Volume 31 · Issue 4

Part I Edition, Translations and Facsimiles ²¹↤ ²¹ N.b. In this checklist, “Facsimile” is taken to mean “an exact copy” attempting very close reproduction of an original named copy including size of image, color of printing (and of tinting if relevant), and size, color, and quality of paper, with no deliberate alteration as in page-order or numbering or obscuring of paper defects.

Section A: Original Editions

America (1793[-1831])

Copy M

History: . . . (5) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (6) The Yale Center for British Art.

The Book of Thel (1789[-1818])

According to Joseph Viscomi, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 344, the plates for The Book of Thel were cut from a single sheet of copper in the following pattern:

Thel pl.	4	5	6	1
Marriage pl.					4
Thel pl.	3	2	7	8

Thel pl. 1 and Marriage pl. 4 being especially small plates, and Thel pl. 1 and 8 being etched last.

Copy B

History: . . . (4) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (5) The Yale Center for British Art.

Descriptive Catalogue (1809)

Patrons of Blake’s exhibition who did not buy the Descriptive Catalogue itself were offered “an index to the Catalogue gratis.” No separate copy of this Index has been traced, but presumably it is identical with the “Index” to the Descriptive Catalogue itself (Signature G6).

Copies of the Index for separate distribution could have been created by printing extra copies of Sheet G from which leaf G6 with the Index could be cut. However, it is much more likely that the Index leaves were amputated from whole copies of the Descriptive Catalogue in order to have them to sell to non-catalogue-buying patrons of the exhibition. The amputation method would have left some copies of the Descriptive Catalogue lacking the Index leaf.

Confirmation of this speculation is found in Descriptive Catalogue copy U, which was bought in November 1809 for George Cumberland by his son, who had already seen the exhibition and the catalogue, and which lacks the Index leaf (G6). If other copies of the Descriptive Catalogue appear without the Index leaf, we may presume that they were bought at 28 Broad Street by individuals who did not propose to see the exhibition; untraced copy V, which was bought in November 1809 by George Cumberland Jr., for Barry’s library in Bristol, should lack the Index.

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy U

Binding: (1) Watermarked “AP” and “1807” (as usual), 11 × 19 cm., lacking the index leaf (G6),²²↤ ²² According to the advertising flyer for A Descriptive Catalogue, patrons paying for admission but not for a catalogue were given “an Index to the Catalogue gratis,” which “served as a hand-list for viewers of the exhibition. However, as copy U was bought by Georgé Cumberland Jr. to send to his father in Bristol, he did not need the Index.” with the corrections Blake made in copies distributed at the exhibition (B-D, F-H, J, L, O) on the titlepage (“_^At N 28 Corner of Broad Street, Golden Square_^”) and on 64 (“idea of want” altered to “want of idea”), plus unique alterations by Blake on iv²³↤ ²³ “‘Till we get rid of Titian [and del] Correggio, Rubens and Rembrandt, We shall never equal Rafael [and del] Albert Durer, Michael Angelo, and Julio Romano.” and 3,²⁴↤ ²⁴ In the couplet, “and the mole” is altered to “mole_^& Bat_^” in order to make it rhyme with “fat” and to make it correspond to the draft in Blake’s Notebook 36. begin page 143 | ↑ back to top plus minor underlining and notes probably by George Cumberland; (2) Rebound c. 1840 in Grey boards, with Blue cloth spine; with tipped-in letters from (A) John Linnell [to George Cumberland], 18 March 1833; (B) John Linnell to George Cumberland [Jr.], 4 January 1876; (C) Dora Greenwell of 27 December 1875 (printed) on “Vivisection” quoting 26 lines of “Auguries of Innocence”; (D) Dora Greenwell [to George Cumberland, Jr.], 25 January 1876; plus (E) A note by “GC 1842”²⁵↤ ²⁵ The date looks like “1849,” but a curl at the bottom of the “9” makes it look much like a “2” Cumberland wrote elsewhere in the book. on the back flyleaf which is integral with the paste-down of about 1840.

History: (1) In November 1809 George Cumberland, Jr., paid 5s for two copies of the Descriptive Catalogue²⁶↤ ²⁶ George Cumberland Jr. wrote to his father on 14 Oct 1809 about Blake’s Catalogue of Pictures being the ancient method of Frescoe Painting Restored.—you should tell Barry to get it, it may be the means of serving your Friend[;] it sells for 2/6. and may be had of J. Blake. 28. Broad S Golden Square at his Brothers—the Book is a great curiosity. He [h]as given Stothard a compleat set down— Three weeks later, on 5 Nov, Cumberland asked his son to “send by Abingdon 2 vols of Blakes work & make my regards to Blake—MC will pay you the 5/- for them—” (Blake Records [1969], 219). George Cumberland Jr. had clearly seen the Descriptive Catalogue and may therefore have possessed a copy of it, but, if so, it has not been identified. and sent them to (2) His father George Cumberland in Bristol,²⁷↤ ²⁷ George Cumberland Sr. wrote to his son on 13 Nov 1809: Blakes Cat. is truly original—part vanity part madness—part very good sense—is this the work of his you recommended, and of which I gave you a Comm” to buy two sets one for me and one for Barrys Library? . . . who gave one to B. Barry (see below) and kept the other; (3) Cumberland’s copy was bought “many years ago” by a man, (4) Whose daughter sold it through Marlborough Rare Books and John Windle in August 1997 to (5) Robert N. Essick.²⁸↤ ²⁸ For the intermediaries between George Cumberland and Robert Essick, see Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997,” Blake (1998), generously shown me in typescript.

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy V

Binding: Unknown.

History: (1) Sent by George Cumberland, Jr., in November 1809 to (2) His father (as in Copy U) for (3) The Bristol publisher and circulating library owner B. Barry;²⁹↤ ²⁹ Advertisements for Blair’s Grave with Blake’s designs in June 1808 said that it could be had “At Barry’s Reading Rooms, Bristol” (Blake Records Supplement [1988] 56, 57). Barry’s role as a publisher and a portrait of him are recorded in G.E. Bentley, Jr., A Bibliography of George Cumberland (1754-1848) (N.Y. & London: Garland, 1975) 25, 115. (4) Untraced.

Europe (1794[-1831])

Copy A

History: . . . (6) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (7) The Yale Center for British Art.

Copy c

For new details about pl. 1, see “The ‘Order’ of the Songs.”

Plate 1 (with Jerusalem pl. 30 on the verso)

History: . . . (5) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (6) The Yale Center for British Art.

The First Book of Urizen (1794[-1815?])

Plate 21

According to Viscomi, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 313n38, it is Urizen pl. 21 (10.2 × 16.6) which is probably on the verso of Marriage pl. 19 (10.2 × 16.4) rather than Marriage pl. 16 (10.2 × 16.6 cm.), as in BB 167.

Copy C

Binding: (2) It was disbound at the Yale Center for British Art by 1997.

Copy G

History: . . . The Dover edition (1997) reproduces the Blake Trust facsmile (1958).

Edition

The Book of Urizen [G]. (London: The William Blake Trust, 1958).

It is reproduced with omissions in the Dover reproduction (1997).

The Book of Urizen: In Full Color. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1997) 12°, iv, 42 pp.; ISBN: 0-486-29810-9.

Anon., “Publisher’s Note” ([iii-iv]); normalized transcription of the poem (28-42).

