felt creatively stultifying. The arrangement gave Blake steady income, yet it increasingly resembled drudgery that pulled him away from the prophetic labour he believed he was born to pursue. His creative freedom was blunted; his energy misused. It didn’t help that Blake was, by any measure, the finer poet. Robert Southey’s verdict on Hayley – ‘everything about that man is good, apart from his poetry’ – captures the imbalance.

Blake’s letters from this period bristle with frustration. ‘He thinks to turn me into a tame cat,’ he wrote to Thomas Butts, complaining that he was ‘forced down to the level of a mechanic’ and ‘chained to the oar’ of commercial engraving. Elsewhere he calls Hayley ‘the hinderer of my spiritual labours’ – a devastating phrase, suggesting not malice but a suffocating atmosphere of worldly prudence. The cottage itself offered little relief: draughty, damp, and hard to heat, it left Catherine repeatedly unwell and made Blake’s printing work physically miserable. By the summer of 1803, the sense of promise had curdled into something closer to trial. Blake would later describe his Felpham years as ‘a kind of purgatory’. He decided it was time to turn his back on Sussex and return to London – though one final, explosive incident would further sour his rural interlude.

A military visitor

On 23 August 1803, Blake received a more prosaic visitation – one with far more worldly consequences. He spotted a soldier, John Schofield, ‘lounging about’ on his property. An altercation followed, ending with Blake physically ejecting the man from the garden and frogmarching him to the Fox Inn, some 50 yards away, where Schofield was billeted. The incident might have ended there, had Schofield not retaliated with a formal accusation that Blake had uttered seditious statements while expelling him.

What do we know of the soldier? Not much. Schofield, who had previously worked as a fustian cutter in Manchester, had once been a sergeant in the First Dragoons but had been demoted for misconduct. He was billeted at the Fox Inn, his horse stabled there. Blake later learned that Schofield had been invited into the garden to assist a workman – one William Pearce, the ostler at the Fox, whose landlord also owned Blake’s cottage. You can imagine the soldier’s indignation at being manhandled out of the garden and humiliated outside the inn in front of villagers and fellow troops. He soon took his revenge. As, ultimately, did William Blake.

Schofield claimed that, during the scuffle, Blake had shouted “Damn the King!”, “The soldiers are all slaves!”, and even that the French would conquer England. In the feverish atmosphere of the Napoleonic invasion scare – with troops massed along the Sussex coast – such a charge of sedition carried real weight. Blake was hauled before the magistrates at Petworth and bound over to stand trial at the Chichester assizes. The case rested on the testimony of two soldiers, Schofield and a fellow Dragoon, John Cock. Blake’s defence drew on local character witnesses, including William Hayley, and on the dubious reputation of his accusers. At the Guildhall in January 1804 – formerly the Great Church of Chichester Priory, now a court house – the jury swiftly acquitted him, to applause.

The liberation of prophecy

Blake left Felpham in the autumn of 1803 feeling both chastened and clarified. The three years he had spent there – years of visionary intensity, domestic discomfort, creative frustration, and finally legal peril – had crystallised something in him. In Felpham he had seen an angelic host descend into his garden; he had also dragged a soldier out of it by the collar. Between these two visitations, the prophetic and the prosaic, Blake found the emotional and imaginative spark that would ignite his greatest works.

It was in Felpham that he began Milton, the epic poem in which the spirit of John Milton descends from heaven, enters Blake’s body, and undertakes a journey of self-annihilation and renewal. The poem’s opening plates, including the words of the now-hymn Jerusalem, were drafted in the cottage. Felpham gave Blake both the solitude and the friction he needed: the sense of being tested, misunderstood, and spiritually endangered. When he returned to London in 1803, he brought the manuscript with him and completed it there, but its emotional core belongs to Sussex.

Jerusalem, the vast illuminated epic that would occupy him for the next decade, also has its roots in Felpham. The poem’s great theme – the struggle between visionary freedom and the oppressive forces of the material world – is inseparable from Blake’s experience of Hayley’s well-meaning but suffocating patronage, the grinding routine of commercial engraving, and his humiliating brush with the law. In Jerusalem, Blake transfigures these experiences into myth. The two soldiers who accused him of sedition reappear as ‘Scofeld’ and ‘Coke’, spectral figures of spiritual error and malice. In one plate, Scofeld is shown in chains (previous page), a grotesque embodiment of the very forces that sought to bind Blake in the real world.

After the trial, Schofield and Cock vanish from the historical record. They leave no further trace , except in Blake’s prophetic poem. Their disappearance only heightens the symbolic power Blake assigns them: they become not men but types, embodiments of the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake believed held England in thrall.

Felpham, then, was not a pastoral interlude but a crucible. The angelic visitation of Ololon and the earthly intrusion of Schofield form a diptych: revelation and resistance, ascent and humiliation, the visionary and the mundane. Together they shaped Blake’s understanding of himself as a prophet-artist whose task was to wrestle with the forces that sought to diminish the human imagination. Without Felpham – its beauty, its discomforts, its patronage, its betrayals – there would be no Milton, no Jerusalem, no Blake as we now understand him.

An unwelcome revelation

I’m visiting Blake Cottage courtesy of Doug Nicholls, chair of the Blake Cottage Trust, leading the charge to restore the house in time for the 2027 bicentenary. He leads me through the low rooms, and up the rickety stairs, pointing out the painstaking restoration work in progress: the lime plaster, the exposed worm-eaten beams, the stone floor where Blake’s printing press would have stood. We pause to talk to Liam, the thatcher, back down to earth and halo-less, who cheerfully explains the tricks of his trade.

Doug suggests lunch at The Fox. The original pub burned down in 1946, he tells me, but the present building sits on the same footprint. We walk through the garden and up what is now Blakes Road, the short rise to the inn. As we go, I try to picture Blake frogmarching John Schofield up what was then a muddy track – the pivotal scene in a film that has yet to be made. And I realise, as I order a fish-finger sandwich, that this moment of earthly indignation has more resonance for me than Blake’s celestial vision of an angel above the thatched roof. It’s what drew me to this story in the first place: the vision is myth; the scuffle very human. One belongs to eternity, the other to the stubborn, everyday world I’m familiar with. Where Blake saw an angel, I saw a whale. Am I in thrall to those mind-forged manacles, much maligned by the visionary artist? Are we all? As we walk back from The Fox, the cottage coming into view, I look up, half-hoping for Ololon. Nothing. Just a cloud-plumped Sussex sky and a jovial thatcher finishing his shift.

Words by Alex Leith
Find out more about the restoration of Blake Cottage, including how to donate to the project, at blakecottage.org