Courtney McGrailThe World of Books
We Irish have a partiality to laying claim to any writer with even the remotest connections with our island.
Critics, for instance, have discussed whether the Irish origins of Edgar Allan Poe (in Longford) or the Brontë sisters (South Down out of Longford) brought to their work the macabre atmosphere that surrounds The Fall of the House of Ussher and Wuthering Heights. But when it comes to the poet, visionary, and peculiar Christian William Blake academics have scorned the idea.
That William Blake was of Irish descent was asserted by W.B. Yeats and Edwin J. Ellis in their landmark edition of Blake’s works in 1893, from which the modern study of the poet derives. The notion of Blake’s Irish origin was not Yeats invention. In the introduction he wrote to an edition of Blake’s poems published in The Muses Library in 1905 he provides an epitome of the theory.
“Early in the 18th Century, a certain John O’Neill got into debt and difficulties, these latter apparently political to some extent; and escaped both by marrying a woman named Ellen Blake, who kept a sheebeen at Rathmines, Dublin, and taking her name. He had a son James, I am told, by a previous wife or mistress, and this son also took the name of Blake, and in due course married, settled in London as a hosier, and became the father of five children one of whom was the [poet William Blake]. John O’Neill had also a son by his wife Ellen; and this son, settling in Malaga, in Spain, entered the wine trade, and became the founder of a family, and from one of this family, Dr Carter Blake, I have the story.”
This, to an Irish mind, seems a very reasonable descent. The best that modern scholarship can report is that Blake’s grandfather was a James Blake, gentleman, of Rotherhithe, of whom little is known.
So Yeats’ claim really rests with Dr Carter Blake. He was one of those reputable, yet odd, characters with which the Victorian period abounds. His father was Charles Ignatius Blake of Quintero in Chile; this might suggest the family was Catholic, but it was not: Dr Charles Carter Blake converted to the Catholic Church in 1870, about the age of 40, just before his marriage. Between 1868 and 1881 he lectured in anatomy at the Westminster Hospital. He was a student of anthropology, a friend of savants such as Richard Owen, Charles Darwin, Richard Burton and others.
But he was more than a scholar and gentleman. Despite being a Catholic, he was a keen investigator of spiritualism, but was thrown out of the Spiritualist Association because he was a Catholic. Later he declared himself a Theosophist. These interests would have brought him into contact with Yeats. He died, however, in London’s only Catholic hospital for men, St Camillus’ in the Fulham Road.
Daughter
This was at Christmas time 1897. He was aged 57. In 1906, his daughter, Miss Jane Blake, told Yeats she could not help with any further information as she was unaware of the tradition. Yet oddly enough the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1854, notes that William Blake “had been born in Ireland”, an error which may be an echo in some way of Irish descent. There is still some mystery here.
Chesterton in his little book about William Blake, published in 1910, provides an appropriate comment on which to close.
“Some have found in his Irish origin an explanation of his imaginative energy; the idea may be admitted, but under strong reservations. It is probably true that Ireland, if she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets. A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up Heaven and Earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates Heaven and Earth, even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the English type is he who sees the elves entangled in the forests of Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr W.B. Yeats.”