Experience taught William Blake that "Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy." His brilliant achievements as a poet, painter, and engraver brought him public notice, but little income. William Blake in the Desolate Market records how Blake, the most original of all the major English poets, earned his living. G.E. Bentley Jr, the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but thereafter his fortunes declined. For his most ambitious commercial designs, he made hundreds of folio designs and scores of engravings, but was paid scarcely more than twenty pounds for two or three years' work. His invention of illuminated printing lost money, and many of his greatest works, such as Jerusalem, were left unsold at his death. He came to believe that his "business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes." William Blake in the Desolate Market is an investigation of Blake's labours to support himself by his arts. The changing prices of his works, his costs and receipts, as well as his patrons and employers are expertly gathered and displayed to show the material side of the artistic career in Britain's Romantic period.

G.E. Bentley Jr (1930-2017) was professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto.

G.E. Bentley Jr's profile page

"This impressive work of scholarship gathers the accumulated evidence of Blake's lifetime of failure as a businessman. [Citing Blake’s] personal proverb, 'desire of gain deadens the genius of man,' Bentley shows Blake’s ever more inventive ways of losing money - [including] engraving on copper plates at a time when the cost of copper rocketed. Blake's stubborn reliance on a material that placed him in direct competition with arms manufacturers is the sort of revelatory detail that will make this a vital supplement for teaching, criticism, and biographical work in the period." Studies in English Literature 1500-1800

“The effort that produced William Blake in the Desolate Market is that of a lifetime, gathering for the first time, in concentrated fashion, every interaction and transaction Blake had with an often indifferent marketplace and its agents. It will be of serious pragmatic use for the next generation of Blake scholars.” Mark Lussier, Department of English, Arizona State University

“In an age of digitally diluted research practices, this exemplary volume testified to traditional scholarly rigor and the continuing necessity of historicist methodologies. Essential.” Choice