A reproduction of the Blake Trust facsimile of copy G (1958), considerably reduced in image-size, enormously reduced in leaf size, on glossy paper, omitting Blake’s framing lines and plate-numbers.

For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820-31?)

Copy G

History: . . . (4) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (5) The Yale Center for British Art.

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2 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (M) <GEB> pl. 27, photographed by John Sullivan of the Huntington so as to show the texture of the paper.   The “Chorus” at the bottom of the page has not printed, but the tops of the first two letters of “Chorus” and the flourishes above it are plain, and the rest of the word “Chorus” and fragments of the text below it are faintly embossed on the paper. In Marriage (K), pl. 24 lacks the design of Nebuchadnezzar at the bottom; however, there is no embossing of the design, and a faint indentation just below the text seems to indicate that the bottom of pl. 24 was masked when it was printed, as I am informed by David Scrase of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Some of the etched lines seem to touch the outer margin—pl. 25, “-merican,” “the ocean,” “Rome,” “-derous” on the left and “across,” “dungeon;,” and “thun-” on the right; pl. 26, “hoary,” “vain,” “chariots,” “slings,” “wilderness” on the right —apparently leaving no room at all for the wax dike which Blake is believed to have used to keep in the acid when the plate was being etched. (The evidence of this dike is quite plain in the irregular black borders of posthumous copies, e.g., of America, Europe, Jerusalem, and the Songs.) I cannot account for this.

In the context of the debate about the use of Blake’s variable formation of the letter “g” for dating purposes (see D. V. Erdman, “Dating Blake’s Script; the ‘g’ hypothesis,” his “postscript” to this note; GEB, “Blake’s Sinister ‘g,’ from 1789-93 to ?1803,” Blake Newsletter 3 [1969]: 8-13, 42, 43-45; and Robert N. Essick, “‘The Phoenix’: A Problem in Attribution,” Philological Quarterly 67 [1988]: 371) notice that the serif on the letter “g” is more often than not on the left, but there is a quite differently formed “g,” with a right-ward serif, much more like ordinary hand-writing than Blake’s usual Illuminated Book print-writing.

left-serif “g”: pl. 25 Song groand falling trembling light king grey wings among flaming; pl. 26 night falling enlarge counting winged thoughts flaming sinking roaring beating wings king grey among falling rushing ruining night emerge gloomy king leading; pl. 27 glancing morning golden spurning loosing night crying [In the “Chorus” not printed here: longer virginity thing]

right-serif “g”: pl. 25 along dungeon falling; pl. 26 gold slings; pl. 27 promulgates [In the “Chorus” not printed here: religious]

N.b. Pl. 25, 1. 6: The first “falling” has a right-serif “g” and the second “falling” has a left-serif “g.” Pl. 26, 1. 12: The serifs on the immediately sequential “g”s in “counting gold” are leftward and rightward.
[View this object in the William Blake Archive]

Inscriptions on Designs

Poems and Descriptions of Designs for Gray’s Poems (1797)

History: (6) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given them to (7) The Yale Center for British Art.

Jerusalem (1804[-20?] [-1832?])

Copy E

Binding:(4) It was disbound again at the Yale Center for British Art by 1997.

Plates 28, 35

History: . . . (6) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (7) The The Yale Center for British Art.

Editions

*Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion [E]. Ed. Morton D. Paley. (Princeton: Princeton UP in conjunction with the William Blake Trust, 1991) Blake’s Illuminated Books Volume I. 4°, 302 pp., 105 reproductions, ISBN: 0-691-069352 “(cloth).” B. §(London: The Tate Gallery for the William Blake Trust, 1991) <BBS 88>. C. (Princeton: Princeton UP in conjunction with the William Blake Trust, 1991 [i.e., 1997]) ISBN: 0-691-069352 “(cloth),” i.e., 0-691-1029075, paper.

The 1997 paperback has the same imprint and ISBN number as the 1991 cloth issue (“$75.00”); the presumably-more-accurate information about the 1997 issue ($29.95) derives from Books in Print 1997.

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3 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (L) (Robert N. Essick) pl. 27.^[e]   Notice the ink splatter^[e] in ll. 5-6, the broken tail of the semi-colon after “free,” the smudges after “his” in the first line and especially at the bottom right of the page, about “wishes,” “every,” and “Holy,” and the “a” of “calls.” The paper size, wide margins, and registration are handsome in copy L, but the inking is more careful and the impression sharper in copy M.

The chief difference between the impressions of pl. 27 in copies L and M is the presence of the “Chorus” in copy L and its ommission in copy M. However, the ghost of the Chorus is perceptible even in copy M. Not only is the top of the “C” of “Chorus” clearly visible, but the bottom of the “C” and indeed the rest of the “horus” are discernible in an un-inked, blind impression even in the photograph (and, I hope, in the printed reproduction).

An indentation farther down the page of copy M seem to show the vertical risers of “deadly black” in exactly the position they occupy in copy M. Under the hind hooves of the left ramping horse, the “L” of “Let” may be made out, and other surface noise^[e] reveals isolated letters to the eye of faith. At least, all those whom GEB has invited to examine the print have begun in healthy skepticism bordering upon incredulity and ended with growing faith that the fragments of the text of the “Chorus” may be discerned embossed in the un-inked bottom of Marriage of Heaven and Hell (M) pl. 27.

Very few observers profess to make out whole letters in copy M pl. 27, much less whole words (except for “Chorus” and “Let”), and therefore it is not possible to determine whether the blind text copy of M was identical with the inked text of copy L and other copies.
[View this object in the William Blake Archive]

Review

14 Dennis M. Welch, English Studies 78 (1997): 90-93 (with The Early Illuminated Books [1993], and Milton . . . and the Final Illuminated Books [1993]) (all the volumes display “consistently meticulous” scholarship).

*Jerusalem [E]. Introduzione, traduzione, note e glossario a cura di Marcello Pagnini. (Firenze: Giunti, 1994) 4°, 2 vols., Vol. 1, 104 pp., Vol. 2, 312 pp.; ISBN: 88-09-20507-3.

Vol. 1 is a facsimile of copy E using the same photographs as the Blake Trust facsimile (1991) but with the plates printed back-to-back rather than on one side only as in the original; Vol. 2 has an “Introduzione” (5-23), the text of Jerusalem in English and Italian on facing pages with Italian notes, and a “Glossario” (399-409).

Letters

Table

Date	Postmark	Watermark	Location
	1 September 1800		Essick

The letters from Hayley to Blake of 17 April 1800 and from Blake to Hayley of 11 December 1805 which belonged to Sir Geoffrey Keynes did not go with his collection of Blake’s graphic works to the Fitzwilliam Museum or with his collection of Blake’s purely literary works to Cambridge University Library (as I am informed by David Scrase of the Fitzwilliam Museum); they did not stay with the works (such as plates from Europe, Urizen, Ghost, Jerusalem, Songs, and Visions) in the Keynes Family Trust, which is on long-term deposit in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Keynes family retained nothing relevant to Blake (as I am informed in a letter of 8 August 1997 from Sir Geoffrey’s son Stephen Keynes).

17 April 1800 [Hayley to Blake]

History: . . . (5) Untraced.

