An Island in the Moon

An Island in the Moon is the name generally assigned to an untitled, unfinished prose satire by William Blake, written in late 1784. Containing early versions of three poems later included in Songs of Innocence (1789) and satirising the "contrived and empty productions of the contemporary culture,"An Island demonstrates Blake's increasing dissatisfaction with convention and his developing interest in prophetic modes of expression. Referred to by William Butler Yeats and E. J. Ellis as "Blake's first true symbolic book," it also includes a partial description of Blake's soon-to-be-realised method of illuminated printing. The piece was unpublished during Blake's lifetime, and survives only in a single manuscript copy, residing in the Fitzwilliam Museum, in the University of Cambridge.

The overriding theory as to the main impetus behind An Island is that it allegorises Blake's rejection of the society of Harriet Mathew, who, along with her husband, Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew organised 'poetical evenings' to which came many of Blake's friends (such as John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and Joseph Johnson) and, on at least one occasion, Blake himself. The Mathews had been behind the publication in 1783 of Blake's first collection of poetry, Poetical Sketches, but by 1784, Blake had supposedly grown weary of their company and the social circles in which they moved, and chose to distance himself from them. This theory can be traced back to an 1828 'Biographical Sketch' of Blake by his friend in later life, the painter J.T. Smith, published in the second volume of Smith's biography of Joseph Nollekens, Nollekens and his times. Smith's references to the Mathew family's association with Blake were taken up and elaborated upon by Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, in his 1863 biography Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus., and from that point forth, the prevailing belief as to the primary background of An Island is that it dramatises Blake's disassociation from the social circles in which he found himself.

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