Blake’s synaesthesia, although it cannot be traced as a continuous feature of his life, reappeared spectacularly in the late 1810s when his visual art offers a rare opportunity to study not only the nature of his synaesthetic percepts but also the immediate context of their recurrence when, for the first time, he had a group of supportive friends who left documentary records of their encounters with him. The Visionary Heads, a sequence of pencil portraits (and one tempera) produced, c. 1819–1825, were the outcome of Ordinal Linguistic Personification Synaesthesia (OLP).Footnote 1 In short, the distinctive appearances of the historical figures he drew in the Visionary Heads were the products of the synaesthesia events that provoked them. OLP is a modality not classified until 2006 as ‘the involuntary association of animate qualities such as gender/personality to linguistic units such as letters/numbers/days.’Footnote 2 That is, the reading or auditing of graphemes (words, parts of words, vowels, consonants etc.) trigger synaesthetic concurrent personifications, sometimes with elements of personality. Mary Whiton Calkins was amongst the first to identify the principal characteristics of OLP when she gathered over five hundred respondents from her students at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in the early 1890s. One of them reported, for example, ‘“Q is odd and stands by himself as rather an eccentric middle-aged man. R is like a maiden lady, an advisory friend of S, a young, handsome girl. T is the devoted admirer of S.”’Footnote 3 That is, this type of synaesthesia triggers personifications in response to graphemes, in some cases even bordering on personality. In this particular response, one can discern elements of cultural and historically marked predispositions influencing responses to grapheme shapes, even suggesting elements of personality; ‘Q is odd,’ ‘R is … a maiden lady,’ ‘S [is a] young … girl.’

While there is stronger evidence for Blake’s OLP, c. 1819, when he began the Visionary Heads series, than for its incidence, c. 1789, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is consistent with his hallucinatory types that it was recurrent, even if intermittently, across most of his lifetime. Blake claimed to others that his ‘visions’ started c. 1766 and he supplied his own unequivocal testimony that they recommenced no later than 1800 when he wrote to Thomas Butts enclosing his ‘Vision of Light’ poem (in fact, the ‘Scheerer’s phenomena,’ discussed in Chap. 2). In OLP graphemes trigger personifications that synaesthetes attribute with the physical and (often) the personality characteristics of people (tall, short, loud, quiet, extrovert, shy etc.). Mary Whiton Calkins also recorded a number of what she called ‘dramatizations’ (interacting personifications triggered by numbers) as early as 1892/1893.Footnote 4 However, Calkins’ research in the 1890s notwithstanding, there remains a barely acknowledged lacuna between OLP concurrents produced as ‘personifications’ and OLP concurrents produced as ‘personalities’ (personalities are capable of articulation, personifications are lists of types) although, in practice, they are currently treated as undifferentiated.Footnote 5 To add to these complications (although it is actually a simplification of the nuances to assist understanding), it should be remembered that (as discussed in Chap. 6), when Blake was engaged in processes of writing or drawing, there was no functional difference between words written and words spoken as far as triggering his OLP was concerned.

The first indications of Blake’s OLP begin no later than c. 1789. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) Blake wrote that ‘The ancient Poets’ ‘animated’ ‘sensible objects’ (including ‘woods, rivers, mountains’), and gave them the not only the names of ‘Gods or Geniuses’ but ‘the properties’ of those ‘objects.’ All this they were able to ‘percieve’ through their ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ (E 38). Modern studies of OLP have identified people who similarly personify inanimate objects, including items such as pieces of furniture.Footnote 6 Blake’s use of the word ‘animated’ is particularly apt for describing this process of personification. In a potentially important development for how these different sorts of hallucinatory types might be connected, there is some evidence of cortical links between synaesthesia and migraine aura (including responses to pattern glare, sometimes a trigger of migraine).Footnote 7 Although the evidence for OLP in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is sketchy, if correct, it fits into a much larger context where Blake is working through his philosophical position about perception in There is No Natural Religion, c. 1788, which argued that man ‘percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover,’ a formulation seeming to include the agency of ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ (E 2). As referred to in the previous chapter, he repeatedly returned to narrating an extended myth of the universal decline or narrowing of the senses in the illuminated books composed c. 1788–1795.

Perhaps on account of their avowedly secular content and the critical assumption that they arose from dubious semi-astrological seances organized by the astrologer and watercolourist, John Varley (1778–1842), despite their individuality, the Visionary Heads have received relatively little critical attention.Footnote 8 Morton D. Paley’s observation that they are indicative of his ‘imaginative sportiveness’ in late life is probably a fair summary of critical engagement with them although the complexity of the provenance of their corpus has attracted excellent biographical, bibliographical or other documentary scholarship (including by Paley himself).Footnote 9 Or, as the late G.E. Bentley Jr. summarized the circumstances of their creation, critical discussion tends to be centred on ‘Blake’s sanity [and] deal anxiously or dismissively with the Visionary Heads.’Footnote 10

The best evidence for Blake’s OLP, which mainly derives from the Visionary Heads, supports a date of onset no later than c. 1819 and implies that it continued until 1825. They were a series of drawings done by Blake, c. 1819–25, and were often sketched by him in the company of witnesses. It is fortunate that, because they originate from Blake’s later life, he had by then gathered around him a small set of friends, advocates and otherwise interested parties, so that their circumstances of composition are fairly well documented. They almost certainly evidence OLP perhaps in combination with sequence-personality synaesthesia.Footnote 11 That is, Blake’s Visionary Heads were synaesthetic percepts triggered by graphemes (vocalized or written) which prompted him to automatically assign them with both human and social characteristics. Perhaps the best foundational indicator of OLP’s prevalence is that, according to one study, 65% of synaesthetes attributed both a gender and a personality to graphemes.Footnote 12

The Visionary Heads portraits can be assigned to date ranges encompassing 14, 27, 29 October 1819, 18 September 1820 and c. 1821–1825.Footnote 13 There were three sketch-books, one of them extant only in fragmentary form. Of these, one sketchbook did not come to light until 1989 and so could not be included in Butlin’s 1981 catalogue raisonné.Footnote 14 In all, there seem to have been approximately 130 different subject portrait sketches although not all have been traced. It is on account of their extremely varied, often esoteric, range of historical portrait subjects, together with their obviously prolific rate of invention, that OLP is suggested here as a major originator of his creativity with respect to this series.