Newly Recorded Letter

1 September 1800 to George Cumberland

History: (1) Perhaps this³⁰↤ ³⁰ Rather than the letter of 12 April 1827, as BBS 96 speculates. is the “long and very interesting letter” to George Cumberland inserted in Cumberland’s begin page 146 | ↑ back to top copy of Songs (F) which was offered in Thomas Kerslake’s catalogue of Valuable Books Manuscripts Literary Curiosities (after December 1857), Lot 733; (2) Acquired from a private British Collection in November 1997 through John Windle by (3) Robert N. Essick.³¹↤ ³¹ See his “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997” above.

11 December 1805 [Blake to Hayley]

History: . . . (7) Untraced.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([?1790] [-1827?])

↤ ³² Copy M consists of two leaves on a half-sheet of paper, pl. 26-27 printed back to back (not pl. 25-26 as in BR); the front page of the folded gathering is blank. ↤ ³³ It is wove paper, with two deckled edges. ↤ ³⁴ The piece of paper as a whole (bearing two leaves) is 24.3 × 19.9 cm.

Copy	Plates	Leaves	Watermark
M	25-27	232	—33
Binding Order		Leaf Size in cm.	Printing Color
25-27		10.5 × 15.234	black

The plates of the Marriage seem to have been cut out of seven sheets of copper in the following patterns and perhaps in the following order, according to Viscomi, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 337:

Sheet		I	II		III			IV		V		VI	II	verso		VII
Plate	22	24	12	x	2	3	6	7	15	9	17	16	x	27	25	26
Plate	23	21	x	13	1	5	8	11	14	10	19	18	20	x	—

Bold-face indicates plates upside-down; “x” and apparently “—” identify unknown plates.

Sheet II was originally used for “The Approach of Doom,” and Marriage pl. 4 came from the sheet from which Thel was cut (see above).

Plates 16, 19

According to Viscomi, ut supra, 313n38, Marriage pl. 19 (10.2 × 16.4 cm.) was “likely paired with [i.e., etched on the verso of] Urizen pl. 21 [10.2 × 16.6]” rather than Marriage pl. 16 (10.2 × 16.6 cm.), as in BB 167.

Plate 21

According to Viscomi, ut supra, it is Urizen pl. 21 (10.2 × 16.6) which is probably on the verso of Marriage pl. 19 (10.2 × 16.4) rather than Marriage pl. 16 (10.2 × 16.6 cm.), as in BB 167.³⁵↤ ³⁵ The dimensions of plates in the Marriage given in Viscomi differ slightly from those in Blake Books partly because he gives four dimensions (height on left and right sides, width at top and bottom) rather than two (width at bottom and height at right) and partly because he gives individual measurements for five copies, whereas Blake Books gives average measurements for each plate in all copies. The differences are not, however, substantial.

Variants:

Pl. 26, l. 6: Copy M reads “And weep and bow thy reverend locks!” as in Copy L, rather than “And weep!” as in other copies. In Copy M, there is a pencil “x” beside the line (see illus. 1).

N.b. When these letters were etched out, they were not replaced with flourishes to fill in the empty space, though every other such space on the plate is so filled. The erasure had to be done extremely carefully, for, in the erased “thy” (l. 6), the riser of “h” is on the same level as the flourishing descender of the “y” in “eternity” above it (l. 5), the ornamental descender of the “y” in the same “thy” actually touches the riser in the “h” in “hands” below it (l. 7), and the riser of the “k” of “locks” (l. 6) overlaps the descender of the “g” of “falling” (l. 7)—and the overlap is still visible on copies such as B where the end of l. 6 is erased.

Pl. 27: The 8-line Chorus is not inked in Copy M (see illus. 2). However, the tops of the first two letters of “Chorus” and of the flourishes round it are inked. The obscuring was probably not achieved by masking (by laying a piece of paper between the bottom of the plate and the paper-to-be-printed-on), for there is no indentation from this masking-leaf, and the portions omitted are not in a straight line—the missing word “Chorus” is between the unobscured rearing horses.

Further, the flourish below the word “Chorus” is visible in indentation. Even more strikingly, in sharply-raking light faint hints of the rest of the text of the “Chorus” are also discernable; the “L” of “Let” in the first line, the “dl” of “deadly” in the second line and the exclamation-point after “not” in the seventh line are particularly clear.

If these ghost-letters are truly there, this means that (1) The plate was not masked, for this embossing would scarcely show through a layer of paper; (2) The letters are not black either because (a) they were never inked or (b) the ink was wiped off or (c), probably, a combination of the two, as must be the case with the “C” of “Chorus,” which is inked at the top and only embossed at the bottom; (3) The text was complete when the print was inked; it is not merely waiting for a design or inspiration to fill the space.

But of course we must be very cautious about determining just what was written in this early version of the “Chorus.” All this evidence shows clearly is that “deadly” (or at least “dl”) and “not!” (or at least “!”) were present when pl. 27 of Copy M was printed.

Copy M

Binding: Three plates are printed on two integral leaves (one folded half-sheet); the page left blank is, very oddly, the first one (see illus. 1-2). The first (blank) page is perhaps slightly dirtier than others, and it seems slightly foxed.

Paper size: The paper is somewhat irregular in shape, 24.3 cm. wide (measured at the bottom) or 23.8 cm. (at top) × 20.0 cm. high (at right of inner folding) or 19.6 cm. (at left). The original deckled edges are still on the right (when looking at pl. 25-26) and top; the bottom and left edges are slightly crooked as if cut with scissors (a knife would surely have been drawn along a straight edge, as of a ruler). The paper was folded not quite in the middle—who is to say begin page 147 | ↑ back to top when and by whom it was folded? The crease is now very firm, and there is a tiny tear at bottom of the crease. The leaf with pl. 25 is 11.7 cm. wide at the top, and that with pl. 26-27 is 12.1 cm. wide at top.

Registration: Pl. 25-26 are carefully registered top and bottom—the plate-marks are very clear. Pl. 27 is pretty carefully registered with pl. 26—it is very slightly higher. Copies K (pl. 21-24), L (pl. 25-27), and M (pl. 25-27) were almost certainly not produced together, for the paper sizes are quite different.

History: (1) Sold posthumously with the John Linnell Collection at Christie’s, 15 March 1918, Lot 197, for £8.18.6 to the firm of Tregaskis, for (2) Frank Rinder, who offered it to an unidentified friend in an undated note still with the prints³⁶↤ ³⁶ The letter is unsigned and unaddressed, but it is on the letterhead and in the hand of Frank Rinder, as is demonstrated by comparison with examples in the collection of Robert N. Essick. At the 1918 sale, Rinder bought Marriage (L) listed in the same note at the purchase price of £11.10.0 + 10%. at £9.18.6 (the purchase price of £8.18.6 plus 10%); (3) Found by John Windle in a copy of Blake’s Job³⁷↤ ³⁷ The Job was “in contemporary red linen box . . . as described by John Linnell” (according to the Christie catalogue below) with an inscription by Frank Rinder and was sold in the same 1997 sale as the Marriage, Lot 168. The Linnell description and box are otherwise unknown to GEB. brought to Christie’s with a furniture consignment and sold anonymously at Christie’s, 26 November 1997, Lot 166 (pl. 25-26 reproduced) (estimate: £10,000-£15,000) for £9,000 to John Windle for (4) Dr A. E. K. L. B. Bentley.

