Plate 51
Vala, Hyle and Skofeld

Jerusalem consists of 100 plates or pages. It is divided into four sections of around twenty-five pages, each one addressed to a different audience - the Public, the Jews, the Deists, and the Christians. In between these different sections come four text-free illustrated plates like the one shown here. This page comes from the start of the third section, addressed to the Deists.

The picture shows (from left to right) Vala, Goddess of Nature, Hyle, one of the giant Sons of Albion, and 'Skofeld'. The last of these three is the most interesting, since we can see how Blake took his revenge on people who had crossed him by inserting them into his private mythology. 'Skofeld' is, in fact, Private John Schofield, the soldier who, after being expelled by Blake from his Sussex garden, claimed that Blake had made disparaging remarks about the King and the British army, causing him to be tried for sedition in 1804. The scholar Morton D. Paley (see bibliography) points out that Schofield, burning in hell-fire, is also weighed down by 'mind-forg'd manacles' of the kind we saw in 'London', in the Songs of Experience, while his posture resembles that of the personification of Despair in The House of Death.

The other real-life figures who play a significant role in Jerusalem are the Hunt brothers, journalists who had reviewed Blake's work with brutal contempt.