William Blake, Remote by the Sea

Adapted from William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, which sometimes assimilates quotations, preserving the original spelling and punctuation.

In the autumn of 1800, as the swallows were flying past his window bound for Africa, William Blake was preparing for a new career in a new town. He was forty-three years old and in need of a change. So he set off south himself, sixty miles to the sweet Heaven of Sussex, leaving the terrible desart of London behind.  

With him was his beloved Catherine, his heroine, Kate. She was like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she heard their destination named, he said. They travelled light, with sixteen boxes of belongings, as embarking on a voyage to the ends of the earth. Inside were all their worldly possessions and many unworldly ones too: all the prints Blake had been unable to sell (that is, most of them), together with the engine of anarchy that gave them birth—his printing press.  

William Blake is a perfect name, most excellent. Plain and no-nonsense. Like his tradesman’s clothes, the best disguise for a man with such a wild mind. You might imagine a purveyor of hardware, or of socks, as indeed his father was. Unlike other people in this story, he did not come from a wealthy family. He had to advertise himself. “William Blake” starts like the wind, rises to a pitch and ends in an ache. It suits its owner’s own true heart: his one pure being of hope, of whirling prophecies for life here on earth. It could almost have been anyone standing there that night in Soho when the star of inspiration fell out of the sky. Blake just happened to be in the right place at the right time, ready to take the call.  

He had the air of innocence and experience, a faerie child or a candle flame. A subtle, gentle smile that seemed somehow interior and knowing. Huge pale blue eyes that saw into the far distance but looked right into you, too. Red hair that stuck up like a cockscomb in his youth. An aura of quiet power within. But no one could have expected this stubby Londoner, barely five-foot-five, to arrive in this sleepy seaside village, bringing with him intimations of revolution and wild desire. 

When the Blakes appeared in Felpham, it was a shock for the villagers, like discovering new age hippies had moved in overnight. It was a shock for William too: the invitation, arranged by his friend, the artist John Flaxman, had come from the renowned but not entirely inspired poet and biographer of John Milton, William Hayley, who wanted Blake to illustrate his work. Hayley lived in the Turret, a villa topped with a grandiose tower almost as high as the church. He called it his little marine hermitage, complete with a warm sea-bath. He had bought the field between the villa and the shore to ensure his view of the sea. It spoke of his lordly demeanour, and did not augur well for Blake. 

Felpham may have been a dozy place of barely two dozen homes, but already Londoners were arriving in their droves, taking summer cottages to escape the city’s smoke and noise. That was why the Blakes’ landlord, Mr. Grinder, the Dickensian owner of the Fox Inn across the street, could charge them twenty pounds per annum for his Rose Cottage. Any old place with a lick of paint demanded a premium from the carriage trade. 

It was the sea that drew them here; the same sea that had only recently begun its transformation from a place of terror to a site of nature worship. Saltwater bathing hit as a fever, as it had up and down the coast as hydrophilia took hold. A body to receive other bodies, the union of flesh and seawater could cure anything from an upset stomach to a rent in the fabric of your soul. The sea-as-therapy also subverted Albion’s defensive shores. Its beaches faced not the French and their monkeys and their Antichrist, but an invasion of homegrown bathers, announced twice daily with the tides. War stopped all frivolous travel. You couldn’t get any further than this. It’s why Blake never left England. And it was why the sea leapt from fearful element to frivolous entertainment. It was the new dispensation and people came here for the cure, as they still do. 

If you half-closed your eyes on Felpham’s genteel shore, you could just about ignore Bognor, not yet Regis, next door. It was not yet Piccadilly-by-the-sea, as Constable saw Brighton, nor Byron’s Venice, his Sea-Sodom. Nor ugly and repulsive, either, as Blake’s admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti complained when he moved to Bognor in the 1870s. But things were changing fast. Rather than a new Jerusalem, Sir Richard Hotham built a hotel with its own warm sea bath and a trio of Georgian mansions with a tea room under a golden dome. It wasn’t quite Kubla Khan, more hot tub and cocktails. The facilities were designed to lure people of quality: the Prince of Wales duly arrived to visit his mistress, Lady Jersey, but they didn’t spend the night together. 

