The Book of the Dead

Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life & beauty there
In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found
The lineaments of Gratified desire

One day, Blake’s friend Thomas Butts came across Kate and William sitting naked in their summerhouse in Lambeth reading each other Paradise Lost. Blake—far from being embarrassed— welcomed him in, saying, “It’s only Adam and Eve you know!”

In 1800 William Hayley encouraged the Blakes to move near him at Felpham on the Sussex coast. At first it was a refreshing change (“Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London,” Blake wrote), but it was also wartime. The coast was under threat of a Napoleonic invasion and the towns and villages were full of soldiers. One day, Blake found one of them, John Scolfield, lurking in his garden. His assertive streak and his dislike of authority took hold. Blake accosted the soldier and “taking him by the elbows” manhandled him down the street. A fight followed, cheered on by a number of Scolfield’s comrades, who were drinking in the Fox Inn. When it turned out Blake’s gardener had invited Scolfield into the garden, Blake was formally charged with assault and—a much more serious matter—sedition: During the tussle he had yelled “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves!” Given the delicate military situation, a conviction might well have cost Blake his life.

The jury acquitted Blake (the locals didn’t like the drunken squaddies any more than he did), but he plunged into a depression. By the time he appeared at Chichester assizes in 1804, he had fallen out with William Hayley and he and Kate had moved away from Felpham. Ironically, it was while he was awaiting trial for treason that Blake penned the preface to his prophetic poem Milton, which contains his most famous lines, the hymn now sung as “Jerusalem,” sometimes called England’s other national anthem. Blake had loved to ride across the Sussex downs: “England’s green and pleasant land” was his tribute to the magnificent view from Trundle Hill above Chichester.

Blake died in harness, having spent his last shilling on a pencil to keep working on his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. He had been complaining for some time of “shivering fits & ague” and the “torment of my stomach.” The most likely cause of death was liver damage resulting from fifty years of inhaling toxic copper fumes as he toiled at his engravings. Catherine was with him, and his very last act was to ask her to pose for him: “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are—I will draw your portrait—for you have ever been an angel to me.” One of his younger admirers, the painter George Richmond, was there too:

He died… in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ—Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.

He and Catherine had always enjoyed singing together, both old ballads and his own songs, many of which had the simplicity of Shaker hymns. After his death, Catherine lived off his work and kept in close contact with him, “consulting Mr. Blake” before agreeing to any deal. She herself died four years later, calling out to him “as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now.”

It took most of a century for Blake’s reputation to rise to the summit of English art and letters. These days, his Songs of Innocence & Experience are recognized as classics and “The Tyger” is the most anthologized English poem of all time. The longer, prophetic poems may be read less often, but the illustrations that accompany them are exhibited all over the world as masterpieces of spiritual art; few people have ever transformed their mystical experiences into such simple and instantly recognizable images. Blake’s philosophy also seems to resonate deeply with the modern age. The last line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “For everything that lives is holy,” reaches out far beyond a narrow Christian interpretation. It would do very well as the slogan for a contemporary environmental charity. But Blake was never a conventional Christian. As he once remarked, relishing the paradox: “Jesus is the only God… and so am I, and so are you.”

Blake’s reputation, rather like St. Cuthbert’s body, had many adventures after his death. In contrast, the posthumous fate of Blake’s contemporary, the social philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), was planned down to the last detail. The father of utilitarianism (the philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number) wanted to do something useful with his mortal remains. Instead of leaving them to molder in the ground, he chose to put them on permanent public display. In his will, Bentham left his body to his friend Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith with very precise instructions on how to turn it into what he called his Auto-Icon. It is still visible today, preserved in a glass-fronted wooden cabinet at University College, London.

Bentham first toyed with the idea of preserving his own body while in his twenties, when he asked a doctor friend to get him a human head so that he could experiment with drying it in his oven. He explained that he wanted to leave his own body to science “with the desire that mankind may reap some small benefit by my decease, having had hitherto small opportunities to contribute while living.”

Six decades later, Bentham got his wish. He had specified in his will that his body was to be offered up for public dissection, a useful thing in itself. At that time, because of the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh (when Christ will supposedly return at the Last Judgment to open the graves of the dead), there was still a Christian taboo against not burying bodies. This meant there was a general shortage of specimens for pathologists to work on.

Before the dissection began, at London’s Webb Street School of Anatomy, twenty-eight of Bentham’s friends gathered to say farewell. His corpse lay before them in a simple nightshirt. In a scene straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (then just into its second edition), the funeral oration was dramatically accompanied “with thunder pealing overhead and lightning flashing through the gloom.” Once the eulogy had finished, Dr. Southwood Smith made sure, as Bentham’s will had specified, “to ascertain by appropriate experiment that no life remains.” He then carefully stripped the flesh from the bones and placed the internal organs and “the soft parts” in labeled glass containers “like wine decanters.” His cleaned bones were then pinned together with copper wire and the skeleton dressed in a suit of Bentham’s clothes, padded out with hay, straw, and cotton wool. A sachet of lavender and naphthalene was placed in the stomach cavity to discourage moths. Again adhering to the instructions in his will, the body was seated in “a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” The whole ensemble was to be enhanced by the presence of Dapple, his favorite walking stick, and topped off with his actual head (well preserved and with a suitable hat on it).

Dr. Southwood Smith succeeded in all save the preservation of the head. He later explained:

I endeavored to preserve the head untouched, merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as hard as the skulls of the New Zealanders; but all expression was of course gone. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a model made in wax by a distinguished French artist.”

Some of Bentham’s own hair was attached to the waxwork head, and (for some years) his actual (poorly mummified) head sat at his feet in the glass cabinet, out of which stared the disconcertingly blue glass eyes he had carried around in his pocket for six months before he died. The final flourish, also specified in the will, was the presentation to his close friends of signet rings containing his portrait in miniature, painted using a brush made from his own hair. He hoped that they would meet regularly on the anniversary of his death and that his Auto-Icon would be wheeled out to join them. His wish was fulfilled, and Bentham—dressed since 1939 in new, moth-resistant underwear—still occasionally graces university functions. The mummified head, once a victim of regular undergraduate pranks, is now locked away in storage.

Jeremy Bentham was never in any danger of being described as conventional. The son of a solicitor, he was a child prodigy who began learning Latin at the age of three and by the age of five could play Handel sonatas on his violin. He was physically weedy, described as having a “dwarfish body coupled with a hawkish mind.” His mother