The Blake Society
Programme
2005

Tuesday 25th January 2005
Every body hates a King!
William Blake, Sedition & the English Legal System.
A Lecture by Mark Crosby
On 11 January 1804 William Blake was tried at the Chichester Quarter Sessions court for sedition.  This was an offence at English common law & was punishable by a term of at least three months in gaol or, in certain cases, transportation.  If convicted Blake would have been incarcerated or even sent in shackles to Botany Bay.  According to Alexander Gilchrist, Blake believed that he had been the victim of a Government conspiracy, but many subsequent biographers & critics have dismissed Blake’s belief in a plot against him as paranoia.  My talk will re-examine the circumstances surrounding the trial & will reveal that Blake’s conspiracy theory may not have been too far from the truth.
Mark C Crosby is researching a DPhil on Blake at University College, Oxford.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 15th February 2005
BlakeSpace:  ‘My Business is to Create’
A Lecture by Jay Harris
One of the most exciting projects in London today is BlakeSpace—an attempt to manifest Blake’s principles in the way we live our lives.  BlakeSpace will integrate craft & enterprise, art & artisanship in a programme to re-engage young people in danger of exclusion from our society.
Many of the issues Blake confronted still face us in London today, including the pervasive poverty that threatens half of our inner city children & the disappearance of traditional artisan livelihoods despite London’s rapidly evolving creative sector.   Blake responded to the challenges of his day by creating a new artistic vocabulary & a technology that integrated not only word & image but also concept & execution—a BlakeSpace.
Jay Harris has a background in art history, child psychology & as Director of Edunomics has consulted on regeneration programmes in London.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 15th March 2005
Converse In The Spirit
Blake & Boehme
A Lecture by Kevin Fischer
The relationship of Blake & the German visionary philosopher Jacob Boehme was a meeting of minds that transcended place & time. Each regarded himself as part of a community of visionaries & believed that any predominant form of thought or understanding was only partial. Both shared an unorthodox & radical view of the spiritual, rejecting all conventional literal views of the overseeing God in his Heaven. Their writings are not a simple or direct description of the movements of divinity nor of what divinity is or is not, but a medium for approaching it.
Kevin Fischer is a novelist who works with people with disabilities for the University of Nottingham.  His latest book ‘Converse in the Spirit’ is a comparative study of William Blake, Jacob Boehme & the Creative Spirit.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 12th April 2005
Mental Fight
A Lecture by Andrew Solomon
Blake made it clear that his dual art was not merely an end in itself. He was concerned with Man’s “Fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity”.
As thinking beings, we cannot avoid the “Fall” into a state of inner conflict, in which we are often torn between self-indulgent impulse & what we regard as moral duty. Blake saw it as his “great task” to lead his fellow men & women to a state of spiritual enlightenment in which they are at peace with themselves. This is the building of Jerusalem. He knew that only “future generations” would understand him. Andrew Solomon believes the time for that has now come.
Andrew Solomon is the author of “Blake’s ‘Job’” & “William Blake’s Great Task (The purpose of ‘Jerusalem’)”. He is a former editor of the Blake Journal.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 10th May 2005
Turning Scholarship to Fiction:
The Story of Kate & William.
A Lecture by Janet Warner
Janet Warner is a retired Professor of English from York University, Toronto.  Last year she published ‘Other Sorrows, Other Joys ~ the Marriage of Catherine Sophia Boucher & William Blake’ (St. Martin’s Press).  Her first book on Blake was ‘Blake and the Language of Art’ (McGill Queens).
She now lives in Aldergrove, British Columbia, where she is trying to become a novelist.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 21th June 2005
Recapturing Radical Innocence by John Docherty
Our Annual Joint Meeting in 2005 is with The George MacDonald Society
Once a year we hold a joint meeting with another society or organisation.  This year is the centenary of MacDonald’s death & so we are delighted to welcome the George MacDonald Society & their speaker John Docherty.  The Lecture will look at how George MacDonald & his great friend Lewis Carroll took up Blake’s subversion of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs.
John Docherty has been the editor of North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies & he is currently the membership secretary of the Society.  He is the author of The literary products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald friendship (Lewiston, N.Y; Lampeter: Mellen, c1995). Since the publication of this work Blake’s writings have been recognised as being highly influential for both MacDonald & his friend C.L. Dodgson, the author of the famous Alice books.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 26th July 2005
Blake & Coleridge
A Lecture by Morton Paley
The lecture will first examine the evidence for a meeting or meetings between Blake & Coleridge (& will conclude that they did in fact meet) & then will consider what they might have said to each other.  It will include a consideration of Coleridge’s letter about the Songs.