Edition

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1994) <Blake (1995)>. The work is boxed with Favorite Works of William Blake (1997).

The “Order” of the Songs (?after 1818)

History: . . . (3) The miscellaneous volume including the “Order” of the Songs was broken up by George C. Smith and sold at Parke-Bernet on 2 November 1938; . . .

(F1) Lot 28, Europe (c) pl. 1^[a] [probably colored], was sold for $300 to (F2) An Anonymous buyer—see illus. 1 of Essick above indicating that it was colored, probably as in the Muir facsimile of Europe pl. 1; (F3) Sold for A. E. Newton at Parke Bernet, 16 April 1941, Lot 130,³⁸↤ ³⁸ Described as printed in black, which BB 148 presumed “is a mistake”; BB identified this as Ancient of Days copy B, not copy D as it now turns out. for $125; (F4) Acquired by A. E. Newton’s daughter Caroline Newton; (F5) Acquired by W. H. Auden, who bequeathed it to (F6) An Anonymous New York Collector.³⁹↤ ³⁹ According to a colleague at Columbia University as reported to GEB by Robert N. Essick.

(G1) Lot 29, with Europe (c) pl. 1^[b] [apparently uncolored], 4^a and 5^a, was sold for $245 to the firm of Sessler’s of Philadelphia for (G2) Moncure Biddle; pl. 1 was consigned to Sessler’s for sale, where it was acquired on 28 March 1957 by (G3) Dan[s?] Grubb, who consigned or sold it to Sessler’s again on 13 February 1964 for $60; sold by Sessler’s on 30 June 1964 for $175 to (G4) Leonard Baskin, who sold it in May 1997 to (G5) The dealer John Windle, who sold it that month to (G6) Robert N. Essick.⁴⁰↤ ⁴⁰ The history here for 1957-97 is revised on the basis of Robert Essick’s “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997” (generously shown me in draft). His information for 1957-64 is based on “Sessler’s acquisition and sales records, xeroxed or carefully transcribed for me years ago by Michael Young.” Mabel Zahn of Sessler’s had told GEB that Sessler’s sold Europe pl. 1^[b] to Moncure Biddle and bought it again at Biddle’s sale (Blake Books, 340). Robert Essick points out that Biddle’s sale at Parke-Bernet, 29-30 April 1952 did not include Europe pl. 1.

Europe (c) pl. 4^a and 5^a went to Robert N. Essick^[e] in 1989 <BBS 103>.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794 [-1831?]) Plates 25 (“Infant Joy”), 39 (“The Sick Rose”), b (“A Divine Image”).

According to Viscomi, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 301n28, “A close examination of the shapes of the plates” reveals that “Infant Joy” (6.8 × 11.1 cm.) has on its verso “A Divine Image” (7.0 × 11.2 cm.) rather than “The Sick Rose” (6.8 × 11.1 cm.) as in BB 382.

Songs of Experience

Edition

Songs of Experience (1984) <BBS 134>.

The work is boxed with Favorite Works of William Blake (1997).

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Innocence (1971) <BB #168)>.

The work is boxed with Favorite Works of William Blake (1997).

New Entry⁴¹↤ ⁴¹ The MS has previously been referred to in print only in Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995) (see Blake [1995]).

The Sophocles Manuscript

Binding: Bound in pale reddish marbled boards over a parchment spine; by December 1995 the parchment spine had mostly perished, but the leaves were still secure. John Byrne, who examined the manuscript in 1993, tells me that it was inscribed on the spine with the name of “BLUNDEN,” but this has now disappeared. Many leaves were torn out close to the gutter, generally one at a time but at least once (between ff. 51-52) in a group of up to half a dozen, leaving very narrow stubs.⁴²↤ ⁴² F. 121 is now free, leaving no stub, raising the possibility that other now untraceable leaves may also have been removed without leaving a stub or other trace.

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History: (1) Apparently acquired by “Blandford” (perhaps the son of the Duke of Marlborough, known by the courtesy title of the Marquis of Blandford⁴³↤ ⁴³ The son of the Marquis of Blandford bears the courtesy title of the Earl of Sunderland, “Sunderland” is written on ff. 24^r, 43^v, 48^v, 50^r, 71^r, 79^r, 91^r, and 114^r, and “Blake” deletes “Sunderland” on f. 43^v, 91^r, and f. 114^r. , whose name is written by itself in a hand unlike those in the rest of the manuscript on the first paste-down in old brown ink; (2) Offered for sale as “3 Vol £1-0-0” (according to the note on the first paste-down); (3) Acquired (?without the two accompanying volumes⁴⁴↤ ⁴⁴ In Feb 1993, Mrs. Blunden helped Anthony Rota to search the library for the other two volumes which apparently were once with the Sophocles Manuscript, but with no success. ) during the 1920s probably for its blank paper by Edmund Blunden (1896-1974), who later wrote brief autobiographical essays in it; (4) Inherited by his wife Clare Blunden, who in 1993 offered it for sale through Anthony Rota of Bertram Rota.⁴⁵↤ ⁴⁵ Neither Blunden nor his wife seems to have thought the Blake names significant, for Blunden scratched one out at the head of one page of his essay (f. 35^r), and the volume was considered as little more than an example of Blunden’s writing until it was examined by John Byrne and Anthony Rota.

Description: It is a small quarto volume (16.0 × 21.0 cm.) presently consisting of 191 leaves (all but the first and last fly-leaves—on laid paper with vertical chain lines —foliated 1-189 in 1993 by John Byrne then of Bertram Rota) of laid paper with horizontal chain-lines (as in a quarto) bearing at the center of the inner margins a watermark of Britannia and a crown of a type common before 1794 and a countermark of GR above a tiny cross.⁴⁶↤ ⁴⁶ W. A. Churchill, Watermarks in Paper in Holland, England, France etc., in the XVII and XVIII Centuries and their Interconnection (Amsterdam: Menno Herzberger & Co., 1935), #219-38, show Britannia with a staff in her hand and a shield behind her, within an oval beneath a crown, some of them (e.g., #221) with GR, but all are pretty distinct from that in the Sophocles MS (a reproduction of which was generously provided to GEB by Anthony Rota). Edward Heawood, Watermarks in Paper Mainly of the 17 ^th and 18^th Centuries (Hilversum, Holland: The Paper Publications Society, 1950: Monumenta Chartae Papyraceae Historiam Illustrantia, I), #201-20, show a similar Britannia, and #207-10, 214-21 have a GR attached, #208 (n.d.), 217 (1794), and 218 (1790) being most like the Sophocles MS. The GR watermark is more common, with 24 examples in Heawood, none just like those in the Sophocles Manuscript. The Britannia watermark (only half visible at a time) is on ff. 1-39, 106-39, 141-44, 146-49, 170-71, 174-75; and GR (half at a time) is on the rest. Normally a watermark appears on only half the leaves of a divided sheet of paper, not on each leaf, as in the Sophocles MS, but, according to Heawood, such double marks (two on the same sheet) were not uncommon. A similar but distinct Britannia watermark with a crowned G R countermark is reproduced in Tiriel, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 53, and a fleur de lis watermark above a rectangular shield with a GR countermark is in An Island in the Moon (BB [1977], 221).

