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From Vampire to Apollo: William Blake’s Ghosts of the Flea, c.1819–1820

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Beastly Blake

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

Abstract

Erle offers an interpretation of the versions of Blake’s flea: the head and full-length pencil drawing as well as the tempera The Ghost of a Flea and the plate in John Varley’s A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy. Moving beyond the familiar narratives about Blake’s collaboration with Varley and the nightly séances at his house, the chapter revisits the debate about Blake’s renewed interest in physiognomy by aligning the images with Lavater’s Lines of Animality. As well as exploring the reception of Lavater’s physiognomy in early nineteenth-century Britain and physiognomical ideas relating to perceived animal likenesses in human faces, Erle analyses the changing morphology of the flea against the backdrop of vampire literature as a fluid or expressive body challenging contemporary taxonomies of character. The intricate interplay between the images and the speeches attributed to Blake’s flea, as Erle shows, firmly places Blake’s flea at the centre of the early history of the now iconic figure of the vampire.

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Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Laurie Garrison, Jon Mee and Martin Myrone who looked at earlier versions of this chapter. Their comments and suggestions helped shaped my responses to its materials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK

    Sibylle Erle

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  1. Sibylle Erle
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Correspondence to Sibylle Erle .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Amateur, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Helen P. Bruder

  2. Department of English, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Tristanne Connolly

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Erle, S. (2018). From Vampire to Apollo: William Blake’s Ghosts of the Flea, c.1819–1820. In: Bruder, H., Connolly, T. (eds) Beastly Blake. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89788-2_10

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