• Name: Blake, Arthur
• Gender: Male
• Birth Date:
• Death Date:

The references to 'Blake' in Godwin’s diary have caused some scholarly speculation and debate, and in such discussions Gilchrist’s comment in his 1863 Life of Blake is often cited – that in 1791 Blake was "in the habit of meeting a remarkable coterie " at the weekly dinners of the bookseller Joseph Johnson:" Hither came Drs Price and Priestley, and occasionally Blake; hither . . . Fuseli; hither precise doctrinaire Godwin . . . Him the author of the Songs of Innocence got on ill with, and liked worse.’ Erdman has shown in an August 1953 Notes and Queries that the first two references concern an Arthur Blake (distinguished in one instance by his first initial. According to Erdman, Arthur Blake was a member of the London Society for Constitutional Information, and was also a friend of Holcroft. Three days before the entry ‘Call on Blake’, Holcroft wrote a letter from Newgate asking Godwin ‘to look up Wiliam Sharp and Arthur Blake who 'did live in Devonshire Street') to get affidavits as to their testimony before the Privy Council concerning the S.C.I.’ (Erdman, p. 355). According to Erdman’s research, the witness list for the trial includes Arthur Blake, of Devonshire Street, Portland-place (Morning Post, 1795, as cited in Erdman, p. 355). However, the April 1797 entry listing a dinner at Johnson’s that included Blake (no initial) and Fuseli is likely to be the poet William. Grignion, also mentioned in the list of diners, was also an engraver. The sporadic use of the initial A to indicate Arthur Blake of Portland Place strengthens this conjecture, particularly when Godwin uses this to differentiate A Blake from William Blake when listing dinners at Johnson’s (as in April 1798) and an exhibition advenae on April 23, 1798. The use of the initial is also confusing, since it appears with groups and at times when ‘if the…entries had not been initialled otherwise, we would have surely guessed Blake.’ (Erdman, p. 355) The two Blakes clearly traveled in the same circles which accounts for Godwin’s use of the initial. According to Erdman, the entry in 1797 corresponds with Blake’s period of intimacy with Fuseli before his retirement when he was ‘hid’ (p. 355). With this ongoing debate in mind, A Blake and Blake (no initial) have been coded as ‘Blake’, whereas only the entry in 1797 has been indicated to be William.

• Harold L. Bruce, ‘William Blake and Gilchrist’s Remarkable Coterie of Advanced Thinkers’, Modern Philology, Vol. 23, No. 3 (February 1926), 285-92.
• David V. Erdman, ‘“Blake” Entries in Godwin’s Diary’, Notes and Queries (August 1953), 354-56.
• David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).

This table lists the people this person is most frequently noted with in the diary.