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.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Blake
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)
“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.”
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)