“The staple reading for all children in the period of Blake’s infancy was the chapbook — stories from British history, the true confessions of criminals about to be executed at Tyburn during ‘Paddington Fair’, myths and legends of uncertain provenance such as The History of the Two Children in the Wood — printed on cheap thick paper and accompanied by clumsy if vivid woodcuts. These ‘cuts’ show children dancing ‘in the round’, chasing butterflies, and spinning hoops; but there are also images of forests ‘dark and drear’, of crippled beggars and wayfarers offering an appropriate subject for infant contemplation, of deathbed scenes to remind the little children of mortality. Blake may also have read such illustrated books as Pine’s Horace and Croxall’s Aesop, and his later interests suggest that he had at least glanced at The History of Jane Shore as well as at The History of Joseph and His Brethren; but it is important only to note that, from the beginning, he saw words and images together in the morbid mid-eighteenth-century equivalent of comic books.“—Peter Ackroyd, Blake: A Biography, (emphasis mine)
