"William Blake Among the Tombs, or some mornings Blake drank his coffee by the grave of Edward the Confessor"

A few months shy of his fifteenth birthday, William Blake was apprenticed to master engraver James Basire. During his apprenticeship Blake not only learnt the graphic techniques that enabled engravers to replicate form, tone, and the illusion of depth in copperplates to reproduce accurate printed impressions, but also began developing an aesthetic theory focused on the primacy of the bounding line. This talk will offer a portrait of the teenage Blake as an apprentice, exploring his life at 31 Great Queen Street and the time he spent in Westminster Abbey (and ‘other churches in and about London’), sketching medieval funerary monuments, before revealing some of his earliest identifiable engraving work.

Mark received his D.Phil from the University of Oxford and has taught at Durham University, Queen's University Belfast, and is now an associate professor at Kansas State University.  His main area of research is Romantic-period literary and visual culture. Most recently, Mark's research led to the discovery of William Blake’s earliest engraved art and the reconstruction of the hanging arrangement of Blake’s 18 portraits of poets.

Mark has edited an edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (2024), and co-authored, with Robert N. Essick, the first critical edition of William Blake’s Genesis Manuscript (2012). Mark also co-edited Re-envisioning Blake (Palgrave 2012) and William Blake’s Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests (Palgrave 2024).

Mark is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a contributor to BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (https://branchcollective.org)  and is an associate editor for the William Blake Archive, the largest and most comprehensive free to access digital repository of Blake’s works on the web: www.blakearchive.org

Mark’s research on Blake has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and in print media, including Reuters, The Times, The Smithsonian Magazine, and The Art Newspaper. He has a forthcoming co-edited collection on Blake's patron, William Hayley and his role as a biographer and cultivator of literary networks during the Romantic period: (https://link.springer.com/book/9783031683046)