The life of William Blake became a legend even before he died, and in discussing his life the two must be disentangled as far as possible. This presents several problems. First of all, the essential materials for his biography - letters, journals, memoirs, official records, comments of friends and others - are meager, while the uncertain dates of many of his works complicate the task of a chronology. Only ninety-two of his letters survive, the first a short note from 1791, when he was thirty-four, and most of the others are concentrated in a single decade, 1799-1808, like the few remaining letters written to him. For the most part his letters are concerned either with prosaic business matters or with what Keats called “the life of allegory,” only remotely connected to outward events and relationships. There was little external incident in Blake's life, and he lived in obscurity for most of it; except by a small group of admirers his name was largely forgotten within a decade of his death in 1827, as the subtitle of the first full-length biography, Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus,” suggests. So sparse a record as this is a temptation to biographers to fill out with more or less fictional detail.