“Burning Bright” by Tracy Chevalier

This novel is set, largely in London, in then same period that Hochschild focuses on in the first half of his history. But it makes no mention of the slave trade. It does, however, deal most effectively with the impact of the French Revolution in England which is also discussed extensively in ‘Bury the Chains’.

It took me some time to get into this, but once I did, I enjoyed it a lot. It is one of a number of historical novels I have found myself reading this year which mix fact and fiction, intertwining the lives of real people with the author’s fictional creations. This is one of the more successful attempts to do carry off this difficult task.

The real people here are William Blake and his wife Cate who in 1792-3 were in their early thirties and living in Hercules Buildings just south of the then pretty new Westminster Bridge and their neighbour, the circus impresario, Philip Astley.

The rest of the characters, including the central figures of Jem Kellaway and Maggie Butterfield, along with their families, are invented. The story is quite sweet, but unremarkable, being focused on a Dorset carpenter’s adventurous sojourn in London with his family. But this is really best seen as a vehicle for an exploration of London life in the late Eighteenth Century.

There is one passage I particularly enjoyed when the teenagers decide to follow the funeral cortege of William Blake’s mother. They first walk to Soho via the Haymarket, then onto St Giles and down High Holborn to Spitalfields and the burial site. It is an area of London I know well and while historical accounts are always interesting to read, I somewhat reluctantly must admit that Tracy Chevalier’s novelistic impression brings it all to life much more effectively.