Epilogue: The Ghost of Abel

Abstract

In the miniature drama of The Ghost of Abel, Blake’s last illuminated book, the forms of Satanism produced by two generations of Romantic writers converge. Here Blake rewrites the denouement of Byron’s Cain: A Mystery to envision the overthrow of the Satanic worship of retribution. Executed in 1822, the work belongs to the years when Blake was beginning to emerge from obscurity, some four years after he met his friend and last patron, John Linnell, but well before Samuel Palmer and the other ‘Ancients’ discovered him. The biographical record of these years reveals nothing about Blake’s view of the blasphemy crisis or of the downward arc of Byron’s reputation. These events passed without a single remark or poetic allusion from Blake, until the publication of Cain in December 1821. But the dedication of The Ghost of Abel ‘To LORD BYRON in the Wilderness,’ which recognizes him as a type of John the Baptist, is a gesture that communicates Blake’s awareness of the force of Byron’s dramatic intervention in the historical moment (1; Erdman, p. 270). Blake places Byron in the stance he occupied in All Religions are One: in that work ‘the Voice of one crying in the Wilderness’ proclaims the coming of Christ in a new and unfamiliar revelation — the infinite creative power of God that ‘becomes as we are,’ incarnate in the Poetic Genius (Erdman, pp.1–3).