aug 18, 1782 - Blake marries Catherine Boucher

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While visiting her parents, B. related to young Catherine Boucher the story of being ill-treated by a woman he was courting. Catherine expressed sympathy for him, at which point B. asked, “Do you pity me?” to which Catherine replied, “yes, I do.” In response, B. said simply, “then I love you.” A year later they embarked on what must be one of the happiest marriages in literary history.

Both partners were poor; this was a marriage of love rather than convenience. Indeed, in later years when there was talk of appointing him a professor at the Royal Academy Schools, it was held against B. that he’d married a servant.
B. seems to have found in C. a soul mate & a sympathetic, nurturing partner. She came to believe in Blake’s visions and eventually saw visions of her own. She drew & painted alongside her husband, and it is reported that they spent fewer than a couple of weeks apart during their 45-year marriage. Their’s was a life of constant poverty and occasional privation, yet both were reported to be orderly, clean, and quite content simply to be together. When B. would be attacked by the “nervous fear,” paranoia, and occasional despair that his visions sometimes brought on, C. would sit quietly with him until he felt better.

Despite their radical political leanings, they hewed to traditional gender roles in their home. C. cooked, cleaned, and made them their clothes; B. lit the fire, made the tea, and worked nearly incessantly on his commissions or his own work. The couple were childless.
Despite what some of B.’s art and poetry might suggest about his views on open marriage and sex as a gate to Eternity, Akroyd remarks that “there is no evidence that B. was ever unfaithful to his wife; there is no reason to suppose that B. ever practiced homosexuality, despite the presence of homo-erotic art in his illustrated books; there is no plausible excuse for conjecture, made by some biographers, that he tried to bring a second “wife” into the home in accordance with Swedenborgian religious precepts. His depictions of sexuality are idealized, almost abstract, and they seem to have remained for him a matter of the mind rather than of the flesh” (82).

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