Felpham dozed through all this furore. It had its own bathing machines, admittedly, from which bathers might be launched naked into the sea. But as Bognor, like Brighton, Southampton, and Weymouth, turned into a site of watery outrage, a decadent resort for gouty bodies and youths in fearfully made garb, the village held out against those marine villas busy rising in Regency allure. Rose Cottage, set at right angles to a sandy lane, had a thatched roof that sloped steeply at the back; it clamped the house down to the land like a limpet, and provided a summer home for swallows. There were just four and a half rooms, two up, two down, with a kitchen extension for that sort of thing. The Blakes weren’t interested in domesticity. 

Tucked up in their cozy nest, they preferred to peer out from under the eaves, over the fields of corn and down to the sea. It was the first time Blake had seen it with his own eyes. He’d imagined it endlessly in his art, in his head; now it was at the end of his lane. He could walk down there in his dressing gown and slippers, if he so desired. The sea hung there like a perpetually unfolding panorama, an unignorable flicker in the corner of his eye. Always different, always the same. The sea had no limits and neither did he. It promised everything. So did he. 

The Blakes’ cottage rivalled any Palace of Magnificence, William announced. Nothing can be more Grand than its Simplicity & Usefulness. It was the Spontaneous Effusion of Humanity, he said.  

For a visionary, Blake could often sound like Mr. Micawber. The sweet air & the voices of the winds make this a dwelling for immortals, he told Thomas Butts, his Dear Friend of the Angels whose wealth lay in the business of coal and who used it to buy Blake’s works so often he might have had a weekly subscription. Whenever poverty overwhelmed the Blakes, Butts had fuel delivered to their door; pictures for coal. No one had seen the sea before Blake. He got the sixpence. But what would his spirits say as he set up home in his own marine hermitage? 

Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates, he enthused, as if reading out the particulars from an ethereal estate agent; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen. The Cottage was a Shadow of their heavenly houses, he said, for all that it was rented from the landlord of the local pub. 

He called the cottage their mundane shell, as if his skull echoed with the sound of the sea, and even as he wrote, Kate and his sister Catherine were down on the shore, courting Neptune for an Embrace. The sea’s terrors that morning had made them afraid, he told Butts, but the ocean’s mildness was often Equal to his terrors. The Blakes had arrived at the autumn equinox, and in the softness of September, when the English sea is finally starting to get warm, the two women took advantage of the spirit of the age to dip in. I don’t know whether William joined them as their bodies were borne up in the swell, but as Hayley recommended it as a great reviver of health, I doubt William would have got away without Hayley getting him in. 

Blake left no note of that; he left almost no letters, considering his long life, which was either careless or very careful of him. But his poem “Milton,” which was born out of this place as though borne on the tide, would be filled with seaweedy lovers and divers diving down its margins and Blake himself, strolling in his seaside Eden as if bound for the beach, apparently naked save for his hat and unaware of an angel in the trees like a blown-in plastic bag. You can hear the crows protest. She is the Virgin of Providence, Milton’s feminine aspect, and she came in on the breeze like a siren, all fluttering drapes and streaming hair. 

The gates of Heaven did indeed open up for Blake here; they’d been waiting for him all along, and it would have been rude to decline. By day he walked the shore, communing with his spirits. At night he wandered into the countryside, where the crescent moon hung ominous and bright and alive. The blighted wheat lay felled in the field, a blasted oak bends in the storm. Back on the beach, the sails of two windmills spun round, grinding the corn. To Blake they were factories worked by slave labour, grinding out the whole of the world. 

Everyone mentioned his big wide eyes, open wide to everything. Here they opened up to a new infinity: the sea and a horizon beyond the city’s no exit. It was existential. His gaze was suddenly released, the way your eyes loosen when you get on a train after too much time in town. You can feel his pupils dilate 

My Eyes more & more 

Like a Sea without shore 

Continue Expanding, 

and there, on the sand, were Moses, Homer, Dante, and Milton, no less, strolling with their trousers rolled up, Blake at their side, talking to his spiritual companions as they paced the sands of time. They looked like men, he said, only taller, and composed of grey but luminous shadows. The sea as a ghost, now rising up to take new forms, now lying down low. 

Filled with this spirit, how he would grow! Blake was forty-three years old and the sea re-energised him in his midlife crisis. He plugged into it like a battery. In words that would inspire the artist Paul Nash a century later, he emanated his vision of light to Butts, in staccato lines; he’d have sent them by text if he could. Away from all care, he wrote, in this signal of delight, as in particles bright, in each grain of sand, he looked on, 

Astonish’d, Amazed; 

For each was a Man 

Human-form’d. Swift I ran, 

For they beckon’d to me, 

Remote by the Sea. 

