Europe Title-page (1794) © Glasgow University Library

Lambeth was still a village when Blake and his wife moved to No. 13 Hercules Buildings in 1791. A much larger house than any Blake had lived in before, it provided the light and space that he needed for his work. Blake now entered upon the most creative and productive period of his life.

Blake's work had become more overtly political after the upheavals in France in 1789. His poem The French Revolution, though printed in 1791 by Joseph Johnson (publisher of Tom Paine's Rights of Man), was deemed too dangerous to actually publish. By this time, Blake already felt himself to be losing out to his contemporaries in the art world, and now he saw the door to public recognition closing. The 1793 co-publication of The Gates of Paradise, an emblem book for children, was Blake's last venture into commercial publishing. In October of the same year, Blake published his Prospectus a public advertisement of his recent works. The Prospectus was also a critique of the establishment and the difficulty of gaining reconition for artists who lacked 'the means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius'. Blake was literally taking matters into his own hands by producing his own work and offering it for sale at his home.

The Prospectus advertised the illuminated prophetic books which had begun to pour forth from his press: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a brief epic interspersed with proverbs, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, an allegory about freedom, and America, A Prophecy, a mixture of history and myth, all date from 1793.

There was no letting up in 1794, when The Songs of Experience (the pessimistic 'contrary' volume to The Songs of Innocence) was completed. In the same year Blake also published Europe, A Prophecy (an allegory of the political situation in Europe with warnings about the dire consequences of war), and The First Book of Urizen (his account of the origins of mankind and the natural world).