These quarto leaves were bound with a printed octavo⁴⁷↤ ⁴⁷ The size is indicated by the fact that in the outer margins of some leaves (ff. 96^r, 101^r, 102^r, 104^r, 106^r, 107^r, 115^v, and 116^r) there are regular rows of horizontal parallel lines as if of deletions, ending on the inner side in a sharply-defined vertical hiatus, suggesting that lines begun on now-missing octavo leaves continued from the now-missing leaves onto the quarto host-leaves. The size defined by the hiatus is c. 14 cm. wide. volume bearing the Greek text of Sophocles,⁴⁸↤ ⁴⁸ John Byrne has read the offset Greek running-heads of Ajax, Electra, Trachiniai, and Philoctetes. which have offset very faintly onto facing pages showing two columns of footnotes separated by a vertical rule. On many leaves one or more eighteenth-century hands wrote in old brown ink a translation (into very colloquial eighteenth-century English) of Ajax (ff. 3-22) by Sophocles, and another hand made learned annotations in English, Latin, Greek.

At apparently random intervals (including ff. 35^r, 43^v, 45^v, 48^v, 51^r[?], 60^r, 71^r[?], 79^r, 81^r, 83^r, 91^r, 103^r, 113^r, 114^r, 116^v), generally on pages with little or no other writing,⁴⁹↤ ⁴⁹ “Blake” is written at the top of f. 35^r which now bears Edmund Blunden’s essay, and “Taffy Williams” is written between two “Blake”s on f. 103^r. The adjacent leaves are blank. “Sunderland” is associated with the “Blake” on ff. 43^v, 71^r, 79^r, 91^r, and 114^r. “Blake,” “W^m Blake,” or “William Blake” is written in old brown ink, once in mirror-writing (“BLAKE” on f. 116^v), and twice in stipple (“W^m Blake” on ff. 43^v, 45^v).⁵⁰↤ ⁵⁰ All the “Blake” signatures are reproduced in Blake 31 (1997) illustrating the essays of Michael Phillips and G. E. Bentley, Jr. On f. 71^r is an ornamental B followed by a flourish, with two drawings beneath it.

4 Sophocles MS f. 45^r <Mrs. Blunden> showing “W^m Blake” written in stipple.  

There are very small, simple, amateurish sketches in pencil or Black ink on ff. 71^r, 79^r, 147^r, 148^v, 149^v, 150^r, 181^r, 182^v, and 183^r.

There are two or more hands in the Sophocles Manuscript, and these are similar to but distinct from that of the poet (see illus. 4-5).

Probably before Blunden acquired the book, 126 or more leaves were torn out, including all the printed Greek text.⁵¹↤ ⁵¹ There are surviving stubs before f. 1 and after ff. 1 (2), 3, 5, 7, 9, 11-12, 15-16, 18 (2?), 20, 24, 38-41, 43-46, 48-49, 50 (6?), 53-56, 58-61, 64-65, 68-69, 75-81, 83-84, 86-90, 94-100, 104-05, 109-10, 114-16, 125, 127-34, 140 (3?), 141, 143-45, 146 (2), 149 (2), 150-51, 153, 154 (2), 155 (2), 157-59, 161-64, 166-71, 173-78, 182, 184-87, 189 — numbers joined by hyphens indicate a leaf removed after each leaf. begin page 149 | ↑ back to top

5 Sophocles MS f. 157^v <Mrs. Blunden> showing the two main hands used in writing the translation of Sophocles’ Ajax.  

Edmund Blunden wrote an autobiographical essay entitled “Notes on Friends, Acquaintances &c” (one about “An occasion April 14, 1921,” and another about a visit to Thomas Hardy at his Max Gate residence in 1923) on 12 blank rectos (ff. 24-37).

None of the handwriting seems to GEB to be that of the poet-artist;⁵²↤ ⁵² Peter Ackroyd and Michael Phillips apparently believe that at least some of the writing is by the poet-artist, and Byrne, Anthony Rota, and Mrs. Blunden hope that it may be so. presumably at least the signatures are those of the score and more of his contemporaries named William Blake.

For arguments for and against the connection of the poet William Blake with the Sophocles Manuscript, see Michael Phillips, “William Blake and the Sophocles Manuscript Notebook” and G. E. Bentley, Jr., “William Blake and the Sophocles Enigma,” Blake 31 (1997): 44-49, 65-71, from which this description is repeated.

There is No Natural Religion (1794-95)

Copy B

History: (6) By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to (7) The Yale Center for British Art.

Tiriel (?1789)

Drawing 1: “Tiriel Supporting Myratana.”

History: By 1997 Paul Mellon had given it to The Yale Center for British Art.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793-1818)

Copy E

History: (4) . . . It was first reproduced in color in Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996).

Part II Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings

Part III Commercial Book Engravings

Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826, 1874)

1826 New Location: National Library of Australia.

Copy of Unrecorded Date New Location: Auckland City Art Gallery.

Linnell drafted a description of the work: ↤ ⁵⁵ Simon Finch, Catalogue 32: Recent Acquisitions (London: Simon Finch Rare Books, Winter 1997), #18, Job, India paper “Proof” (£26,000). The hand appears to GEB to be that of John Linnell.

Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. Consisting of 22 Plates engraved by himself upon Copper from his own Designs.
Price to Subscribers [£]3. 3[s].
Proof on India paper [£]5. 5[s.]
Subscription [£]1. received by the Author Wm. Blake. 3 Fountain Court, Strand or J. Linnell 6. Cirencester Place Fitzroy Square. These Plates are engraved entirely by Blake with the graver only (that is without the aid of aqua fortis).⁵⁵

The printed label is similar in substance except that (1) there are said to be 21 plates (omitting the titlepage); (2) Blake is described as “Author of Designs to ‘Blair’s Grave,’ ‘Young’s Night Thoughts, &c.;’” (3) The prices are given only in manuscript with India paper proofs at £6.6.; (4) The date is added (“March 1826”); and (5) The last sentence of the draft is omitted.

Blair, Robert, The Grave (1808, 1813, . . .)

C 1813 New Location: Auckland Public Library.

The copy of the 1808 quarto for which Robert Scott of Edinburgh subscribed (its effect upon him is described in Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. William Minto [1892] 1: 21-22), with (1) a description of “1844” by his son David Scott (quoted somewhat approximately in Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” [1863] 1: 377), the bookplate and signature of his other son William Bell Scott (“5 March 1849”), and (2) a sonnet by W. B. Scott (quoted in Scott’s Autobiographical Notes [1892] 1: 23-24, and in George Goyder, “An Unpublished [sic] Poem about Blake by William Bell Scott, ‘On seeing again after many years William Blake’s designs for “the Grave,”’” Blake Newsletter 10 [1976]: 125) was sold with the library of George Goyder at Christie’s, 26 November 1997, Lot 103, and bought by Dr. A. E. K. L. B. Bentley for G. E. Bentley, Jr.

Bonnycastle, John, Introduction to Mensuration (1782, 1787, 1791, 1794)

D 1794 New Location: Huntington.

Dante, Blake’s Illustrations of Dante (1838)

Editions

§Dante. La Divina Comedia. Tr. Francisco José Alcántara, prólogo de Marcial Oliver. La Divina Comedia en la literatura español, por Joaquin Arce. Illustraciones de William Blake. (Barcelona, 1969) <BBS 208>. B. §(Barcelona: Nauta, D.L., 1987) 2 vols., 451 pp., 22 cm., Clasicos universales, Vol. 14-15 ISBN: 84-278-144-8. C. (1989)

Emlyn, Henry, A Proposition for a New Order in Architecture (1781, 1784, 1797)

1781 New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

Gay, John, Fables (1793, [1811])

Copies of Unrecorded Date: New Location: Auckland Public Library.