His visions were sea-borne, electric. Those grains might have been bioluminescent zooplankton or asteroids spinning in space. I hope he’ll forgive my crude interruptions and allusions, grinding him up for these pages. His childlike reaction to the sea was cause and effect, somewhere so animate and alive that it could even predict itself, as he told Butts in a handy PS: A Piece of Sea Weed serves for a Barometer, it gets wet & dry as the weather gets so. 

The sea had always been there, of course. An everywhere-nowhere place, hovering in the periphery of his art. Now it became part of his life, the angel-hair trail he blazed. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God, he boasted to Butts. My fingers Emit sparks of fire with Expectation of my future labours, he informed Hayley, like a comet. 

Blake, in rapture, became the moon, became the stars. He was in England, sure enough, but in his head he was a world away, careering across the sky. That’s why his visions stay long after they’ve gone, after-images on our collective retinas like dark stars, all the gods on the stairs and the angels in the trees, and a man carrying a glowing sun through a doorway as if he were holding a bowling ball or an atomic bomb. The way that, as a boy, Isaac Newton invented a kite laden with a candle-lit paper lantern which he flew in the dark. Hanging in the night sky, it wonderfully affrighted the neighbors, as Newton’s antiquarian friend William Stukeley wrote. It was an omen of his discoverys, he said. Later Newton came to believe that comets fed the sun like coals in a fire, thundering into its nuclear core, sparking the solar god back into life. 

Blake, like other artists of his time, feared Newton’s dissection of our dreams, the ominous consequences of his discoverys. Science was taking the natural world apart. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said it would take the souls of five hundred Newtons to make a Shakespeare or a Milton; Charles Lamb and John Keats, over an immortal dinner at Christmas, 1817, blamed him for destroying all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. 

Science was no gift to humanity in their eyes; but it was impossible to resist, so they drank a toast to Newton’s health and the confusion of mathematics. Perhaps they’d heard the rumors that, in secret, Newton practised alchemy and metaphysics, rewrote the book of Revelations and, as Jacob Bronowski, the twentieth-century philosopher, said, only understood the movements of stars as ships in the sea, riding through space; the way that the planets are on an endless spiral into the sun, or the way that matter itself might become sentient, evolving like organic life. Name something once and it’s doomed forever. Nations, states of mind, storms, animals, ideas, diseases. Like Adam in Paradise, science gave names to things that had had no name. Industry then exploited them, again and again. They all lined up for their new names, all the same. 

In 1937, Humphrey Jennings, the writer and filmmaker who had helped arrange the International Surrealist Exhibition the year before and who had just founded Mass Observation, a kind of art-inflected gathering of social information, began to apply the same techniques to a decade-long literary project. Jennings called it Pandaemonium, a term invented by Milton for the Palace of Satan: a place where all devils would be found, as opposed to the Pantheon of all gods. 

Like Paul Nash’s Unit One or NASA’s mission to Mars, Jennings’ book was another impossible task, never to be finished in his lifetime. Bronowski, his college friend and collaborator, said Jennings’s mind was too subtle and nimble to get everything down on the page that he wanted to say. Pandaemonium was designed as an anthology of terrible wonder; a collage of texts or images, as Jennings called it, which would reveal the real cost of the Industrial Revolution to humanity. His nineteen-thirties-search-engine mind sorted eyewitness accounts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to present a series of snapshots of how we got to here from where we had been. 

Combining the rage of Blake with the random energy of surrealism, Jennings relayed reports of machines able to carve sculptures and newspaper presses whose system of machinery were declared to be almost organic by the Times in 1814; devised and arranged, the newspaper said, to relieve the human frame of its most laborious efforts in printing and in so doing far exceed all human powers in rapidity and dispatch. It was artificial intelligence: the word frame itself was an image of the industrial leviathan to which workers were enslaved, humans as future robots, and the new metropolis a man-machine. 

It was all happening too fast for anyone to keep up. In 1791, Jeremy Bentham devised an all-seeing panopticon in which prisoners might be kept under permanent surveillance; by 1824, The Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine was suggesting that a camera obscura might be usefully employed on the city’s streets to locate criminals, sending the reports straight to the police station by telegraph. 

