This month, as the nights close in we will turn our attention to the supernatural. We have invited a scholar in a different discipline to shed some light for us, not on Blake himself, but on the world of belief and superstition in which he was working. Blake’s work teems with fairy life, spirits, goblins and angels of all kinds. It is also threaded through with the folklore of his day. From the sun dancing on the mountains, to themes of stolen brides, lost children, caged robins, and fairy funerals, we see Blake weaving British folklore into his work.

However, much of that folklore is lost to our own culture so it seems strange and easy to just put down to Blake’s idiosyncratic world view. Did the people of Blake’s time believe in fairies? What kind of creatures did they see? How did they view stories of ghosts and angels? To explore this area with us we have invited one of the most prominent folklore historians of our day to come into the world of Blake and help us to see the world as his contemporaries saw it.

Dr Simon Young is a British Folklorist and Historian who studied at Cambridge and holds a Doctorate from the University of Florence. He now lives and teaches in Italy at the University of California’s Florence campus, and has published extensively on the 18th and 19th century supernatural. He has been runner-up for the Katharine Briggs Prize, and for The Wayland Hand Prize, and has won the Brian McConnell Book Award, and the Curran Fellowship.