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Blake’s Synaesthesia: The Testimony of Crabb Robinson

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William Blake's Visions

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

G.E. Bentley Jr. has written that Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries and notes ‘give far fuller information about Blake’s conversations than may be found anywhere else.’ By the time he met Blake socially at a dinner given by Eliza Aders (b.1785) on 10 December 1825, he ‘had seen the 1809 exhibition, read his Descriptive Catalogue, and written an essay about him [in the Vaterländisches Museum, 1810].’ His notes, taken verbatim and apparently written down on the day, or day after, their meetings subsequent to Aders’ dinner, are an extremely valuable resource. They are earnest in tone yet also emotionally distanced by a scepticism belied by Crabb Robinson’s eagerness to faithfully record Blake’s ideas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) p 410.

  2. 2.

    Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005. [insert] pp 167–179. Accessed 12 May 2023.

  3. 3.

    Charlotte Anne Chun and Jean-Michel Hupé, ‘Mirror-Touch and Ticker Tape Perceptions in Synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00776; Accessed 14 May 2021. ‘Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person,’ Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan, 1883) p. 67, cited by Chun and Hupé.

  4. 4.

    BR(2): p 435.

  5. 5.

    Paley, Morton D. ‘Cowper as Blake’s Spectre.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, (1968), pp. 236–52.

  6. 6.

    BR(2): p 434.

  7. 7.

    BR(2): p 695.

  8. 8.

    BR(2): p 434.

  9. 9.

    BR(2): p 400 and 400n.

  10. 10.

    S.-J. Blakemore, D. Bristow, G. Bird, C. Frith, J. Ward, ‘Somatosensory activations during the observation of touch and a case of vision–touch synaesthesia,’ Brain, Volume 128, Issue 7, July 2005, pp 1571–1583.

  11. 11.

    Banissy Michael, Ward Jamie, ‘Mechanisms of self-other representations and vicarious experiences of touch in mirror-touch synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013) 112: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00112.

  12. 12.

    Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005. pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2021.

  13. 13.

    Idalmis Santiesteban, Geoffrey Bird, Oliver Tew, Maria Cristina Cioffi, Michael J. Banissy, ‘Mirror-touch synaesthesia: Difficulties inhibiting the other,’ Cortex, 71 (2015) pp. 116–121; Serino A, Giovagnoli G, Làdavas E (2009) ‘I Feel what You Feel if You Are Similar to Me.’PLoS ONE 4(3): e4930. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004930. Accessed 2 June 2021.

  14. 14.

    Charles Spence, K. Sathian, Chapter 11—‘Audiovisual crossmodal correspondences: Behavioral consequences and neural underpinnings,’ Editor(s): K. Sathian, V.S. Ramachandran, Multisensory Perception (Academic Press, 2020) pp 239–258.

  15. 15.

    Kaitlyn Bankieris and Julia Simner, ‘What is the link between synaesthesia and sound symbolism?’ Cognition 136 (2015) pp 186–195.

  16. 16.

    BR(2): p 434.

  17. 17.

    Butlin: 343.15; 692.106.

  18. 18.

    BR(2): p 423.

  19. 19.

    BR(2): p 422. The reference is to the Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).

  20. 20.

    BR(2) pp 296, 298,299, underlining in Bentley.

  21. 21.

    Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina Schmack, Albert R. Powers, ‘Hallucinations and Strong Priors,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23 (2019) pp 114–127.

  22. 22.

    Alderson-Day, B. and Fernyhough, C., 2015. ‘Inner speech: Development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology.’ Psychological bulletin, 141(5), pp. 931–965.

  23. 23.

    Sam Wilkinson, ‘Accounting for the phenomenology and varieties of auditory verbal hallucination within a predictive processing framework,’ Consciousness and Cognition 30 (2014) pp. 142–155.

  24. 24.

    L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1987), originally published 1934.

  25. 25.

    Louise C Johns, Jim van Os, ‘The Continuity of Psychotic Experiences in the General Population,’ Clinical Psychology Review, 21 (2001) pp 1125–1141.

  26. 26.

    Benrimoh, D.A., Parr, T., Vincent, P., Adams, R.A. and Friston, K., 2018. ‘Active Inference and Auditory Hallucinations.’ Computational Psychiatry, 2, pp.183–204. https://doi.org/10.1162/CPSY_a_00022. Accessed 3 June 2021.

