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The Life Of William Blake
The ''Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus." With selections from his poems and other writings'' is a two-volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863. The first volume is a biography and the second a compilation of Blake's poetry, prose, artwork and illustrated manuscript. The book was largely written by Alexander Gilchrist, who had spent many years compiling the material and interviewing Blake's surviving friends. However, Gilchrist had left it incomplete at his sudden death from scarlet fever in 1861. The work was published two years later, having been completed by his widow Anne Gilchrist (writer), Anne Gilchrist with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. The book became the first standard text on the Blake, a foundation of the extensive scholarship on his life and work. The original 1863 edition was subtitled "Pictor Ignotus", Latin for "unknown artist", a common phrase used for unattributed artworks. Here it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist (182830 November 1861), an English author, is known mainly as a biographer of William Etty and of William Blake. Gilchrist's biography of Blake is still a standard reference work about the poet. Gilchrist was born at Newington Green, then just to the north of London, son of the minister of the Unitarian church there. Although he studied law, Gilchrist adopted literary and art criticism as his main pursuits. He settled at Guildford during 1853, where he wrote ''Life of William Etty, R.A.''. In 1856 he became a next-door neighbour of his friend Thomas Carlyle at Chelsea and his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, both of them notable writers. Gilchrist had all but finished his ''Life of William Blake'' when he contracted scarlet fever from one of his children and died. His wife Anne helped to complete the Life (his ''magnum opus''), and survived him by 24 years. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William also contributed to the completion of the book. References F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ''magnum opus'' is generally considered to be ''The Prelude'', a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850. Early life The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, (now in Cumbria), part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1880 Non-fiction Books
Year 188 (CLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known in the Roman Empire as the Year of the Consulship of Fuscianus and Silanus (or, less frequently, year 941 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 188 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Publius Helvius Pertinax becomes pro-consul of Africa from 188 to 189. Japan * Queen Himiko (or Shingi Waō) begins her reign in Japan (until 248). Births * April 4 – Caracalla (or Antoninus), Roman emperor (d. 217) * Lu Ji (or Gongji), Chinese official and politician (d. 219) * Sun Shao, Chinese general of the Eastern Wu state (d. 241) Deaths * March 17 – Julian, pope and patriarch of Alexandria * Fa Zhen (or Gaoqing), Chinese scholar (b. AD 100) * Lucius Antistius Burrus, Roman politician (executed) * Ma Xiang, Chine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1863 Non-fiction Books
Events January–March * January 1 – Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation during the third year of the American Civil War, making the abolition of slavery in the Confederate states an official war goal. It proclaims the freedom of 3.1 million of the nation's four million slaves and immediately frees 50,000 of them, with the rest freed as Union armies advance. * January 2 – Lucius Tar Painting Master Company (''Teerfarbenfabrik Meirter Lucius''), predecessor of Hoechst, as a worldwide chemical manufacturing brand, founded in a suburb of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. * January 4 – The New Apostolic Church, a Christian and chiliastic church, is established in Hamburg, Germany. * January 7 – In the Swiss canton of Ticino, the village of Bedretto is partly destroyed and 29 killed, by an avalanche. * January 8 ** The Yorkshire County Cricket Club is founded at the Adelphi Hotel, in Sheffield, England. ** American Civil War – ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Smetham
James Smetham (9 September 1821 – 5 February 1889) was an English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter and engraver, a follower of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Biography Smetham was born in Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire, and attended school in Leeds; he was originally apprenticed to the Lincoln architect Edward James Willson before deciding on an artistic career. He studied at the Royal Academy, beginning in 1843. His modest early success as a portrait painter was stifled by the development of photography (a problem shared by other artists of the time). In 1851 Smetham took a teaching position at the Wesleyan Normal College in Westminster, and was the first Drawing Master for what would later become Westminster College (today part of Oxford Brookes University). In 1854, he married Sarah Goble, a fellow teacher at the College. They would eventually have six children. Smetham worked in a range of genres, including religious and literary themes as well as portraiture; but he is perha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William James Linton
William James Linton (December 7, 1812December 29, 1897) was an English-born American wood-engraver, landscape painter, political reformer and author of memoirs, novels, poetry and non-fiction. Birth and early years Born in Mile End, east London, his family moved to Stratford, Essex in 1818. The young Linton was educated at Chigwell Grammar School, an early 17th-century foundation attended by many sons of the Essex and City of London middle classes. Early career Aged 15, Linton was apprenticed to the wood-engraver George Wilmot Bonner (1796–1836). His earliest known work is to be found in John Martin and Richard Westall's '' Pictorial Illustrations of the Bible'' (1833). He worked from 1834 to 1836 with William Henry Powis, another pupil of Bonner; but Powis died. Linton then worked for two years for the firm of John Thompson. After working as a journeyman engraver, losing his money over a cheap political library called the "National," and writing a life of Thoma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Canterbury Tales
''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''Masterpiece, magnum opus''. The tales (mostly written in verse (poetry), verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the The Tabard, Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. It has been suggested that the greatest contribution of ''The Canterbury Tales'' to English literature was the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Descriptive Catalogue (1809)
The ''Descriptive Catalogue'' of 1809 is a description of, and Prospectus (book), prospectus for, an exhibition by William Blake of a number of his own illustrations for various topics, but most notably including a set of illustrations to Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'', this last being a response to a collapsed contract with dealer Robert Cromek. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales, Canterbury Pilgrims'', Blake approached Cromek with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing that Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly commissioned Thomas Stothard to execute the concept. When Blake learned that he had been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard, formerly a friend. He also set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Chaucer illustration, along ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Book Of Thel
''The Book of Thel'' is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably composed in the period 1788 to 1790. It is illustrated by his own plates, and compared to his later prophetic books is relatively short and easier to understand. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line. It was preceded by '' Tiriel'', which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from ''Tiriel'' were incorporated into ''The Book of Thel''. Most of the poem is in unrhymed verse. This book consists of eight plates executed in illuminated printing. Sixteen copies of the original print of 1789–1793 are known. Three copies bearing a watermark of 1815 are more elaborately colored than the others. Thel's Motto Thel’s Motto can be interpreted as Blake’s rejection of the Church of England. The “silver rod” where Wisdom cannot be found represents a scepter or staff that would have been used in traditional kingship or even high-ranking ecclesiasts before the rise of nationalism and the consequent fall of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience
''Songs of Innocence and of Experience'' is a collection of illustrated poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases: a few first copies were printed and illuminated by Blake himself in 1789; five years later, he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled ''Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul''. Blake was also a painter before the creation of ''Songs of Innocence and Experience'' and had painted such subjects as Oberon, Titania, and Puck dancing with fairies. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and "Fall". Often, interpretations of this collection centre around a mythical dualism, where "Innocence" represents the "unfallen world" and "Experience" represents the "fallen world". Blake categorizes our modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetical Sketches
''Poetical Sketches'' is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' ''The Complete Writings of William Blake'' in 1957.Keynes (1966: 883) In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000. Publication The original 1783 copies were seventy-two pages in length, printed in octavo by John Flaxman's aunt, who owned a small print shop in the Strand, and paid for by Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, dilettantes to whom Blake h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commonplace Book
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler's responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes. Entries are most often organized under subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective." Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts; sometimes they were required of young women as evidence of their mastery of social roles and as demonstrations of the correctness of their upbringing. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. "Commonplace" is a translation of the L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