Blake’s engravings may have been copied not from the first printings of these designs, Vol. 1 in 1727 and Vol. 2 in 1738 (as implied by Keynes, BB, Essick, Blake’s Commercial begin page 153 | ↑ back to top Book Illustrations, et al.), but from the designs re-engraved by Gerard Van Der Gucht (London: C. Hitch, L. Hawes, et al. 1757). The evidence for this conclusion is chiefly that, compared to the original versions, the 1757 designs reverse right and left and the format is vertical rather than horizontal. The 1762 and 1767 editions revert to the earliest formats. See Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997,” Blake (1998).

Hayley, William Ballads (1805)

New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

Hayley, William, Life of . . . William Cowper, Esq. (1803-04)

A New Location: Auckland Public Library.

Hayley, William, Triumphs of Temper (1803)

1803 New Location: Auckland Public Library.

In a copy of the work inscribed “From the Author,” the plates are colored (BB 579); John Windle and Dr. E. B. Bentley do not think the coloring Blake-like, though George Goyder did. The book was sold from Goyder’s library at Christie’s, 26 November 1997, Lot 101 (£3,500).

Hunter, William, Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson, and Norfolk Island (1793)

A New Location: Auckland Public Library.

Lavater, J. C., Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98; 1810; 1792 [i.e., 1817])

1810 New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

Malkin, B. H., A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806)

A working proof of Cromek’s engraving of Blake’s design like that in the BMPR <BBS 237> is in the collection of Robert N. Essick (see his “Blake in the Marketplace, 1995,” Blake 30 [1996]: 63).

Monthly Magazine (1797)

New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

Stedman, John Gabriel, Narrative (1796, 1806, 1813)

1796 New Locations: Auckland Public Library, Yale Center for British Art.

Virgil, The Pastorals (1821)

New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

Blake’s drawings for “Thenot and Colinet Converse Seated Beneath Two Trees” and “For Him our Yearly Wakes and Feasts We Hold” reappeared after 70 years and were sold at Sotheby’s, 13 November 1997, Lot 56 (reproduced) to Robert N. Essick.

For a census of Blake’s designs for Virgil’s Eclogues in the collections of the Beinecke Library (Yale University) (1), Robert N. Essick (2), Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge University) (2), Houghton Library (Harvard University) (2), Pierpont Morgan Library (3), Princeton Art Museum (1), Maurice Sendak (1), Arthur Versbow (1), and untraced (7), see Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997,” Blake (1998).

Whitaker, John, The Seraph (1818-28)

A Printed by Button, Whitaker and Comp New Location: Yale Center for British Art.

C Printed for Jones & C^o New Location: GEB.

Part IV Catalogues and Bibliographies

23-25 July 1923

Catalogue of the Valuable Contents [of] 185, Camberwell Grove, Denmark Hill, [London] S.E., [sold 23-25 July 1923] at the Residence By Order of the Executor of R.C. Jackson by Messrs. Goddard & Smith (22 King Street, St. James,’ London, S.W.1, 1923).

The catalogue offers works which are said to have belonged to William Blake (#159, 182, 245, 287, 293, 465, 579f, 737, 812, 861), Thomas Carlyle (#466, 470), Charles Dickens (#966), David Garrick (#556, 571), Dr. Johnson (#538), Charles Lamb (#137, 475, 506-07, 509-10, 512-13, 516), Michael Angelo (#579), and “The Poet Schiller” (#464). Two of the Lamb items are said to have come from the “Moxon sale, 1805” (#506-07—see below), when Lamb’s friend Edward Moxon was four years old. The significant Blakes are 182 “By Blake. A bust Portrait of Dante (12-in. by 9-in.); a ditto of Chaucer with red cap (16-in. by 13-in.).” Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) lists no portrait such as these two and nothing owned by R.C. Jackson.

245 “a fine pen and ink drawing with inscription and figure cartoon by William Blake.”

293 “Engraving, The Canterbury Pilgrims [?by Blake, 1810], a ditto, Scene from The Beggars Opera, Act III [surely by Blake, 1790], . . . and a letter from William Blake to Flaxman.” BB 276n3 guesses this may be the letter of 12 September 1800. The “Canterbury Pilgrims” is not in Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake (1983), though Essick does suggest (154) that the “R. Jackson” who gave a copy to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1889 may be Richard C. Jackson.

465 “Heppelwhite open arm mahogany chair with seat begin page 154 | ↑ back to top and back in velvet. FORMERLY THE PROPERTY OF WILLIAM BLAKE, THE POET.” There is no other reference to such a chair which belonged to Blake, and its present whereabouts (if it survives) is unknown.

579f “WILLIAM BLAKE’S PAINTING TABLE, with leather centre, tilting top and on tripod (formerly Gainsborough’s) (20-in. by 15-in.).” (See illus. 6).

737 “The Book of Thel, by William Blake, 1789, in board cover, quarto size, 39 copies, and 23 royal quarto ditto.” This is plainly not the “1789” edition; probably it is the edition “Printed as Manuscript” in 1917 for the William Blake Society, of which Richard C. Jackson was President.

812 “The Library of William Blake, 25 vols., and 12 vols., various, in paper covers.” Anon., “Felpham and the Poet-Painter Blake. The Thirty-fourth Meeting of the William Blake Society . . .,” Observer and West Sussex Recorder, 27 May 1914, said “books, with Blake’s Autograph” were lent for display at the meeting by R.C. Jackson (BB 681n1), but no book known to have been owned by Blake has any known association with Richard C. Jackson.

It is difficult to believe that Blake, Lamb, et al. had any connection with these works before Richard C. Jackson acquired them.⁵⁶↤ ⁵⁶ Carl H. Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library,” Harvard Library Bulletin 10 (1956): 208-39, 367-402, says: “it must be doubted whether Lamb owned any” of the 116 volumes which Jackson claimed came from Lamb’s library. Jackson was capable of “believing what he wanted to believe”;⁵⁷↤ ⁵⁷ Anon., “An Eccentric Recluse—Mr Jackson and Walter Pater,” Times, 30 July 1923, 8. he called himself Brother à Becket, wore monastic robes in the street, and kept his house in an “indescribable condition of filth and neglect.”⁵⁸↤ ⁵⁸ Anon., “Richard C. Jackson. Eccentric Camberwell Recluse who Collected Everything. Died as He Lived,” South London Press, 3 Aug 1923.

Jackson “claimed descent from Capt. Jackson of the ‘Essays of Elia,’”⁵⁹↤ ⁵⁹ G. W. Wrigley, “Jackson of the Red House, Hackney,” Notes and Queries 153 (9 July 1927), 28. Lamb’s “dear old friend,” whom he described as “a retired half-pay [naval] officer, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance.⁶⁰↤ ⁶⁰ Charles Lamb, “Captain Jackson,” The Last Essays of Elia (1833).

As Lamb does not mention a son of his old friend Captain Jackson, it seems very unlikely that Richard C. Jackson was descended from him.

