Chaucer and the Nine-and-Twenty Pilgrims (c. 1808) © Glasgow Museums: Pollock House, The Stirling Maxwell Collection

Blake's optimism about his return to London was ill-founded. At his new lodgings on the first floor of No. 17 South Moulton Street, he began work on the illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem. However, commercial work proved even more elusive than it had before. 'Art in London flourishes,' he wrote, 'yet no one brings work to me'.

When the publisher Robert Cromek approached him to both illustrate and engrave the poet Robert Blair's Grave, Blake's luck seemed to have taken a turn for the better. The disappointment was only the more intense, therefore, when Cromek ultimately chose the artist Schiavonetti to engrave Blake's illustrations instead of Blake himself. The Grave proved a success, but Blake received little financial reward. He now became increasingly paranoid and cantankerous, breaking off from most of his friends and patrons.

In 1806, Cromek teamed up with the artist Thomas Stothard to produce a painting and engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake claimed they had stolen the idea from him and when Stothard's work was exhibited to great acclaim, Blake decided to hold a one-man exhibition centered around his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Unfortunately, he could not afford to show his work in a fashionable part of town, so his exhibition was held in his brother's hosiery shop in May 1809. Almost no one came. The reviews were cruel, mocking Blake as 'an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement', and dismissing his Descriptive Catalogue as 'a farrago of nonsense...and egregious vanity'.

By 1810, Blake was impoverished and estranged from his friends and patrons. Indeed his first biographer entitled the chapter dealing with the period 1810-1817 'Years of Deepening Neglect'. But Blake continued to work, believing his Jerusalem, an epic about war, peace and liberty focused on London, to be his finest work.