>>24664848
>So why did Mrs Blake cry? They were going through what is nowadays called a rough patch in their marriage. Mrs Blake, or was it Mr Blake?, couldn't produce a child. She miscarried the only conception they had together. The arrival of Count Cagliostro in London - a refugee from the Bastille, didn't help. After his departure the Swedenborgians struggled to comprehend the positive visionary experiences as well as the negative sexual gossip. William and Catherine Blake were serious students of Swedenborg. However, their unity was shattered when disputes arose over theories of conjugal love and concubinism. Many adherents claimed that the advocacy of concubinage opened the floodgates of immorality. Blake, of course, saw it as liberating and he eventually proposed to his exhausted and unhappy wife that he add a concubine to their "poor and shifting establishment." This did not happen, as over the next three years Blake struggled against the forces of repression both in his wife and in general society which "blocked the sexual path to the spiritual vision." She was not helped by their change of address to a house South of the Thames where they became close neighbours to several Swedenborgians sympathetic to Blake's increasingly radical views. Some of these views undoubtedly produced much distress in Catherine. In an illustration done during this time Blake produced the well-known portrait showing a man and his wife bound back to back, the man in leg irons, his mouth wide in horror.
>His conversation on social topics, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence and virtual guilelessness; for he frankly said, described, and drew everything as it arose to his mind. 'Do you think,' he once said in familiar conversation, and in the spirit of controversy, 'if I came home and discovered my wife to be unfaithful, I should be so foolish as to take it ill?'