By then Charles Babbage was already at work on his difference engine, a calculating computer which astonished even its own inventor, who told friends that he did not profess to know all the powers of his machine. In 1812, Byron had declared to Parliament that his sympathies lay with workers suffering the most unparalleled distress: By the Lord! he told the frame-breakers in 1816, if there’s a row, but I’ll be among ye! Thirty years later his own daughter, Ada Lovelace, would devise the first algorithms for Babbage’s computer. 

Science suborned art. When the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce brought his first photograph to England in 1826, William Blake was still alive; had he perfected his invention a little earlier, we might have seen Blake in the flesh; imagine what Julia Margaret Cameron might have made of those eyes. Six years later, in 1834, when Henry Fox Talbot created his device, using it to make images of his grand country house, Lacock, he declared that the building was the first that was ever known to have drawn its own picture. 

All this panorama of invention and fear was a world Blake recognised and diagnosed. An artist felt like a stranger in a strange land where parts of England had come to resemble battlefields in an industrial war, eaten up in enclosures, with farmhouses left ruined and deserted as collateral damage. Clumps of dead trees stood like skeletons while the new manufactories rumbled and roared. Servile workers ran as attendants to serve the beasts amidst flames as in a pandemonium, the engineer and philosopher James Nasmyth wrote; to him it seemed the earth had been turned inside out, its entrails strewn about; and above, in a night sky which was no longer sacrosanct, even the stars were made pale and feeble by the cindered and blasted scenes below. 

Satan was gaining sway in this lost paradise. Milton describes Pandemonium with the kind of matter-of-fact detail Thomas More applied to his island of Utopia and its fifty-four cities. Milton’s devilish settlement is a high Capitol suddenly built out of the Deep. It is a stronghold born of darkness, of belched fire and rolling smoke and sulphur, like the chemosynthetic life conceived on the deep ocean floor, the same profound we now plumb for rare-earth minerals to power our own revolution. Mammon, another of Satan’s angels, says Hell will be bettered by mining for such minerals, and he sets his crew to work as they 

Ransacked the center, and with impious hands 

Rifled the bowels of their mother earth 

For treasures better hid. 

Who would ever have imagined such resources might be finite? Who knew? 

Well, quite a lot of people, actually. Thomas Carlyle saw the mines and furnaces of the north as worked by half-naked demons, black as ravens, their bodies besmeared with soot. He knew it could not go on in this way. In Manchester, the artist and reformer Benjamin Haydon felt physically sick at the sight of hideous mill-prisons for children. New demagogues rose to voice opposition to these conditions, exhorting workers to turn against their tyrannical masters. In Bradford, Richard Oastler roused the crowd to tell their oppressors, Go back to your dens and there feed on the blood of your own cruelty. 

The whole of London, with its own chimneys and manufactories, seemed surmounted by a black vapour, a permanent cloud hanging over Holborn, like fluid ink, Carlyle said, while its flood of humanity and animals toiled to run the capital, as if it were one huge machine itself. The black rain of flakes of soot Dickens saw fall from the sky in Bleak House had gone into mourning for the death of the sun. 

The idyllic Albion that Blake had hymned, populated with ancient Britons painted with woad, was now filled with mill children whose faces were permanently stained blue from the dyes to which they were exposed. 

What did all this mean for the soul? Who asked questions about the wisdom of progress and its stealth? Jennings thought the use by capital of science had repressed the imaginative vision in ordinary folk. He saw industrial Britain as a colony, its people as savages to be exploited; its wealth the property of the conquerors, and its preachers the missionaries to dope and convert the natives. There is no wealth but life, as John Ruskin said, always sure of himself, telling the good people of Tunbridge Wells that they were cannibals and hypocrites for dealing in stealing and speculation by buying cheap goods and investing in shares. Over in New England, Henry David Thoreau would be obliged to resist the endless march with his own body. 

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine, he said. As men were enslaved to industry, Blake and his fellow artists felt they were about to be replaced. When he was shown a copy of the Mechanic’s Magazine which celebrated the rise of the machine, Blake said, 

Ah, sir, these things we artists HATE! 

And all the Arts of Life they chang’d into the Arts of Death in Albion. 

A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art; it is destructive of Humanity & of Art. 

And when he read, in one of those magazines, of a surgeon who had, with the cold fury of Robespierre, caused the police to arrest and imprison an astrologer, Blake wrote a letter of protest defending this Man who could Read the Stars, against the Newtonian who is opressed by his own Reasonings & Experiments. 

As if the state could outlaw ghosts.  

Adapted from William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Copyright © 2025 by Philip Hoare. Published with permission of the author and Pegasus Books.