Dr Caroline Ritchie publishes William Blake and the Cartographic Imagination
In chapter three of Jerusalem, William Blake’s final and longest work, he introduces the image of a ‘golden string’ which leads to ‘Heaven’s gate’. Like the string used by Theseus in the Minotaur’s labyrinth, it becomes a kind of alternative map. This anti-cartographic cartography is a thread that Dr Caroline Ritchie, Rankin Fellow in English Literature at Exeter College, follows in her latest book, William Blake and the Cartographic Imagination: Maps, Diagrams, Networks.
Blake had an ‘astute critical angle on cartography’. Working within a ‘vibrant mesh of cartographic practices’, the artist and poet was involved in a key phase of European map-making history. However, his relationship with this culture was, according to Dr Ritchie, both ‘energetic and uneasy’. His spatial imagination both participated in and defied cartographic expectations, and his artworks, poems, and other texts mapped London and other spaces in an unconventional and constantly expanding manner. Dr Ritchie argues that these mappings’ incomplete and evolving nature was a self-conscious decision—Blake left room for his ‘golden thread’ to unspool and for his conceptions of space to be expanded upon.
Like Blake’s works, mapping as a discipline has expanded and changed over time. Dr Ritchie’s monograph cuts across different periods, exploring contemporary and historical ways of understanding and practicing mapping. Using primary material that is new to many scholars in the field, she unfurls a previously unmapped aspect of Blake scholarship. With chapters titles such as ‘Spiritual Networks’ and ‘Mental Travel’ placed alongside ‘The London Print World’ and ‘Blake’s London’, Dr Ritchie points out the imaginative meaning in Blake’s spatial works.
Reviewer, Dr Luisa Calè, writes that Dr Ritchie’s ‘fascinating study reconstructs the cartographic impulse of Blake’s geographic imagination’, which, with its ‘geometrical plans of paradise and Jerusalem’ rejects the ‘ontological security of a map’. Instead, Dr Ritchie presents Blake’s mapping as ‘offering a communitarian model of the city in the making’.
A highly visual work, filled with images of Blake’s maps and artworks, The Cartographic Imagination follows Dr Ritchie’s previous book, published by Tate—Artists Series: William Blake. She has also written articles for Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Literary Geographies, and VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society. William Blake and The Cartographic Imagination: Maps, Diagrams, Networks was published by Palgrave Macmillan on 25 February. Find out more and purchase a copy here.