Professor Morton Paley is one of the leading Blake scholars. His most recent books are:
The Traveller in the Evening: the last works of William Blake (Oxford University Press, 2003) & Portraits of Coleridge (Oxford University Press, 1999)
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Sunday 14th August 2005
Deathday Heaven
It is our tradition to meet at Bunhill Fields on the anniversary of William Blake’s death. We will gather at the gravestone at 1pm, to read a poem, or tell a tale, then repair to a nearby public house.
This year it is a great honour to have Luis & Carol Garrido speak about their researches into the burial of Blake’s immediate family & their identification of the exact place where William is buried—recorded in  the coordinates (77, 32, 9)
‘His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven’
Bunhill Fields Cemetery has entrances in City Road & Bunhill Row, London EC1. Nearest Tube: Old Street exit 5; buses 43, 141, 214, 271.
Before our event there is a walk organised by Ed Glinert (not the Blake Society) leaving from Oxford Circus tube (Exit 6) at 10.45am. The timing has been chosen for the convenience of anyone wanting to go to the grave at Bunhill Fields at 1pm. The cost is £5.50 or £4.50 concessions.
The walk will include key sites from Blake’s life—residences, addresses, places mentioned in the poems—& include sites around the West End relevant to his contemporaries or indicative of influences.

Tuesday 20th September 2005
Blake & the Secret
A Lecture by Leon Humphries
The talk centres around relevant passages & illustrations from ‘Europe’ & ‘The Four Zoas’ but also looks at some of the early lyric poems in tracing the development of Blake’s use of secrets & secrecy as literary terms & pictorial motifs. As Blake’s art & poetry evolves, the secret becomes a significant weapon in his rhetorical & imagistic armoury.  The spiritual & intellectual connection between Blake & figures such as Paracelsus, Dionysius, Plato, Swedenborg & Milton, are also suggested by the investigation of the secret.
Leon Humphries is a student at Bristol University.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 25th October 2005
The Blake Society Annual Lecture 2005
Blake’s Dark Materials
To be given by Philip Pullman.
“I shall be talking about the relationship between what I believe & what I write—Blake’s ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’—& whether a ’system’ restricts or empowers.”
Philip Pullman, an international bestselling author, has brought Blake to a new audience—both young & old—through a trilogy of novels His Dark Materials.
Please note that this event takes place at St James’s Church
The Annual lecture is free to members of the Blake Society.  For non-members tickets cost £5 each & are available at the door on the night. 
For more information please email  tickets@blakesociety.org.uk
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 22th November 2005
Romantic Regeneration :
Blake, Creation & the Constitutive Imagination
A Lecture by Donald John
This lecture is in association with the Temenos Academy & the discussion afterwards will be chaired by Professor Jonathan Wordsworth.
Intuitively Blake rejects creatio ex nihilo (& ex deo in the Miltonic sense) in favour of an emanation system in which the human imagination is constitutive of individuals, societies & creation itself. The imagination is constitutive because it participates in the creative centre of ultimate reality. In terms of personal regeneration, we find in Blake a preference for internal self-activated soul-making as opposed to an external, passively received redemption, a predilection for a concept of salvation as being a real ontological state of being, as opposed to an arbitrary alteration of one’s relationship to God by way of forensic analogies & finally, a tendency to view heaven & hell as what one makes of oneself as self-authoring rather than as places or locales for the distribution of irrelative rewards & punishments. Finally the lecture will explore the redemptive possibilities open to those who people Blake’s integral universe.
Professor Donald John was educated at St Catherine’s College, Oxford & now lives in the  Napa Valley in California. He is at work on a forthcoming book Embarrassed for God: Theodicy, Regeneration & the Imagination of William Blake.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 13th December 2005
AGM 
immediately followed by
The Floating Press
A Film by Polly Gould
During the summer the Parabola Trust organised an exhibition at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth celebrating Blake’s ten years at Hercules Buildings.
The exhibition Cloud & Vision was organised in association with the Blake Society & so we invited one of the artists to investigate a question that has long troubled us. Why do people join—or not join—the Society?  With only 200 members this throws doubt on whether we are an organisation at all or just an anarchy of visionaries.
Polly Gould is a Lecturer at St Martin’s School of Art & as an artist she works across a broad range of media.  For the exhibition she created The Floating Press comprising a 19th century iron rolling press set up inside the Museum of Garden History, a blog on the web onto which anyone could publish their opinions, & finally she interviewed a number of members of the Society, recording the interactions on video.
We might have asked a firm of management consultants to investigate the puzzle of our minimal membership, but since we are The Blake Society we thought we would ask an artist instead. This film is her report.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)
The Annual General Meeting
Agenda
1) Minutes of last year’s AGM
2) Apologies for Absence
3) Chairman’s Report
4) Treasurer’s Report
5) Secretary’s Report
6) Election of the 3 Honorary Officers for 2006
7) Election of the Committee for 2006
8) Any other business.