Catherine Blake - Life

Life

Catherine was born the daughter of a market gardener in Battersea, then just outside London on the other side of the Thames. She met William here in 1781, during his brief visit to the area while recovering from an emotional upset following the failure of an earlier relationship. Their courtship was brief. According to early biographers of Blake, Catherine immediately recognised him as her future husband and when she sympathised with him over his earlier emotional troubles he replied "do you pity me? Then I love you." Blake married Catherine – who was five years his junior – on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary's Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an 'X'. They remained together until his death in 1827. Blake taught her to read and write, and also to use his printing-press.

The couple had no children, and it has been suggested that Blake wanted to bring a concubine into the relationship to act as a surrogate mother, which was consistent with the theories of Swedenborgianism by which Blake was influenced. Blake's earliest biographer Alexander Gilchrist does not mention this, but speaks of unspecified troubles in the early years of the relationship. However, Algernon Charles Swinburne later explicitly asserted that this was the case, but that Blake dropped the idea when he saw that it upset Catherine. No documentary evidence survives supporting this notion, but Blake is known to have stated that he "learned from the Bible that wives should be held in common."

Writers who knew the couple in their later years describe a very happy relationship. In 1802, William Hayley wrote that William "and his excellent wife (a true helpmate!) pass the plates thro' a rolling press in their own cottage together". On his deathbed, Blake drew a picture of Catherine as his last work, stating "you have ever been an angel to me".

After her husband's death Catherine was taken in by Blake's admirer Frederick Tatham, for whom she nominally worked as a housekeeper. At this period she continued to sell Blake's works. When she died four years later Tatham claimed that she had bequeathed all Blake's works to him. When he later converted to Irvingite beliefs, he destroyed a number of them, asserting that they were inspired by the devil.