Although many of the drawings are now loose from their sketchbooks and dispersed, the sets of drawings are known as The Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook, The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook and the fragmentary, largely untraced, Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook, amounting to over one hundred drawings in all. While sketches associated with the latter volume have been identified, Varley and Linnell also made several counterproofs from the originals. John Varley’s counterproofs (probably using a reproductive method based on mechanically assisted tracings over Blake’s outlines) are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the original drawings themselves (as are some replicas of the sketches, probably made by Linnell). Typical portrait types include ‘Caractacus,’ ‘Milton’s first wife,’ ‘Harrold killd at the Battle of Hastings,’ ‘Charlemagne,’ ‘Miss Blandy who poisoned her father,’ ‘Catherine Hayes Burnt for the Murder of her Husband’ and Mahomet. Varley also drew up his own ‘List of Portraits Drawn by W. Blake from Visions which appeared to him & Remained while he completed them.’Footnote 15 On account of Varley’s interest in astrology, sometimes the exact time and circumstances of their drawing are recorded. For example, that of ‘Richard Coeur De Lion’ is inscribed by Varley, ‘Rd. Coeur de Lion. Drawn from his spectre … WBlake fecit Octr. 14 1819 at 14 Past 12-Midnight.’Footnote 16 That some may have been drawn in a cluster of sessions is indicated by a similar session included in The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, ‘Cassibelane the British Chief,’ recorded as ‘By Blake Octr. 27 1819 11 P M.’Footnote 17 Most seem to have been done at Varley’s instigation, often late at night, and all can be dated to Blake’s late life.

The general circumstances of their composition are well understood because, unusually, they were composed during a series of séance-like sessions mainly at the request of John Varley. Varley was fairly punctilious in recording them, noting that a set of 38 of these drawings (although not certainly all) began at a session ‘Wednesday 29 / Tuesday Oct 29th 1819 Night.’Footnote 18 These sessions were sometimes also attended by Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, as well as other, unidentified, persons who formed part of their artistic and friendship circle. One of those possibly present was Frederick Tatham, an early biographer of Blake who had met him no later than 12 June 1824 when he received an inscribed copy of A Descriptive Catalogue ‘from the Author.’Footnote 19 Tatham, who acquired three different pencil versions of the Last Judgment after Blake’s death, received two Visionary Heads directly from his widow, Catherine. Tatham wrote on the back of one of them, ‘the first sketch of his celebrated last judgment & 2 others[sic] sketches from personages as they appeared to him. in Vision. Blake asserted that he saw these people in vision & he sketched from what he saw in Vision. F. Tatham.’ Although it is not clear which pictures are referenced in Tatham’s remarks, if he did not attend any of the sessions himself in person, they were vouched by Catherine as being ‘what he saw in Vision.’Footnote 20 There are sufficient third-party witnesses or contemporary records extant to provide a reliable picture of what went on, including notes made by Varley and Linnell inscribed directly onto the drawings. The subjects of the portraits are mainly drawn from British history or literary culture, occasionally from the Bible, but more often typified by secular worthies and warriors (of both sexes) fairly well recorded in contemporary history books. However, when it surfaced in 1989 the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook rather surprisingly revealed some now very obscure figures from British popular history, including notorious criminals from the early part of the eighteenth century. Most of the Visionary Heads are pencil sketches except for one, The Ghost of a Flea, now in Tate Britain, perhaps the most famous, executed in tempera heightened with gold on a mahogany support.Footnote 21 This latter seems to be the ‘small panel’ referred to in Allan Cunningham’s account (see below).

OLP was not firmly assigned as a category of synaesthesia until the work of Julia Simner and E.M. Hubbard in 2006.Footnote 22 As they note, however, relevant cases histories can be found much earlier. Examples were collected at least as far back as Mary Whiton Calkins’ research of 1893. As mentioned above, at least one of Calkins’ respondents reported an association of personalities linked to letters of the alphabet, ‘K seems like a young woman, a friend of L, which seems like a daughter to M. N seems to be a sort of maiden aunt, sister to M. O is a young man connected to M as a nephew. He connects M and N with P, an older friend of his.’Footnote 23 That is, the graphemes of the alphabet become animated with different personality types based on their sociability with one another. Not only are these more complex than personifications, they were also attributed with explicit social relationships, most obviously connections of friendship and kinship. Calkins’ studies are important not only on account of being amongst the earliest records of synaesthesia but also because of the way her respondents assigned quite complex—and implicitly historic—social relations between letters which are themselves animated (‘N. seems to be a sort of maiden aunt, sister to M.’). Calkins, in possibly the first journal article to use synaesthesia in the title, even reported ‘The elaborate dramatization of letters, numerals and musical notes, by which they are endowed with physical and psychical characteristics, so that they often become actors in entire little dramas among themselves.’Footnote 24 Two of Blake’s Visionary Heads, for example, were of ‘Edward the First’ and ‘Sir William Wallace,’ titles of rank attached with active social meanings within specific types of nations politically organized as monarchies and aristocracies. Like the ‘maiden lady’ referred to above reported by another of Calkins’ sample subjects, the respondent who determined one of her percepts to be a ‘maiden aunt’ was also designating them with a precise, highly gendered, cultural construction of social relativity extracted from an experience of synaesthesia. In modern countries retaining monarchies, Blake’s kings and knights might even be viewed as rather less culturally circumscribed than the gendered and sexually specific, ‘maiden aunt’ and ‘maiden lady’ reported by Calkins.

