It is a testament to our culture’s present preoccupation with voyeurism — or, if you prefer, with “reality” — that historical figures, once the provenance of myth, are these days as likely as anybody to be enlisted as fodder for our obsessive desire to glimpse into the lives of strangers. In her newest offering, “Burning Bright” (Dutton, 320 pages, $24.95), Tracy Chevalier takes advantage of this well-trodden ground: A mysterious poet of historical import is recontextualized in all the messy ordinariness of the world from which he emerged.

“Burning Bright” immerses us in the late-18th-century London of the poet William Blake, where mere survival requires street smarts and a snappy wit. At the center of Ms Chevalier’s tale is the Kellaway family — a naïve quartet from Dorsetshire who have abandoned the security of the countryside to escape the painful memory of the youngest son’s deadly fall from a pear tree. At the bidding of the “circus impresario” Philip Astley, who hopes to enlist Thomas Kellaway’s skill as a chairmaker, the family ar rives in London unprepared for the challenges of city life. Luckily for them, a motley coterie of neighbors helps them adapt to the unseemly ways of Lambeth, among them the outrageous Astley, the cheeky young Maggie Butterfield, and the enigmatic Mr. Blake.

For several novels now, Ms. Chevalier has inhabited that surprising nexus where erudition and populism collide. Most memorably, in “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (1999), she imbued the beguiling calm of Vermeer’s portrait with an imaginative new life. “Burning Bright” finds Ms. Chevalier in familiar territory: She pours her energy into re-creating the landscape of the London of 1792, and it seems she has done her homework. Ms. Chevalier is visibly at her best, and her writing at its most trenchant, among the scents and sounds of London’s gritty streets —”Full of the smells of people living close together: coal fire, smoke, sour, mildewed clothes, boiled cabbage, fish on the turn.”

Yet if the portrait of lower-class life in Lambeth that emerges from these imagistic flourishes is one of near constant mayhem, a deeper chaos seeps into the structure of the novel itelf. Ms. Chevalier unleashes a flurry of events, references, and plot turns that don’t quite add up. The bizarre trappings of circus culture and the Kellaways’ struggles with their demanding new world take place against the backdrop of the French Revolution. William Blake enters the fray in his “bonnet rouge,” making no effort to conceal his revolutionary sympathies.

As she did with Vermeer, Ms. Chevalier attempts to illuminate the work of one of our great artists obliquely, drawing upon fictionalized details of his surroundings in her search for the origins of his inspiration. Here, she focuses principally on Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” a work she would have us believe was influenced by the budding, adolescent romance between Jem Kellaway and Maggie Butterfield.

The children’s bumbling advances become the vehicle by which Ms. Chevalier implausibly introduces the novel’s weightier ideas. Ms. Chevalier lays her aspirations bare when Blake comes upon Jem and Maggie on a bridge during a playful argument about the nature of opposites. It’s here, as Blake steps in to mediate, that we get the first taste of his poetry. “Tell me then, would you say you are innocent or experienced?” Blake asks. The children are befuddled. You can be two things at once? Inhabit contrary poles simultaneously? Rather than offer an answer, Blake treats them to a rendition of the “Laughing Song.”

Throughout the novel Blake’s presence and the themes of his poetry cast their shadow over Jem and Maggie’s relationship. The ultimate meaninglessness of binaries seems to the be the only notion in Blake’s work that Ms. Chevalier finds worth absorbing. As Jem grows more experienced in the ways of city life, the jaded Maggie adopts from him a measure of innocence. Were Ms. Chevalier content to stick to this primary story, unburdened by Blake and the revolution, she would have given us a charming, if not especially profound, period piece.

While Ms. Chevalier deserves credit for her ambition, her characters demand a more sophisticated treatment than she gives. Blake’s walk-on role is gratuitous, and his poetry is hardly done justice by the fictive context. The French Revolution, its devastation looming in the background, drives the novel’s ending. Yet in the face of such a genuine cataclysm, Ms. Chevalier hesitates to let any of its moral ambiguities permeate her story.

It would seem unjust to expect Ms. Chevalier to match the literary adroitness of her muse if the stark counterpoint of Blake’s poetry didn’t call extra attention to her own prose: The pounding hearts and lumps lodged in throats only look thinner when forced alongside the rhythmic intensity of Blake’s recurring verse. Of course Blake’s poetry comes out on top in this equation — he appears all the more deft for Ms. Chevalier’s shortcomings. It’s hard to imagine that this is the way in which the author intended to honor him.

Ms. Atlas works in publishing and lives in Brooklyn.