Tracy Chevalier in her study

How Tracy fell in love with the mystic Blake

The author of a Girl With A Pearl Earing is back, this time with a tale of poet and illustrator William Blake’s life, writes Ruth Gorb

Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier, HarperCollins, £15.99. order this book

IN 2001, at an exhibition at Tate Britain of the work of William Blake, Tracy Chevalier fell into a terrible sort of love. “Oh my god,” she said. “This man is crazy.”
It was the first time she had seen so much Blake in one place. She had known him as a poet and illustrator. But she had never seen his huge prose works, she had never seen the books he had printed and bound himself, she had never felt so strongly the terror and agony in his work.
She wanted to know more about him. She brought a notebook with a Blake illustration on the cover, and said, “This is where I am going to write my research.”
This being Tracy Chevalier, it was to be not so much research as total immersion in the past – not only for her, but for her readers, most notably into the 17th-century Dutch town of Delft with her runaway success novel, Girl With A Pearl Earring.
She seems a little bemused by its continuing newsworthiness.
“Never mind the film, I still get emails from students who are studying the book for their course work,” she says. “And do you know, the book is banned in Iran, along with the Da Vinci Code?” The most non-political of writers, she shakes her head in disbelief.
It has taken her three years to research and write about Blake. She read obsessively, and understood him less rather than more. “The biographies didn’t make him real for me,” she says.
“The book I needed was mine, the one I was going to write, but I still needed something factual – the dimensions of his garden, the details of his printing room. I got the bones, then had to flesh out the rest.”
In the event Burning Bright is largely about William Blake’s neighbours in London. He and his wife live in a pretty little house, one of a row of brick houses in Lambeth called Hercules Buildings, a terrace between two pubs, the Pineapple and the Hercules Tavern. This is indeed where Blake lived, the pubs were indeed the centre of Lambeth life.
Now for fiction. Next door to Blake came the Kellaway family, Thomas and Anne have left their simple life in Dorset after the tragic death of one of their sons.
With their remaining children, Jem and Maisie they hope to start a new life in London. Thomas was a skilled chair-maker, and he soon finds employment with the eccentric businessman and circus owner, Philip Astley.
From these beginnings comes Tracy Chevalier’s absorbing, dramatic story. It is set in the teeming streets of Georgian London, so evocatively drawn that you can almost smell the horses and the jugs of ale, the muddy river Thames.
The Kellaways become entangled with the lives of another family, the rough, tough Butterfields – above all with streetwise Maggie.
And amidst the turbulence, like a little oasis, is William Blake’s garden, a place where he and his gentle wife welcome the local children and read them his Songs of Innocence.
Reality and fiction became blurred, especially when reality is spread out on a table in Tracy Chevalier’s house in Highgate.
Here are old maps of London marking Hercules Buildings and the Hercules Tavern, and the streets where the children ran wild.
There is a picture of William Blake’s house, a poster for Astley’s Circus, exquisite little buttons made in the 18th-century – button-making is a skill that Anne Kellaway brought with her from Dorset.
It is hard to resist asking Chevalier what in her book is real and what is complete fiction.
“Phillip Astley’s son John really did live just behind the Blake’s, and he really did run the circus, and he really was a womaniser and an alcoholic,” she says.
“Yes, there was a circus in Westminster, and the story about the explosion and fireworks in the laboratory, when one man died, is true. Blake’s mother did die in 1792, and there was a funeral procession – I walked in its footsteps on a bleak December day.”
She says she felt sad when she went to the street where Blake lived. His row of houses had been demolished in 1918. The railway had already come through in the 19th century and cut the neighbourhood up, and World War I had finished it all off. “There was nothing left,” she says. “No 18th-century building in Lambeth at all.” But there were moments of pure elation. The cottage in Dorset where she and her husband and son escape to as often as they can, is near Piddlethrenthide, the Kellaways’ home village, and the place where Dorset buttons were made in the 18th century.
Via the County Records Office and a local historian she found Thelma Johns, who has a collection of antique buttons, and who still sells the fine thread for making them. “Yes,” she says, “I did buy the kit, and here is my button – not quite up to standard.”
There seems no limit to her diligence. She even signed up for a chair-making course, so that she could write about Thomas Kellaway’s craftsmanship.
How did she get the authentic sounds of 18th-century speech? “I made it up,” she admits. “I stripped it of all 21st-century stuff and tried to make it timeless. I felt my way. When you write about a character long enough, you begin to know how they sound.”
Did she get to know Blake? She doesn’t feel that she really unlocked him, which is why she decided to write about him in terms of his neighbours.
And it is this oblique view of the man that gives us an extraordinarily real and poignant image of William Blake, far more perhaps than in any more orthodox biographical study.
She always has placed her novels firmly in the past – does she ever contemplate writing a contemporary theme? “I wrote a novel once about a tour guide in Highgate Cemetery, but I wasn’t happy with it, and I write short stories for magazines,” she says.
“But I want to get away from the obvious, and want to take myself out of my own life. I like to discover new things, and you don’t really do that in contemporary novels. I don’t believe in the ‘write about what you know’ maxim. “I think you should write about what you want to know.”

* Burning Bright will be Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime in November.