Aligning synaesthesia with the specific historical or social relationships implied by their phenomenal modalities does not yet appear to have been much researched. Nevertheless, Julia Simner, Oliver Gärtner and Michelle D. Taylor conclude that ‘Synaesthetes tend to associate high-frequency letters with high agreeable and low neurotic personalities, and non-synaesthetes share these tendencies at an implicit level.’ However, they can also largely be charted using L.R. Goldberg’s personality trait measures which they discuss but conclude that substantial, culturally or historically founded personality perspectives are not covered by Goldberg’s tests (of which religious and gendered characteristics are perhaps the most socially significant).Footnote 25 To what extent the personalities of the subjects of Blake’s Visionary Heads (or any other images he painted), can be correlated with letter frequency is beyond the scope of this study.

Simner, Gärtner and Taylor caution that the number of personality-synaesthete variables is already formidable. The principal analytical framework they establish is that of sequence-personality synaesthesia. That is, the sequenced order of the triggering units is paramount in precipitating the percept (rather than any holistic designation to which they have been assigned, e.g. gender or race). This fits with the case history of Blake’s Visionary Heads because the evidence suggests his responses were triggered by personal pronouns, sometimes accompanied by some designation of their social role, and that these were conveyed to him—most probably—in spoken form. One study noted that 29% of their sample of synaesthesia subjects reported no difference in the strength and frequency of personifications when responding to written rather than spoken texts. A very small proportion (6%) thought spoken triggers stronger than written (rather than no difference).Footnote 26 Although beyond the scope of the present study, coloured hearing (perceiving spoken words in colours) has also been recognized as a modality of synaesthesia.Footnote 27

The significance of the surviving testimonies about Blake’s Visionary Heads is that they refer to a series of convivial and conversational meetings held late at night. As will be described, Blake was often specifically requested by his friends, chiefly John Varley, to call them up in response to verbal requests. According to Varley’s notes, the sessions produced a ‘List of Portraits Drawn by W. Blake from Visions which appeared to him & remained while he compleated them.’Footnote 28 For example, one of them is inscribed, ‘Head of Achilles drawn by Willm Blake at my [Varley’s] request. 1825.’Footnote 29 Allan Cunningham, writing in 1830, although he may not have attended one of the Visionary Heads soirees himself, was told by an anonymous friend that ‘Blake … sat with a pencil and paper drawing portraits of those whom I most desired to see.’Footnote 30 Both testimonies make it clear that the suggestion was verbal (or written), made ‘at my request,’ and consisted of named persons, that is, those ‘whom I most desired to see.’ Or, as Linnell recorded in his memoir of the sessions, he found ‘Blake sitting in the most attentive attitude listening to Varley.’

One of the sessions may be illustrated in a drawing by John Linnell, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, which shows Blake apparently listening to an animated John Varley, both seated at a table at Linnell’s premises at Cirencester Place, London, in September 1821 (Fig. 7.1).Footnote 31 The one referred to above, captioned by Varley ‘Head of Achilles drawn by Willm Blake at my request,’ can only mean that he asked Blake verbally to draw this portrait. Given the convivial and informal circumstances, it seems unlikely he wrote this request down on a piece of paper and gave it to him. If the requests were verbally delivered, the connections between sonic sound and visual synaesthesia are already understood. Pitch effects perception of size as well as brightness. In other words, there is a connection between the percepts of synaesthesia and their sonic and spatial properties.Footnote 32 Although unverifiable, it is plausible that the pitch or volume of their conversations or requests during these convivial evenings altered the percepts Blake experienced. The sonic impact of synaesthesia on size, perhaps particularly if he was in a noisy convivial environment, may have been sufficient for Blake to have seen a figure life-size, as with Allan Cunningham’s c. 1830 testimony that he called out, ‘“William Wallace!” he exclaimed, “I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach me my things.”’Footnote 33

Fig. 7.1
A screenshot captures a sketch from the book featuring John Linnell and William Blake engaged in conversation while seated on chairs around a round table.

John Linnell, William Blake in conversation with John Varley, c.1821–26, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Full size image

An anonymous article in The Monthly Magazine of 1839 on ‘Blake’s Poetry,’ similarly reported a typical sketching session where Blake was asked to, ‘“’Call up, and paint the Founder of the Pyramids,” said some one to the artist-visionary. “There he is,” replied Blake, “a stately man, in purple robes, with a book full of golden leaves on which he sketches his designs.”’Footnote 34 Perhaps more reliably, John Linnell reported, ‘It was Varley who excited Blake to see or fancy the portraits of historical personages—as Edward & Wallace, David, Solomon, the man who built the pyramids &c. &c.’ Linnell’s testimony that ‘It was Varley who excited Blake to see or fancy the portraits of historical personages,’ supports the possibility of a sonic dimension to Blake’s OLP (my italics). Presumably alluding to the Fizwilliam drawing, Linnell particularly recorded that these were social, convivial, and conversational occasions, ‘I have a sketch of the two men [Blake and Varley] as they were seen one night in my parlour near midnight, Blake sitting in the most attentive attitude listening to Varley who is holding forth vehemently with his hand raised.’Footnote 35 This impression is also corroborated by one of the later pictures (actually a tracing) inscribed, ‘The Egyptian Task Master slain by Moses,’ ‘Seen in a Vision by Wm Blake & Drawn while the Same remained before him, My Self J. Varley being Present. in[sic] the Front room first floor No. 3. Fountain Court near Exeter Change.’Footnote 36 In his c. 1830 memoir, Cunningham’s recollection of the William Wallace drawing incident captures much of the dramatic excitement of the event, once again implying its raised sonic dimensions, ‘He was requested to draw the likeness of Sir William Wallace—the eye of Blake sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace!” he exclaimed, “I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach me my things.”’ In short, Cunningham’s recollection was of Blake ‘seeing visions at the request of his friends.’Footnote 37 The 1839 Monthly Magazine account, specifically reporting a verbal request (‘“Call up, and paint the Founder of the Pyramids”’), is also consistent with Alexander Gilchrist’s written in 1863 that ‘Varley would say, “Draw me Moses,” or David; or would call for a likeness of Julius Caesar, Cassibellaunus, or Edward the Third, or some other great historical personage. Blake would answer, “There he is!” and paper and pencil being at hand, he would begin drawing, with the utmost alacrity and composure, looking up from time to time as though he had a real sitter before him.’Footnote 38

