Paradise, Without the Trousers

A Poetry Tale about William Blake, told by Hello Doggo.

Picture the scene. Lambeth, the seventeen-nineties. Thomas Butts, William Blake’s most loyal patron, strolls down the little garden at Hercules Buildings to the summer-house at the end.

Inside sit William and his wife Catherine. Without a stitch on.

They’ve been reciting Paradise Lost. In character.

And Blake, entirely unbothered, calls out: “Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”

It’s one of the great anecdotes in English literature. Alexander Gilchrist put it into his Life of William Blake in eighteen sixty-three, describing the couple as freed from “those troublesome disguises” that had prevailed since the Fall. Which is a very Victorian way of saying: no trousers.

Now — nobody can actually prove this happened. Gilchrist was writing sixty-odd years after the fact, long after Blake was dead. And the painter John Linnell, one of Blake’s closest friends in later life, flatly refused to believe it. The story, he said, was “so entirely unlike everything I have known of him”, and improbable “on account of climate”.

Which is a fair point. This is south London, not the Garden of Eden.

So perhaps it happened. Or perhaps, as Linnell suspected, it simply grew in the telling, passing round the town until it arrived in print fully undressed.

Either way, it’s rather wonderful.

And the best objection anyone ever raised to his paradise was the English weather.