A few months shy of his fifteenth birthday, William Blake was apprenticed to master engraver James Basire. During his apprenticeship Blake not only learnt the graphic techniques that enabled engravers to replicate form, tone, and the illusion of depth in copperplates to reproduce accurate printed impressions, but also began developing an aesthetic theory focused on the primacy of the bounding line. This talk will offer a portrait of the teenage Blake as an apprentice, exploring his life at 31 Great Queen Street and the time he spent in Westminster Abbey (and ‘other churches in and about London’), sketching medieval funerary monuments, before revealing some of his earliest identifiable engraving work.
Mark’s main area of research is Romantic-period literary and visual culture. His most recent research led to the discovery of William Blake’s earliest engraved art and the reconstruction of the hanging arrangement of Blake’s 18 portraits of poets.

Mark has edited an edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (Bodleian 2024), and co-authored, with Robert N. Essick, the first critical edition of William Blake’s Genesis Manuscript (2012). Mark also co-edited Re-envisioning Blake (Palgrave 2012) and William Blake’s Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests (Palgrave 2024).
Mark is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a contributor to BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (https://branchcollective.org), editorial advisor to Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism Series and Poetry Criticism Series Gale/Cengage), and is an associate editor for the William Blake Archive, the largest and most comprehensive free to access digital repository of Blake’s works on the web: www.blakearchive.org
Mark’s research on William Blake has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and in print media, including Reuters, The Times, The Smithsonian Magazine, and The Art Newspaper.