It looks likely OLP is a variant of the GCS Blake had experienced in the early 1790s. A contemporary of Mary Whiton Calkins, Théodore Flournoy, author of Des phénomènes de synopsie (1893), one of the first studies of (what later became known as) synaesthesia, reports individuals whose OLP triggered images provoked from whole words.Footnote 39 For one of his subjects, ‘Bottle, for instance, invoked and still invokes the image of a large woman, laughing, sitting on a little backed bench, with a table in front of her, but no other suggestion of a bottle in the vision.’ Perhaps more relevantly to Blake, a person widely read in the Bible and world history, Flournoy reported that this particular subject, ‘From the first two or three lines relative to a character [in a book] he sees him rise in his mental vision, often very different from the description given by the author.’Footnote 40 That is, a percept is triggered in a form different from what might have been expected. There are also other facets and nuances to personification in synaesthesia. In examples given in Des phénomènes de synopsie, ‘“Charlotte, says a 37-year-old lady, is too heavy, massive, doughy; Hélène is transparent like a piece of ice; Adèle is too light, thin, fragile, etc.”’Footnote 41 These descriptions, provided by an anonymous woman, of a synaesthetic percept are noticeably visually evocative, ‘massive,’ ‘transparent,’ ‘light, thin.’ Calkins and Flournoy established long ago that trigger words are capable of invoking photisms markedly different from their ostensible source. Their accounts may help explain why Blake’s Visionary Heads either depart from known portraits of their subjects or were noticeably facilitated by the absence of portraiture.

One can go further. As mentioned above, graphemes were apparently called out to him with some degree of excitement, ‘It was Varley who excited Blake to see or fancy the portraits,’ calling out the names ‘of those whom I most desired to see.’ In two of the soirees, there is even dramatic movement between the percepts. While painting Sir William Wallace, ‘Blake stopt suddently, and said, “I cannot finish him Edward the First has stept in between him and me.”’Footnote 42 In another, ‘He[Blake] took out a large book filled with drawings, opened it, and continued, “Observe the poetic fervour of that face—it is Pindar as he stood a conqueror in the Olympic games. And this lovely creature is Corinna, who conquered in poetry in the same place. That lady is Lais, the courtesan—with the impudence which is a part of her profession, she stept in between Blake and Corinna, and he was obliged to paint her to get her away.”’Footnote 43 This dramatization, is consistent with the report of Calkins, who noted ‘elaborate dramatization of letters, numerals and musical notes, by which they are endowed with physical and psychical characteristics, so that they often become actors in entire little dramas among themselves.’Footnote 44 Frederick Tatham’s account (which can be only circumstantially connected to the Visionary Heads series), noted that ‘he was the companion of spirits, who taught, rebuked, argued, & advised, with all the familiarity of personal intercourse,’ but which enabled Blake to ‘delineate their forms & features, & to converse upon the topic most incidental to the days of their own existence,’ a recollection which suggests some degree of mini-dramatization during his interactions with figures from history while he drew their portraits.Footnote 45

Of course, similarities between the Visionary Heads and Blake’s earlier works, or images which would have been available to him from paintings or prints by other artists, can easily be found. The muscular figure of ‘Old Parr when Young,’ inscribed and dated by John Varley ‘Aug[ust] 1820 W. Blake,’ may have been a recollection of one of the figures from his, now untraced, Ancient Britons tempera, featured in the 1809 exhibition and which included ‘the Strongest Man’ as one of its figures (E 542–545).Footnote 46 On the other hand, while the Visionary Head frontal portrait view chosen for ‘Saul under the Influence of the Evil Spirit’ is difficult to compare with the profile of Saul shown in the watercolour, The Ghost of Samuel Appearing to Saul (c. 1800), the face is very different from the watercolour, The Witch of Endor, Saul and the Ghost of Samuel, c. 1775–1780.Footnote 47 Similarly, the Visionary Head of ‘Solomon’ (inscribed as such by John Linnell), looks nothing like the sweet faced, delicately featured, king in his tempera, The Judgment of Solomon, c. 1799–1800.Footnote 48 This list of comparison and contrasts could be extended but there is also something else going on.

The ‘Spirit of Voltaire,’ c. 1819–1820 (certified by John Varley), with its angular jaw looks like a younger, idealized, version of the man shown in Blake’s tempera portrait bust of Voltaire (c. 1800–1803) commissioned for William Hayley’s library in Felpham. As Butlin was the first to point out, it is recognizably based on Maurice de La Tour’s portrait, c. 1731.Footnote 49 This degree of conformity, or otherwise, between Blake’s earlier images and the portraits in the Visionary Heads, does not prepare us, however, for the verbal exchange on 18 February 1826 between Blake and Crabb Robinson about Voltaire (discussed below), which triggered an extraordinary example of Blake’s synaesthesia. Similarly, while at least one of the two Visionary Heads of Socrates has some resemblance to an engraving in Johann Kaspar Lavater’s 1789 English edition of Essays on Physiognomy (to which Blake had contributed a plate of Democritus), Crabb Robinson’s 1852 write-up of a conversation with Blake he had about Socrates, c. 1825–1826, demonstrates a completely unexpected turn.Footnote 50 In short, the ‘vision’ of Socrates Blake described to Crabb Robinson bears little relationship—of any kind—to the two Visionary Heads. This is because the phenomenology of the two hallucinatory events was different even though both seem to be related to OLP. For the drawing of the Visionary Head of Socrates, it is known that these pictures were produced when Blake was responding directly to verbal requests made by Varley, Linnell or others. Blake’s OLP triggered a heightened or idealized memory of the plates he saw in Lavater or elsewhere (oddly, Hayley did not commission a Socrates for his Felpham library). Crabb Robinson’s record of their conversation which took place in the mid-1820s precipitated a much more complex response, based on a different kind of OLP episode.