Jackson’s grandfather was probably Francis Jackson (born c. 1784), “Citizen, Merchant and Ship Owner, of London, (Offices, Rood Lane E.C. Admitted Freeman of the Paviour City Company, 14th March, 1805.) Red House, Mare Street, Hackney” whose bookplate, headed “RELICS OF CHARLES LAMB Purchased at Edward Moxon’s Sale” is in, inter alia, GEB’s copy of John Gay, Fables (London: J. Buckland et al., 1788). His parents were Susanah and Richard Charles Jackson of Preston, County Lancashire, to whom his The Risen Life: Hymns and Poems for the Christian Year (1883; 1886; 1888; 1889) is dedicated.

Richard C. Jackson (1851-1923) says that when he was “quite a boy” (c. 1860?), his father, who was born in 1810 and “associated with” Blake’s disciples, took him to tea in the house the Blakes had occupied in Hercules Buildings. There they saw Blake’s fig tree and “the luxurious vine . . . nestling round the open casement,” and his father told him that the vine and fig tree were a present to Blake from George Romney, the vine having been “grafted from the great vine at Versailles or Fontainbleau.”⁶¹↤ ⁶¹ Anon., “William Blake, An Unlooked for Discovery,” South London Observer, 22 June 1912. Since Jackson’s father was only 17 when Blake died and cannot have seen him in Hercules Buildings (which Blake left in 1800), and since R. C. Jackson himself is exceedingly unreliable, it is not easy to accept—or to ignore—his allegations. The vine was still rampant in the neglected garden of Blake’s house in 1916.

R. C. Jackson may have owned books and manuscripts and furniture which had belonged to William Blake, but he probably did not. It is ironic that the only pre-1820 works in Jackson’s sale which are almost certainly from Blake have no such claim made for them—the large prints of the “Canterbury Pilgrims” and Hogarth’s Beggar’s Opera.

8 August-2 October 1980

[Andrew Bogle.] William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job; Henry Fuseli, The Three Witches of Macbeth and Associated Works. [Exhibition at the] Auckland City Art Gallery August 8-October 2 1980. ([Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1980]).

A 17-page catalogue in typescript for Blake’s 22 Job engravings, 8 works by Fuseli, and others by Alexander Runciman and Richard Westall.

The Blake section is reprinted in the National Art Gallery of New Zealand catalogue of 11 February-25 March [1981?].

11 February-25 March [1981?]

* Andrew Bogle. William Blake: IIllustrations of the Book of Job. [Exhibition at the] National Art Gallery, 11 February-25 March [1981?]. ([Wellington, New Zealand: National Art Gallery, (1981?)]).

Except for the illustrated titlepage, this is identical to the Blake section of the Auckland City Art Gallery catalogue of 8 August-2 October 1980.

1990

Fitch, Donald, Blake Set to Music (1990) <BBS 309-10>.

Review

2 §Choice 33 (1995), 577+.

5 September-10 October 1992

§Nikolaus Utermöhlen. 1992 Nikolaus Utermöhlen “An Infinite Painting” on A Vision of the Last Judgment by William Blake 1808. Zwinger Galerie, Berlin, 5 September-10 October 1992.

“In lieu of a catalogue, the gallery issued an ‘artist’s book’ in an exceedingly small (and expensive) edition” (see Dörrbecker, below).

Reviews

1 §Anon., Die Tageszeitung, 15 September 1992 (very brief). 2 D. W. Dörrbecker, Blake 30 (1996-97): 82-87 (“the artist’s references to a Blakean model [are] . . . a fairly banal attempt to dignify with iconographical content . . . [an] experiment in replacing the old-fashioned brush with a xerox machine,” producing “a decorative color rhythm quite appropriate for a postmodern ice cream parlor” [83]).

1994

G. E. Bentley, Jr., & Keiko Aoyama, Blake Studies in Japan (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

Reviews

3 Karen Mulhallen, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada: Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada 34 (1996): 198-200 (high praise).

4 C. S. Matheson, University of Toronto Quarterly 66 (1996-97): 344-46 (with BBS) (“meticulous” and “invaluable”).

3 April-25 May 1995

* Dieter Löchle, William Blake—Roof’d in from Eternity: Erschienen als Begleitheft zur Ausstellung vom 3. April bis zum 25. Mai 1995 in der Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen. (Tübingen: Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, 1995) <Blake (§1996; 1997>.

Review

1 D. W. Dörrbecker, Blake 30 (1996-97): 82-87.

2 July-6 August 1995

§Jaume Plensa, “One thought fills immensity,” Städtische Galerie, Göppingen, Germany, 2 July-6 August 1995.

Review

1 D. W. Dörrbecker, Blake 30 (1996-97): 82-87 (Blake’s Proverbs are blind-stamped on polyester panels in “a highly personal interpretation of Blake” [85]).

1995

G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) <Blake (1996)>.

Reviews

2 James King, English Studies in Canada 23 (1997): 240-42 (it “does not attain quite the same high standards” in Part VI as Blake Books did [241]).

3 Bernice Bergup, American Reference Books Annual 27 (1996): 524 (“Scholars . . . can only applaud his thoroughness”).

4 C. S. Matheson, University of Toronto Quarterly 66 (1996-97): 344-46 (with Blake Studies in Japan) (“exemplary”).

2 February-7 April; 17 April-2 June 1996

William Blake: visiones de mundos eternos (1757-1827): [Exhibition] 2 de febrero-7 de abril de 1996 [at the] Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación “la Caixa,” Madrid. [Tr. Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, Russell B. Sacks, & Elvira Villena.] (Madrid: Fundación “la Caixa,” 1996) 4°, 262 pp. in Spanish, 180 plates; ISBN: 84-7664-537-6. <Blake (1997)>. B. William Blake: visions de mons eterns (1757-1827): [Exhibition] 17 d’abril-2 de juny de 1996 [at the] Centre Cultural de la Fundacio “la Caixa,” Barcelona. [Tr. Ignasi Sardá, Russell B. Sachs, Elvira Villena.] (Barcelona: Fundació “la Caixa,” 1996) 4°, 262 pp. in Catalan, 180 plates; ISBN: 84-7664-538-4. <Blake (1997)>.

The two catalogues are identical except that (1) the Madrid version is in Spanish and the Barcelona version in Catalan {the Catalan titles are given within curly brackets below} and (2) Plates 28f-i are mislabeled^[e] in the Madrid version and in the wrong order but are correct in the Barcelona version.

Note: The reviews indicate that 180 works were exhibited in Madrid and 150 in Barcelona.

Robin Hamlyn is the Comisaro or Curator of the exhibition.

The book (A) consists of:

1. 1 Luis {Lluis} Monreal (Director General, Fundación “la Caixa”), “Presentación” {“Presentacio”} (11), “Foreword” (217): A prime reason for organizing the Blake exhibition is “the fact that his work is not present in any Spanish museum or collection.”

2. 2 Robin Hamlyn, “William Blake (1757-1827)” (12-29 in Spanish {and Catalan}; 219-28 in English): A general account for a Spanish audience.

3. 3 Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Blake y Goya: convergencias y divergencias entre dos mundos” {“Blake i Goya: convergencies i divergencies entre dos mons”} (31-42); “Blake and Goya: Convergence and Divergence between Two Worlds” (229-35): Concerns “Flaxman’s possible influence on Goya” (231), with an aside on Fuseli and a paragraph on Blake.

