William Blake

Blake was apprenticed as an engraver at fourteen and earned his living from the trade all his life, printing other men's designs while making his own books by a method he said his dead brother had taught him in a vision: text and image etched together on one plate, then printed and coloured by hand with his wife Catherine, who he had taught to read and to print. Songs of Innocence and of Experience sold in tiny numbers. He was largely unknown, sometimes ridiculed, and at one point tried for sedition after throwing a soldier out of his garden.

He saw visions from childhood and described them without embarrassment, which is why his contemporaries called him mad; the work is in fact rigorously argued, hostile to empire, to child labour, to the mills he called dark and satanic, and to a church he thought had replaced mercy with rules. He died singing, poor, at sixty-nine, and was buried in an unmarked common grave in the dissenters' ground at Bunhill Fields. Two admirers spent years working out the exact plot from burial records, and a stone was finally laid over the real spot in 2018.