During a discussion again probing the consistency of Blake’s testimony about his ‘visions’ (‘This was somewhat at variance with what he had said both this day & afterwards—implying that he copies [the del] his Visions’), ‘This led me to say [“]Socrates used pretty much the same language,’ and from that they started onto a discussion about ‘Genius.’ Crabb Robinson asked him, ‘Now what affinity or resemblance do you suppose was there between the Genius which inspired Socrates and your Spirits?[“] He smiled, and for once it seemed to me as if he had a feeling of vanity gratified—[Pretty much del] [“]The same as in our countenances[;”] he paused And said “I was Socrates[“]—And then as if he had gone too far in that—[“] Or a sort of brother—I must have had conversations with him—So I had with Jesus Christ[.] I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them[”].’Footnote 51 Crabb Robinson’s question about the similarity between ‘Socrates and your Spirits,’ followed by Blake’s unexpected but explicit identification, because of ‘our countenances’ (Blake shared Socrates’ allegedly snub nose), seems to have triggered an OLP personification.Footnote 52 Or, ‘“I was Socrates,”’ as he apparently blurted out. Much might be made of this sudden confessional, ‘“I was Socrates,”’ but it is sufficient to say that high-functioning autism has been shown to have a nearly 19% rate of incidence in people who also have some type of synaesthesia.Footnote 53

In this case, no doubt due to the social awkwardness of explaining himself to what he must have sensed as the already sceptical Crabb Robinson, he deflected the OLP-induced concurrent, ‘[“] Or a sort of brother—I must have had conversations with him …,”’ converting his association of the percept to a personification of a sibling rather than of Socrates. The reply, ‘“a sort of brother,”’ is itself anxiety loaded. Blake had already had at least one post-bereavement hallucination, c. 1787–1788, of his deceased brother, Robert, as referred to in Chap. 3. Moreover, in the more recent past, in the relief-etched illuminated book, Milton a Poem (c. 1804–1811), in what has been called ‘the key event of Book 1,’ there is a remarkable full-plate design of ‘WILLIAM’ falling backwards complemented by another plate, its exact reversed mirror image, simply labelled ‘ROBERT.’Footnote 54 That is, Blake’s reply that he was ‘“a sort of brother”’ to Socrates, had a potential personal equivalence in the post-bereavement, felt-presence, hallucination of Robert, his biological brother. Admitting he thought of Socrates as ‘a sort of brother,’ referenced a sibling relationship with a special significance to Blake, and a sacredness he quickly elevated by his inclusion of Christ (‘So I had with Jesus Christ’). Hence his afterthought, ‘I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them[”].’

These intricate interactions are helpful in showing how Blake’s ‘visions,’ in this case the OLP episodes triggering the Visionary Head drawings of Socrates, produced different manifestations, but within the same modality of synaesthesia, when he talked to Crabb Robinson about the same person a few years later. The differences across the two OLP episodes probably results from differences in their triggers. It may be simply that, in the case of the drawing of the Visionary Heads of Socrates, Blake was in a more supportive environment, possibly in the company of his friends John Varley or John Linnell, whereas Crabb Robinson’s questioning, verging on scepticism, might have raised his anxiety levels. Recorded OLP examples, dated as far back as Mary Whiton Calkins, demonstrate that social relationships are often inferred from synaesthesia experiences. Revealingly, Crabb Robinson’s teasing question about Socrates and ‘your Spirits’ elicited in Blake an apparent automaticity of response typical of synaesthesia. The range of time durations it would have taken Blake to deflect unwanted, socially unacceptable, concurrent percepts during synaesthesia, such as ‘I was Socrates,’ or ‘a sort of brother,’ are understood.Footnote 55 Something of this same range of complexity of response can be demonstrated in another Visionary Head.

An even clearer example of OLP occurs in the versions of the Visionary Head titled (rather complicatedly) as The Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in Painting &c. in his Dreams or (also known as) Imagination of a Man whom. Mr. Blake has recd. instruction in Painting &c. from[sic]. Both titles were inscribed by John Linnell onto what was a possibly mechanically reproduced counterproof taken from an original drawing (itself uninscribed) now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.Footnote 56 Its stylistic relationship to (what is now known to be) a self-portrait by Blake in pencil and wash provisionally titled, Anonymous Portrait of William Blake (1802?) aged about 45, now in a private collection, was suggested when the drawing first came to light when reported by Martin Butlin in the 1970s.Footnote 57 With a view to establishing the Anonymous Portrait as a self-portrait by Blake (and not a sketch by John Linnell), Robert N. Essick challenged the position of the ‘Portrait of a Man who Instructed Mr. Blake in Painting’ (its more commonly abbreviated title) as a direct precursor sketch to the much more highly finished Anonymous Portrait, but did not otherwise account for the similarities others have found between them, including in the opinion of Butlin.Footnote 58 Tom Hayes went much further in suggesting that the ‘Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in Painting’ was a kind of template for the Anonymous Portrait in a project by Blake to produce a specifically androgynous, non-binary gendered, self-portrait.Footnote 59 In this case, the presence of grapheme triggers is probably central to the potential connections between the two drawings. It would be difficult to conceive of Blake having been ‘instructed,’ or having ‘recd. instruction in Painting,’ without some verbal exchange being involved, not to mention the even simpler explanation that Varley, Linnell—or someone else—just asked Blake who had taught him to paint and then to draw him. The teasing similarities others have noticed between the ‘Portrait of a Man who Instructed Mr. Blake in Painting’ and the Anonymous Portrait may simply be that Blake taught himself to paint or, rather, that he considered he had learned little about it from the Royal Academy, as his exchange with Sir Joshua Reynolds quoted above seems to demonstrate. That is, the question triggered himself as the percept, so that is what he drew.

