Of the childhood and youth of Blake we know little beyond what Malkin and Smith have to tell us. From the age of ten to the age of fourteen he studied at Pars' drawing-school in the Strand, buying for himself prints after Raphael, Dürer, and Michelangelo at the sale-rooms; at fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire, the engraver, who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, and in his shop Blake once saw Goldsmith. 'His love for art increasing,' says Tatham, and the time of life having arrived when it was deemed necessary to place him under some tutor, a painter of eminence was proposed, and necessary applications were made; but from the huge premium required, he requested, with his characteristic generosity, that his father would not on any account spend so much money on him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers and sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as being less expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future avocations. Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty guineas, he learnt the art of engraving.' We are told that he was apprenticed, at his own request, to Basire rather than to the more famous Ryland, the engraver to the king, because, on being taken by his father to Ryland's studio, he said: 'I do not like the man's face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged.' Twelve years later Ryland was hanged for forgery.
Blake was with Basire for seven years, and for the last five years much of his time was spent in making drawings of Gothic monuments, chiefly in Westminster Abbey, until he came, says Malkin, to be 'himself almost a Gothic monument.' Tatham tells us that the reason of his being 'sent out drawing,' as he fortunately was, instead of being kept at engraving, was 'for the circumstance of his having frequent quarrels with his fellow—apprentices concerning matters of intellectual argument.'
It was in the Abbey that he had a vision of Christ and the Apostles, and in the Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, 'in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption,' says Tatham, and then laid a complaint before the Dean which has caused, to this day, the exclusion of Westminster schoolboys from the precincts.
It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger part of the poems contained in the Poetical Sketches, printed (we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the 'Advertisement' at the beginning of the book we are told that the 'following Sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year,' that is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his poems had been published. Ossian had appeared in 1760, Percy's Reliques in 1765. The Reliques probably had their influence on Blake, Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled with the influence of Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books. It has been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and his 'fiend in a cloud,' came from Ossian; and Ossian is very evident in the metrical prose of such pieces as 'Samson,' and even in some of the imagery ('Their helmed youth and aged warriors in dust together lie, and Desolation spreads his wings over the land of Palestine'). But the influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence which could hardly have found its way to Blake before the year 1777. In the fifth chapter of the fantastic Island in the Moon (probably written about 1784) there is a long discussion on Chatterton, while in the seventh chapter he is again discussed in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads: 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient is so,' and on another page, 'I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any poet whatever, of Rowley and Chatterton also.' Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say, but if the 'Mad Song' of Blake has the hint of any predecessor in our literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy and stormy masculine splendor of the High Priest's song in 'Aella,' 'Ye who his yn mokie ayre'; and if, between the time of the Elizabethans and the time of 'My silks and fine array' there had been any other song of similar technique and similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's song in 'Aella,' 'O! synge untoe mie roundelaie.'
Of the direct and very evident influence of the Elizabethans we are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness: 'Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and his Sonnets... poems, now little read, were favorite studies of Mr. Blake's early days. So were Jonson's Underwoods and his Miscellanies.' 'My silks and fine array' goes past Jonson, and reaches Fletcher, if not Shakespeare himself. And the blank verse of 'King Edward the Third' goes straight to Shakespeare for its cadence, and for something of its manner of speech. And there is other blank verse which, among much not even metrically correct, anticipates something of the richness of Keats.
Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only by the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudo-Gothic of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the Castle of Otranto, as 'Gwin, King of Norway,' takes after the Scandinavian fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or 'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. Blind-man's Buff,' too, is a piece of eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses' that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies, the smooth convention of eighteenth—century classicism, and, as he reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light it had rejected:
'How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few!'
In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and from this time forward we find in the rest of Blake's work only a proof of his own assertion, that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.'
In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire came to an end, and for a short time he studied in the Antique School at the newly founded Royal Academy under Moser, the first keeper. In the Life of Reynolds which prefaces the 1798 edition of the Discourses, Moser is spoken of as one who 'might in every sense be called the Father of the present race of Artists.' Blake has written against this in his copy: 'I was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said, "You should not study these old hard, stiff, and dry unfinished works of art. Stay a little, and I will show you what you should study." He then went and took down Le Brun's and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly rage: I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser, "These things that you call finished are not even begun: how can they then be finished? The man who does not know the beginning never can know the end of art."' Malkin tells us that Blake 'professed drawing from life always to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal from life, both at the Academy and at home.' A water-color drawing dating from this time, 'The Penance of Jane Shore,' was included by Blake in his exhibition of 1809. It is the last number in the catalogue, and has the note: 'This Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago, and proves to the Author, and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.' He also did engravings, during several years, for the booksellers, Harrison, Johnson, and others, some of them after Stothard, who was then working for the Novelist's Magazine. Blake met Stothard in 1780, and Stothard introduced him to Flaxman, with whom he had himself just become acquainted. In the same year Blake met Fuseli, who settled near him in Broad Street, while Flaxman, on his marriage in 1781, came to live near by, at 27 Wardour Street. Bartolozzi and John Yarley were both, then or later, living in Broad Street, Angelica Kauffmann in Golden Square. In 1780 (the year of the Gordon Biots, when Blake, carried along by the crowd, saw the burning of Newgate) he had for the first time a picture in the Royal Academy, the water-color of 'The Death of Earl Godwin.'
It was at this time, in his twenty-fourth year, that he fell in love with 'a lively little girl' called Polly Wood. Tatham calls her 'a young woman, who by his own account, and according to his own knowledge, was no trifler. He wanted to marry her, but she refused, and was as obstinate as she was unkind.' Gilchrist says that on his complaining to her that she had 'kept company' with others besides himself, she asked him if he was a fool. 'That cured me of jealousy,' he said afterwards, but the cure, according to Tatham, made him so ill that he was sent for change of air to 'Kew, near Richmond' (really to Battersea), to the house of 'a market-gardener whose name was Boutcher.' While there, says Tatham, 'he was relating to the daughter, a girl named Catherine, the lamentable story of Polly Wood, his implacable lass, upon which Catherine expressed her deep sympathy, it is supposed, in such a tender and affectionate manner, that it quite won him. He immediately said, with the suddenness peculiar to him, "Do you pity me? Yes, indeed I do," answered she. "Then I love you," said he again. Such was their courtship. He was impressed by her tenderness of mind, and her answer indicated her previous feeling for him: for she has often said that upon her mother's asking her who among her acquaintances she could fancy for a husband, she replied that she had not yet seen the man, and she has further been heard to say that when she first came into the room in which Blake sat, she instantly recognized (like Britomart in Merlin's wondrous glass) her future partner, and was so near fainting that she left his presence until she recovered.' Tatham tells us that Blake 'returned to his lodgings and worked incessantly' for a whole year, resolving that he would not see her until he had succeeded' in making enough money to be able to marry her. The marriage took place at Battersea in August 1762.