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Minute Particulars

Vol. 50 no. 2: Fall 2016

William Blake of the Woolpack & Peacock

  • G. E. Bentley, Jr.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.178
Submitted
20 September 2016
Published
20 Sep. 2016

Abstract

William Blake was born in 1757 at the sign of the Woolpack & Peacock—or at least that was the name of his father’s haberdashery and hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, in the year the poet was apprenticed, 1772. Probably there was a shop sign with an emblem of a peacock above a woolpack. The shop title may be seen in the elegant engraved bill-head made out by James Blake, the poet’s father, to the prodigious botanist Joseph Banks. This is the only known evidence of the name of the shop.