There is some evidence to suggest that the mental image of an inducer can trigger synaesthetic concurrent responses. That is, when asked to draw the ‘Man who Instructed Mr. Blake in Painting,’ Blake’s synaesthetic response was to picture a version of himself. As one paper puts it, ‘synaesthesia is linked to more vivid imagery, and that imagery abilities generalize to stimuli not directly involved in the synaesthetic experience.’Footnote 60 In this model, because mental imagery and synaesthesia involve similar or adjacent cognitive pathways, there is a kind of modified self-replication of the trigger percept. Consistent with what one paper calls ‘internally-generated stimuli,’ something unwittingly triggering a synaesthetic concurrent photism (spoken or written GCS graphemes, for example), may account for the Anonymous Portrait of William Blake (1802?) aged about 45, which looks broadly similar to other portraits of Blake yet with the qualities of idealization noticed by Hayes.Footnote 61 Such a hypothesis would be consistent with what Blake evidently led Crabb Robinson to believe, that ‘His paintings are copies of what he sees in his Visions’ and would restore Blake’s own self-portrait to having originated in one of the ‘visions’ he so valued.Footnote 62 Indeed, the full subtitle, ‘The … Man who instructed Mr. Blake in … in his Dreams,’ vouched presumably first-hand from Blake by Linnell, suggests exactly that and even suggests the supplementary hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinatory states he refers to elsewhere (my italics).

If this seems strange territory, then one of the best known of the Visionary Heads is the tempera heightened with gold on panel, The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819–1820. A re-copied label inscription by John Varley on the back of the picture reads, ‘The Vision of the Spirit which inhabits the body of a Flea & which appeared to the Late Mr. Blake … The Vision appeared to him in my presence & afterwards till he had finished this picture.’Footnote 63 Varley’s designation that this was ‘The Vision of the Spirit which inhabits the body of a Flea,’ is a reminder that the epithet, ‘the ghost of a flea,’ only arrived with Allan Cunningham’s narrative and was even then supplemented by its also being described as ‘a spiritualization of the thing!’ The significance of its being ‘a spiritualization of the thing,’ discussed below, has been ignored yet today it can be seen as relevant to OLP synaesthesia.

Cunningham’s narrative of the events surrounding the making of this picture is confusing in some points but two artists, John Varley and perhaps John Linnell, seem to have met to discuss the Visionary Heads sessions with Blake, with one of them ‘taking out a small panel from a private drawer.’ One (probably Varley) tells the other, ‘“It is a ghost, Sir—the ghost of a flea—a spiritualization of the thing!” “He saw this in a vision then,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it, Sir. I called on him one evening and found Blake more than usually excited. He told me he had seen a wonderful thing—the ghost of a flea! And did you make a drawing of him? I inquired. No, indeed, said he, I wish I had, but I shall, if he appears again! He looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and then said, here he is—reach me my things—I shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! his eager tongue whisking out of this mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green;—as he described him so he drew him.”’Footnote 64 According to Cunningham’s separate record, which derived from Varley or Linnell’s testimony, they did not initiate the idea of ‘the ghost of a flea’ but they clearly followed it up with some excitement when they were with Blake, implicitly using the word several times in what ensued (‘did you make a drawing of him? … There he comes!’). Cunningham’s emphasis on what Calkins was to call the ‘dramatization’ of the scene is also matched by modern synaesthesia categories which now include ‘personification.’

The equivocation by these first reporters around using the term ‘ghost’ is interesting. Varley wrote that the Visionary Head was a ‘Vision of the Spirit … of a Flea,’ something that ‘inhabits’ it, while Cunningham explained that the tempera was ‘a spiritualization of the thing.’ Such phrases suggest they thought of it as a kind of essence or qualitative distillation of the insect rather than a phantom. Uncannily, Gilchrist’s account of the same episode (which he mainly quotes from Varley) titled the painting ‘the Ghost of a Flea or Personified Flea.’Footnote 65 By the 1890s, no doubt impelled by the publication of Gilchrist’s biography, the Personified Flea title had become well distributed. A January 1890 issue of the Pall Mall Gazette, following on from a snippet of information about fleas (illustrated by a real flea), ran a connecting item using Varley’s facsimile and giving its readers ‘a sketch of William Blake’s “Ghost of a Flea”’ but also describing it as ‘a Personified Flea.’Footnote 66 Two years later, in provincial England, the ‘Ghost’ name had been dropped. In August 1892 the ‘Quaint and Curious,’ section of the Essex Standard newspaper, ‘Specially Written for the “Essex County Standard.” [By the Barber.][sic],’ included an item headed, ‘A Personified Flea’ (‘William Blake, the artist, poet, and mystic, whose extraordinary works of art at the National Gallery delights some visitors and perplexes others, had a fondness for drawing visionary heads’). Citing Varley’s account by name, the Essex Standard declared ‘One of his visionary heads was that of a personified flea.’Footnote 67 ‘The Barber’ never referred to it as The Ghost of a Flea.

Gilchrist had recorded a version of Varley’s account of the origins of The Ghost of a Flea, repeated from Varley’s book, Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828) but, because it was rare, he copied it from The Doctor (1848), a publication edited by the poet, Robert Southey:

‘This spirit visited his (Blake’s) imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated[,] in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, “I see him now before me.” I therefore gave him paper and pencil with which he drew the portrait … I felt convinced, by this mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he left off and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it. During the time occupied in completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country.’Footnote 68

While there is something tongue-in-cheek about the flea being able to ‘depopulate a great portion of the country,’ this may suggest Blake had a degree of (comical) insight into his OLP. No one has suggested OLP includes dysfunctional social responses. Again, the grapheme trigger of ‘Flea’ is evident in the conversation which took place. Varley relates that ‘I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw,’ questioning him after ‘hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea’ (my italics).

The absurdity, or near-absurdity, about all these exchanges being about ‘a Flea’ is also covered by the OLP condition. As mentioned above, a key concept in synaesthesia is that numbers are actually number forms, and letters are actually letter forms. Or, as one paper puts it, ‘typically, it is the form of the grapheme that is crucial in triggering photisms’ (although grapheme meaning is an ancillary to that trigger in helping determine the percept).Footnote 69 In their conversations about the flea, whoever initiated them, the word was obviously bandied about and this was Blake’s response, whether understood by him as the meaning of the word or just the individual grapheme shapes of ‘Flea.’

