Fellow in English Dr Caroline Ritchie publishes books on William Blake
In William Blake’s 1803 painting, ‘The Angel of the Divine Presence Clothing Adam and Eve with Coats of Skins’, he depicts God as Urizen, a figure from his own constructed mythology representing alienated reason as a source of oppression. This adaption of the Biblical story highlights, according to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Blake’s opinion that Adam and Eve’s real shame was accepting the loss of their original freedom. This is just one example of Blake’s revolutionary position as a ‘free-thinking radical’, one which has ensured his relevance even to those modern readers concerned not with biblical art and literature, but with social justice. It is this radicalism that is highlighted in Exeter College Rankin Tutorial Fellow in English Dr Caroline Ritchie’s new book, William Blake.
Published on 7 November with Tate Britain as part of the Artists Series, William Blake is the latest in a collection of publications on artists as wide-ranging as Francis Bacon, J.M.W. Turner, Patrick Caulfield, and Alfred Wallis, amongst others. Dr Ritchie’s collaboration with Tate creates an accessible, introductory guide featuring seventy plates of Blake’s work. His inclusion in the series is a testament to Blake’s ‘appeal to modern ideas about liberty and social justice,’ which are often addressed directly in his poetry in the form of commentary on ‘industrialisation, revolution, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.’ For example, the famous lines from Blake’s ‘London’ poem, ‘In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ were published only four years after the French Revolution, echoing Rousseau’s assertion that ‘man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’. Set against an engraving of an aged man stooped over a child against a background of blackened bricks, ‘London’ represents an intersection of art and poetry that directly and radically critiques industrial-age capitalism.
Blake’s ‘lifelong interest in integrating visual art and poetry’ is highlighted in William Blake and the Cartographic Imagination: Maps, Diagrams, Networks, an academic monograph based on Dr Ritchie’s doctoral thesis, set for publication in early 2025. The thesis focused on the legacy of Blake’s ‘cartographic imagination’, including ‘half-sketched London sites’ as well as ‘expansive mappings of the entire cosmos’. In the abstract to her thesis, Dr Ritchie points out Blake’s ‘persistent, if agonistic, impulse to map the world around him’. This mapping, like Blake’s art and literature, is capable of connecting themes as ancient as the Fall of Man and as modern as his contemporary revolutionary concerns.
Completed at the University of York in conjunction with Tate Britain, Dr Ritchie’s thesis highlights her background in both English literature and art history. Prior to her PhD, she completed her BA in Classics and English at Trinity College, Oxford, and then completed an MA in Art History, Curatorship, and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute. She now specialises in Romantic-era literature and visual culture.
William Blake was published on 7 November, and captures Blake’s ‘intriguing creative vision’ which, ‘at times both hopeful and apocalyptic, has had a lasting cultural impact that continues to capture the imagination today’.
William Blake can be purchased from Blackwells and other bookstores.