  27. 27.

    Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina Schmack, Albert R. Powers, ‘Hallucinations and Strong Priors,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23 (2019) pp 114–127.

  28. 28.

    For the misattributed inner speech model, see Peter Moseley, David Smailes, Amanda Ellison and Charles Fernyhough, ‘The effect of auditory verbal imagery on signal detection in hallucination-prone individuals,’ Cognition 146 (2016) pp 206–216.

  29. 29.

    Kaitlyn Bankieris and Julia Simner, ‘What is the link between synaesthesia and sound symbolism?’ Cognition 136 (2015) pp 186–195.

  30. 30.

    Mary Jane Spiller, Clare N. Jonas, Julia Simner and Ashok Jansari, ‘Beyond visual imagery: How modality-specific is enhanced mental imagery in synesthesia?’ Consciousness and Cognition 31 (2015) pp. 73–85; italics in original.

  31. 31.

    Mark Crosby and Robert N. Essick (eds.) Genesis: William Blake’s Last Illuminated Work. Edited, with a commentary (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 2012). Crosby and Essick print for the first time Robert R. Wark’s original curatorial essay (a proof draft of which is in Essick’s collection) titled, ‘Blake’s Illuminated Manuscript of Genesis,’ c. 1974. Wark wrote that ‘The Huntington Genesis should not be confused with … a version of Genesis “as understood by a Christian Visionary”’ (p 21.n3). BR(2) repeats this caution (p 435 and n). If Blake produced the Huntington Genesis plus another, ‘“Christian Visionary”’ Genesis, the latter has either ‘not survived’ (as BR(2)’s footnote puts it) or else it remains untraced.

  32. 32.

    BR(2): p 435.

  33. 33.

    BR(2): p 704.

  34. 34.

    Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007) pp 23–29, Fig. 1.

  35. 35.

    Galton, F., Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan, 1983) p 67.

  36. 36.

    Charlotte Anne Chun and Jean-Michel Hupé, ‘Mirror-Touch and Ticker Tape Experiences in Synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00776. There seem to be two versions of this paper, one describing ‘Ticker Tape Perceptions,’ and one describing ‘Ticker Tape Experiences,’ both essentially the same paper with minor variations of grammar. Accessed 5 June 2021.

  37. 37.

    Max Coltheart and Marcia J. Glick, ‘Visual Imagery: A Case Study,’ Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 26 (1974) 438–453.

  38. 38.

    Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005. pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2023.

  39. 39.

    Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005. pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2023.

  40. 40.

    Romke Rouw and H. Steven Scholte, ‘Neural Basis of Individual Differences in Synesthetic Experiences,’ The Journal of Neuroscience 30 (2010) pp 6205–6213.

  41. 41.

    Benrimoh, D.A., Parr, T., Vincent, P., Adams, R.A. and Friston, K., 2018. ‘Active Inference and Auditory Hallucinations.’ Computational Psychiatry, 2, pp.183–204. https://doi.org/10.1162/CPSY_a_00022. Accessed 27 May 2021.

  42. 42.

    Galton, Francis, Visualised Numerals, Nature 21 (1880) pp 252–256.

  43. 43.

    Joanna Hale, Jacqueline M. Thompson, Helen M. Morgan, Marinella Cappelletti & Roi Cohen Kadosh (2014) ‘Better together? The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space,’ Cognitive Neuropsychology, 31:7–8, 545–564.

  44. 44.

    David Brang, EunSeon Ahn, ‘Double-blind study of visual imagery in grapheme-color synesthesia,’ Cortex, 117 (2019) pp 89–95.

  45. 45.

    BR(2): p 435.

  46. 46.

    BR(2): p 435fn. Bentley misunderstands. This is a conversation, not a declaration of titles.

  47. 47.

    Julia Simner, Neil Mayo, Mary-Jane Spiller, ‘A foundation for savantism? Visuo-spatial synaesthetes present with cognitive benefits,’ Cortex, 45 (2009) pp 1246–1260.

  48. 48.

    BR(2): pp 416, 420.

  49. 49.

    BR(2): p 437.

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    David Worrall

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Worrall, D. (2024). Blake’s Synaesthesia: The Testimony of Crabb Robinson. In: William Blake's Visions. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_8

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