GoKawiilAdapted from William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, which sometimes assimilates quotations, preserving the original spelling and punctuation.
In the autumn of 1800, as the swallows were flying past his window bound for Africa, William Blake was preparing for a new career in a new town. He was forty-three years old and in need of a change. So he set off south himself, sixty miles to the sweet Heaven of Sussex, leaving the terrible desart of London behind.
With him was his beloved Catherine, his heroine, Kate. She was like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she heard their destination named, he said. They travelled light, with sixteen boxes of belongings, as embarking on a voyage to the ends of the earth. Inside were all their worldly possessions and many unworldly ones too: all the prints Blake had been unable to sell (that is, most of them), together with the engine of anarchy that gave them birth—his printing press.
William Blake is a perfect name, most excellent. Plain and no-nonsense. Like his tradesman’s clothes, the best disguise for a man with such a wild mind. You might imagine a purveyor of hardware, or of socks, as indeed his father was. Unlike other people in this story, he did not come from a wealthy family. He had to advertise himself. “William Blake” starts like the wind, rises to a pitch and ends in an ache. It suits its owner’s own true heart: his one pure being of hope, of whirling prophecies for life here on earth. It could almost have been anyone standing there that night in Soho when the star of inspiration fell out of the sky. Blake just happened to be in the right place at the right time, ready to take the call.
He had the air of innocence and experience, a faerie child or a candle flame. A subtle, gentle smile that seemed somehow interior and knowing. Huge pale blue eyes that saw into the far distance but looked right into you, too. Red hair that stuck up like a cockscomb in his youth. An aura of quiet power within. But no one could have expected this stubby Londoner, barely five-foot-five, to arrive in this sleepy seaside village, bringing with him intimations of revolution and wild desire.
When the Blakes appeared in Felpham, it was a shock for the villagers, like discovering new age hippies had moved in overnight. It was a shock for William too: the invitation, arranged by his friend, the artist John Flaxman, had come from the renowned but not entirely inspired poet and biographer of John Milton, William Hayley, who wanted Blake to illustrate his work. Hayley lived in the Turret, a villa topped with a grandiose tower almost as high as the church. He called it his little marine hermitage, complete with a warm sea-bath. He had bought the field between the villa and the shore to ensure his view of the sea. It spoke of his lordly demeanour, and did not augur well for Blake.
Felpham may have been a dozy place of barely two dozen homes, but already Londoners were arriving in their droves, taking summer cottages to escape the city’s smoke and noise. That was why the Blakes’ landlord, Mr. Grinder, the Dickensian owner of the Fox Inn across the street, could charge them twenty pounds per annum for his Rose Cottage. Any old place with a lick of paint demanded a premium from the carriage trade.
It was the sea that drew them here; the same sea that had only recently begun its transformation from a place of terror to a site of nature worship. Saltwater bathing hit as a fever, as it had up and down the coast as hydrophilia took hold. A body to receive other bodies, the union of flesh and seawater could cure anything from an upset stomach to a rent in the fabric of your soul. The sea-as-therapy also subverted Albion’s defensive shores. Its beaches faced not the French and their monkeys and their Antichrist, but an invasion of homegrown bathers, announced twice daily with the tides. War stopped all frivolous travel. You couldn’t get any further than this. It’s why Blake never left England. And it was why the sea leapt from fearful element to frivolous entertainment. It was the new dispensation and people came here for the cure, as they still do.
If you half-closed your eyes on Felpham’s genteel shore, you could just about ignore Bognor, not yet Regis, next door. It was not yet Piccadilly-by-the-sea, as Constable saw Brighton, nor Byron’s Venice, his Sea-Sodom. Nor ugly and repulsive, either, as Blake’s admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti complained when he moved to Bognor in the 1870s. But things were changing fast. Rather than a new Jerusalem, Sir Richard Hotham built a hotel with its own warm sea bath and a trio of Georgian mansions with a tea room under a golden dome. It wasn’t quite Kubla Khan, more hot tub and cocktails. The facilities were designed to lure people of quality: the Prince of Wales duly arrived to visit his mistress, Lady Jersey, but they didn’t spend the night together.
Felpham dozed through all this furore. It had its own bathing machines, admittedly, from which bathers might be launched naked into the sea. But as Bognor, like Brighton, Southampton, and Weymouth, turned into a site of watery outrage, a decadent resort for gouty bodies and youths in fearfully made garb, the village held out against those marine villas busy rising in Regency allure. Rose Cottage, set at right angles to a sandy lane, had a thatched roof that sloped steeply at the back; it clamped the house down to the land like a limpet, and provided a summer home for swallows. There were just four and a half rooms, two up, two down, with a kitchen extension for that sort of thing. The Blakes weren’t interested in domesticity.
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