The consequences for finding an appropriate hermeneutic for The Ghost of a Flea is that the tempera needs to be realigned on a continuum with Blake’s ‘vision’ of the Sun, ‘[“]I have conversed with the—Spiritual Sun—I saw him on Primrose-hill[”],’ a triggered percept which is equally, consistent with Calkins’ findings, both dramatization and personification. That is, the picture is less of a Ghost and more like Gilchrist’s ‘Personified Flea’ or, even better, Cunningham’s ‘spiritualization of the thing.’ Mary Whiton Calkins’ descriptions may also be preferred, that these percepts are ‘dramatizations’ and, indeed, the double-sided swagged curtains and floorboards in the Tate tempera may even suggest an actually dramatic, theatrical, stage.

That Blake occasionally perceived personifications talking back to him (much like the Sun on Primrose Hill, with whom Blake ‘conversed’) is not surprising. One episode relates to his several drawings of the ‘Empress Maud’ (also known as, Empress Matilda, 1102–1167) with Varley recording, ‘the Empress Maud said rose water was in the vessel under the table ‖ Octr 29 Friday 11 PM 1819 … & said there were closets which contained all the conveniences for the bed chamber.’Footnote 70 Another concerns the Visionary Head of Sir Henry Percy (1364–1403), better known as Hotspur. Varley recorded that ‘Hotspur Said[?] he was indignant to have been killed by trusting[?] the Stars[?].’Footnote 71 This switching between auditory and visual modalities during synaesthesia events is common. The very basis of synaesthesia lies in the very good evolutionary reasons for being able to switch sensory modalities, rapidly prioritizing between dangers from perceptions of things heard or dangers from perceptions of things seen. Conductors waving their arms about (visible motion) to interpret music (sound) for orchestral players would be an example of how unobtrusively the legacy of concurrent auditory and visual encodings has been absorbed by H. sapiens.Footnote 72

If the OLP theory is correct, then it is plausible Blake may even have responded to the graphemes of his own speech (which is what the double portraits referred to above might suggest) although the evidence for this is largely embedded in the records of his conversation with his interlocutors. Of great interest with regards to stimuli is the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, the volume of drawings which re-surfaced in 1989, long after publication of the Butlin catalogue, and which have since been sold and dispersed (largely into private collections).Footnote 73 Their subjects, although not their styles, are very different from the extant sketches in the rest of the group. Many are of obscure historical people (e.g. ‘Felton the assassinator[sic] of the Duke of Buckingham,’ ‘Tom Nixion the Idiot author of the Prophecies’), including several criminals (e.g. ‘Miss Blandy who poisoned her father,’ ‘Catherine Hayes Burnt for the Murder of her Husband’). Fortunately, the late G.E. Bentley Jr. has a fine essay identifying the subjects and comparing them, where possible, to contemporary prints Blake might have seen.Footnote 74 The characters mentioned in the reminiscences of Varley and Linnell, and whose portraits appear in the other Visionary Heads sketch books, are usually either of subjects of universally acknowledged notoriety (e.g. Satan) or, a type of notoriety accompanied by some degree of nobility (e.g. Mary Queen of Scots, Pharoah). Bentley’s conclusion about the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook drawings is that the likes of Mary Blandy (1720–1752), who poisoned her father with arsenic, were drawn from Blake’s knowledge of ‘the gutter press.’ Varley and Linnell, when reporting the Visionary Heads, do not mention his criminal subjects or the names from popular history (such as ‘Colonel Blood who attempted to steal the Crown,’ or ‘Mother Brownrigg’). Their recorded memories tend to be the drawings of patriotic or schoolbook type figures (e.g. ‘Guy faux,’ i.e. Guy Fawkes of the 1605 Parliament plot).

The most striking thing about the portrait subjects in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, as Bentley observes, is their obscurity. They were people little known even when Blake was alive. It remains a conundrum as to how Blake brought them to mind. One plausible answer is that his experience of OLP was accompanied by the enhanced memory known to be associated with synaesthesia. ‘People with synaesthesia show an enhanced memory relative to demographically matched controls.’Footnote 75 This may be in part because the encoding of the percept (as a colour or a set of graphemes) assists with calling up memories encoded in other formats. If the graphemes of ‘Wat Tyler’ (in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook) initiated a personified photism, this may have suddenly activated already pre-existing linguistically coded knowledge about the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, enabling its easier retrieval from his memory. In this way, the OLP can work not only as the trigger of a photism but also to activate a storage area in a mental memory system. That is, synaesthetic percepts augment normal memory processes, a function possibly developed as an evolutionary advantage (our forebears in the forest in darkest nights may have needed to retrieve an image of a tiger very fast, as soon as they heard the rustle of leaves). What seems certain is that synaesthesia is linked to cognitive changes closely associated with memory and perception. Significantly, there is evidence to suggest synaesthesia particularly enhances the recall of names and nouns by visual or auditory means (but not non-language delivery, e.g. a drawing).Footnote 76 Such factors demonstrate how synaesthesia potentially optimized Blake’s invention of the Visionary Heads series where individual subject identities seem to have proliferated in a fashion which is unusual by comparison to the rest of his work.

In some of the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook subjects, as with the other Visionary Heads drawings, there is evidence that Blake conceived of several different types of socialized relationships within his OLP percepts, consistent with samples Mary Whiton Calkins recorded in 1893, such as ‘L … like a daughter to M [and] N … a sort of maiden aunt.’Footnote 77 At the moment, research in OLP does not fully differentiate between percepts as personifications and percepts as personalities. Simner and Holstein report that one of their respondents thought of ‘January … [female] not many friends; introvert,’ ‘December … [male] a young guy; really, really nice; protective over the rest; maybe a boss.’ One suggestion they put forward is that ‘personality traits may be encoded in regions [of cortex] closely associated to those encoding linguistic knowledge.’Footnote 78 It may be these features of OLP that enabled Blake to create grouped Visionary Heads drawings such as ‘Milton when a Boy,’ ‘Milton when Young,’ ‘Milton’s Youngest Daughter’ and ‘Milton’s elder daughter,’ almost an entire family, all in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, perhaps even drawn during a single session.Footnote 79 Consistent with Simner and Holstein’s theory, it is plausible that, responding to OLP events, the linguistic centrality of ‘Milton’ gave rise to the different ages and familial relationships posited in this group with the prompting of Blake’s interlocutors initiating different memory retrievals acting in combination with his own artistic creativity.

