Viva Lewes Issue #138 March 2018

The Sea of Time and Space, 1821. Arlington Court, National Trust
William Blake in Sussex
Visions of Albion
The three years, from 1800 until 1803, during
which William Blake lived in the village of
Felpham on the West Sussex coast, was the only
time in his life that he spent outside London.
He came to Sussex with his wife, Catherine, at
the invitation of his fellow poet, William Hayley,
whom Blake had visited at Felpham in July, 1800.
Hayley was a great patron of the arts – John Flaxman,
George Romney and William Cowper all
benefitted from his largesse – and the arrangement
that he and Blake seem to have ironed out was that
Blake would take up residence in Felpham and
Hayley would engage him on various design and
engraving projects. And so the Blakes left London
on 18th September, 1800. At first, all went well.
In turning his back on ‘London’s Dungeon Dark’,
Blake was delighted to be ‘Away to sweet Felpham
for Heaven is there’. It was ‘the sweetest spot on
Earth’. In May 1801 he wrote in a letter: ‘Hayley
acts like a Prince’. But the relationship between
patron and ‘patronised’ is always a tricky one. By
January 1803 Hayley had become the ‘source’ of
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