Prophetic Afterlife

Abstract

Exploring the life of Blake leaves the biographer with unanswered questions — more than in the case of most writers. As with Shakespeare, the surviving evidence is sparse and patchy. Were many further designs and illustrations (including, perhaps, more erotic drawings than have survived) among those supposedly destroyed by Tatham after he became a zealous follower of Irving and was persuaded by some of his coreligionists that he had been ‘inspired — but by the devil’?^1* And did such a holo¬caust include other writing, some of which might have thrown more light on his thought and mythologizing?