In short, there are two clear elements in these accounts of the Visionary Heads which satisfy the criteria for OLP synaesthesia as currently understood. The first is that it is known Blake’s companions called out verbally to him the names of historical figures (‘“Varley would say, “Draw me Moses” … Blake would answer, “There he is!” and … would begin drawing’). This constitutes the grapheme verbal-auditory element, in this specific example articulated around the word ‘Moses’ with its prominent long ‘o’ vowel. The second element is personification, although in this case noticeably augmented by implicit personality characteristics since Blake would have had an excellent working knowledge of the Biblical figure. While no one would argue that Blake’s original portraits, or the faces in his figurative designs, reveal depths of personality, the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook occasionally tends that way. A set of drawings named by Butlin, Various Personifications, c. 1793–4, exemplifies the difference.Footnote 80 A later hand (just possibly Blake’s), added titles to the over 30 designs on the recto and verso crammed onto a single sheet of paper. The titles attributed to them include, ‘Avarice,’ ‘Despair,’ and ‘Listlessness,’ over twenty in all. These are all personifications. Christopher Heppner, who has the only extended discussion of the set, comments that Blake was ‘developing his own lexicon of embodied sentiments,’ but specifically not drawing on the lexical types of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment figures ‘as close as one might have expected.’ Indeed, Heppner estimated in this group ‘approximately thirty-five figures that seem to be Blake’s own inventions.’Footnote 81 If Butlin’s date range is correct, this would more or less coincide with Blake’s interest in the ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ discussed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) and the GCS evidenced by the 1794 “London” poem. By contrast, ‘Colonel Blood who attempted to Steal the Crown,’ from the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, strikes a calculating and characterfully determined aspect, one vastly different from the profiles of ‘Mother Brownrigg,’ ‘Miss Blandy,’ ‘Pope Joan,’ ‘Cornelius Agrippa,’ ‘Eloise,’ ‘Abelard’ and the ‘Countess of Essex,’ all squeezed almost overlapping onto another page. That is, although OLP can account for the apparently fluent creativity of the sessions, he was also bringing to bear his acquired skills of representation.

The extant accounts of the sessions which produced the Visionary Heads sketchbooks present a clear picture of the plethora of stimuli exciting Blake’s synaesthesia. The characteristics of Projector mode synaesthesia, that percepts can occur on an axis of auditory or grapheme triggers while also having spatial dimension, may help to explain the basic neural or psychological components likely to have produced the Visionary Heads. Within the late night (‘14 Past 12-Midnight’) domestic space visible in Linnell’s Fitzwilliam drawing, there seem to have been vocal interjections from third parties (such as ‘“’Call up, and paint the Founder of the Pyramids,”’ as the 1839 Monthly Magazine reporter described it).Footnote 82 Also, alongside spatial movement occurring within the room (in Linnell’s picture the seated Varley’s arm gesticulates wildly) there was a tendency for Blake to visualize historical figures with vividly contrasting personalities.

It is worth examining the inferences that can be drawn from the spatial phenomenology of one of Blake’s ‘visions.’ In Allan Cunningham’s account of one drawing session (although not attended by him) where Blake had seen the Scottish national leader, William Wallace (c. 1270–1305), as with the one involving Corinna and Lais, there occurs a dramatic superimposition of one figure over another. The Wallace picture can be reliably located to a double pencil drawing Linnell recorded in notes for copies apparently commissioned from him by Varley: ‘October [1819] Began a painting in oil colours of two Heads size of Life from Drawings by W Blake of Wallace & Edward 1st for Mr. Varley.’Footnote 83 According to Cunningham’s account, which seems to re-tell this occasion, ‘He was requested [by Varley] to draw the likeness of Sir William Wallace—the eye of Blake sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace!” he exclaimed, “I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach me my things.”’ The sonic and spatial disposition of the session is quite explicit: Blake has been requested, presumably verbally, to draw something using his ‘visionary’ powers. Blake then saw Wallace ‘as if a living sitter had been before him.’ There is a clear conjunction between sound (the request plus Blake’s speech) and spatial dimension (‘as if a living sitter had been before him’). In this account the spatial aspects are quite pronounced because the percepts move and block each other: ‘Having drawn for some time, with the same care of hand and steadiness of eye, as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake stopt[sic] suddenly, and said, “I cannot finish him—Edward the First has stept[sic] in between him and me.” “That’s lucky,” said his friend, “for I want a portrait of Edward too.” Blake took another sheet of paper, and sketched the features of Plantagenet; upon which his majesty politely vanished, and the artist finished the head of Wallace.’ Again, conversations containing heavily intonated graphemes and explicit vowels (‘Edward … First;’ ‘William Wallace’) together with the unexpected interjection of Blake’s interlocutor (‘“That’s lucky … for I want a portrait of Edward too”’) all seem to have contributed to the outcome of highly differentiated percepts, ‘Wallace … noble and heroic … Edward stern and bloody.’Footnote 84 It may be that the more general area of Sequence Space Synaesthesia, a variant discussed further below, is relevant here but Blake’s experiences recovered from the anecdotes surrounding his Visionary Heads sessions are not only consistent with OLP but also with the personifications, personalities and dramatizations of synaesthesia percepts first discussed by Mary Whiton Calkins in the 1890s.

For the first time, it is possible to suggest a theory for the creativity that impelled the Visionary Heads series, making it both consistent with the known socially convivial circumstances of their composition and the neural processes activated by his synaesthesia. In particular, Gilchrist’s ‘Personified Flea’ subtitle for the famous Ghost of a Flea tempera comes closer than most descriptions to pinpointing the inspirational background of one of his most enigmatic images.