4. 4 Estella de Diego, “La invención de William Blake” {“La invenció de William Blake”} (43-52); “The Invention of William Blake” (237-42): “Blake is pervaded by life,” and “it is hard to tell just how much the Surrealists actually read of Blake” (240, 237).

5. 5 *[Adela Morán & Montserrat Gómez], “Catalogo” {“Cataleg”} (53-210, with descriptions only of the 180 color plates reproduced, which include Innocence [X], Europe [B], and the Job engravings [1826]); “Catalogue” (243-59 in English of all 188 items exhibited).

6. 6 “Bibliografia” (211-13); “Literature” (261-62).

Reviews, Announcements, Notices⁶²↤ ⁶² In general, reviews (etc.) before mid-April 1996 are for the Madrid exhibition and later ones for the Barcelona exhibition; many of those printed in Barcelona are in Catalan.

1 Anon., “Un Maldito entre Nosotros,” tiempo [Madrid], 13 November 1995.

2 Anon., “Balthus, Ensor, Blake & Barcello,” ABC [Madrid], 29 December 1995.

3 *Ramón Mayrata, “William Blake el Profeta Furtivo,” El Pais [Barcelona], 27 January 1996.

4 *Felipe Pereda, “William Blake: Dibujos Grabados y Palmas de un Profeta del Siglo XVIII,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 28 January 1996.

5 *Alvaro Delgado-Gal, “William Blake, un visionario,” ABC [Madrid], 2 February 1996, 34.

6 *Anon., “Blake reivindica la ‘libertad del artista’: Se exponen por pumera vez en España 180 obras del pintor y poeta,” El Pais [Barcelona], 2 February 1996.

7 *Isabel Hurtardo, “William Blake, en poeta que cambió el arte británico del siglo XVIII: Inventó una nueva forma de expression plastica que combinahe el dibujo y el texto: La Fundación La Caixa ofreca una investra de la obra completa [sic] del artista inglés,” Ya [Madrid], 2 February 1996.

8 *Miguel Angel Trenas, “‘La Caixa’ muestra en Madrid la obra gráfica del pintor y poeta William Blake,” La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 2 February 1996.

9 *J. A. Alvarez Reyes, “Las visiones de William Blake: la Fundación La Caixa muestra 180 acuarelas y grabados del dibujante romántico que permanencerán expuestas hasta el próximo 7 de abril,” Diario 16 (Madrid), 2 February 1996 (with a paragraph about “Relación Blake y Goya”).

10 *Anon. (Efe⁶³↤ ⁶³ Efe (or EFE) is a news-agency; the Efe entries often repeat whole paragraphs verbatim. ), “La Caixa presenta hoy en Madrid las ‘visiones eternas’ de William Blake: Sus escritos y cuadros influyeron notablemente en románticos y simbolistas,” Diaria de León, 2 February 1996.

11 Anon. (Efe), “La Fundación la Caixa muestra en Madrid mas de 180 obras de William Blake,” El Correo [Sevilla], 2 February 1996.

12 *Anon. (Efe), “‘Visiones eternas,’ de Blake, en La Caixa de Madrid: La muestra reúne más de 180 dibujos y grabados del artista londinense del siglo XVIII,” Alerta (Santandar), 2 February 1996.

13 Anon. (Efe), “Las visiones eternas de William Blake se exponen en la Fundación La Caixa,” El Ideal Gallego [La Coruña], 2 February 1996.

14 * Anon. (Efe), “William Blake: visiones de mundos eternas reúne en Madrid más de 180 trabajos del artista: La muestra se inaugura hoy en la fundación La Caixa,” Diario de Noticias [Pamplona], 2 February 1996.

15 *Anon. (Efe), “Las visiones eternas de William Blake, a través de dibujos, acuarelas y grabados: La exposición del pintor británico reune simbólico,” La verdad [Murcia], 2 February 1996.

16 Anon. (Efe), “Le Fundación La Caixa acoge la muestra ‘William Blake: visiones de mundos eternas’: Su la institución, con sede en Madrid, pueden verse 180 obras del artista,” Sur [Malaga], 2 February 1996.

17 Anon. (Efe), “Exponen en Madrid mas de 180 obras del poeta y pintor británico William Blake,” El Correo Español [Bilbao], 2 February 1996.

18 Anon., “Esposicion de Blake,” Diaro de Navarra [Pamplona], 2 February 1996 (1 paragraph).

19 Anon. (Agencias), “Las visiones eternas de Blake, en Madrid,” Atlantico Diário [Vigo], 2 February 1996.

20 * Miguel Morán Turina, “Visiones eternas: Por primera vez puede verse en España la obra de William Blake,” Diario 16 (Madrid), 3 February 1996, 9.

21 Anon., “William Blake,” Revista Iberia, 7 February 1996, in English and Spanish.

22 Anon., “Las visiones de William [sic] en la fundación La Caixa,” Cordoba, 8 February 1996.

23 *Anon., “Mundos Externos,” tiempo [Madrid], 12 February 1996 (one short paragraph).

24 Anon., “La Caixa patrocina una exposición y un catálogo de William Blake,” Gaceta de los Negocios [Madrid], 14 February 1996.

25 Anon., “William Blake,” Comunidad Escolar [Madrid], 14 February 1996 (one short paragraph).

26 *Elena Delgado Castro, “Las visiones interiores de un artista inglés: William Blake, por primera vez en España: Se reúnen en Madrid 180 dibujos acuarelas y grabados del pintor,” Ya [Madrid], 16 February 1996, 60.

27-28 Anon., “Héroes clásicos,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 17 February 1996; 7 April 1996 (almost identical).

29 *Anon., “William Blake: ‘El hijo pródigo,’” Semanal Antenna [Madrid], 18 February 1996, 32-35.

30 *Perez Gállego, “Madrid muestra la obra pictória del poeta William Blake: William Blake nos ofreció unas visiones de mundos eternos que a hora se recogen en una brillante exposición organizada por la Fundación La Caixa en la capital de España,” Heraldo de Aragon [Zaragoza], 19 February 1996.

31 *Anon., “Los héroes de William Blake,” Guía del Ocio [Madrid], 19 February 1996 (one paragraph).

32 *Anon., “Visiones de mundos eternos en Fundación La Caixa,” Cinco Días, 23 February 1996, 35 (one paragraph).

33 *Julián Gállego, “William Blake: Meditaciones Poéticas,” Bianco Negro [Madrid], 25 February 1996, 30-35.

34 *Anon., “Entre el paraíso y el infierno: William Blake en la Caixa,” Epoca [Madrid], 26 February 1976, 2 pp.

35 *Anon., “William Blake, por primavera vez en España,” el nuevo lunes [Madrid], 26 February 1996.

36 *Lydia Garrido, “William Blake,” El Siglo [Madrid], 26 February 1976, 53.

37 *Juan Giron Roger, “Más allá de la mirada de un visionario: William Blake, en la Fundacion La Caixa,” Dinero [Madrid], 26 February 1996, 96-97.

38-39 *Anon., “William Blake: Una Mirada Differente,” Revista Bellas Artes, February 1996, 4-5; Casa & Jardin [Madrid], March 1996, 4-5.

40 Anon., “William Blake,” Revista Arte Omega, February-March 1996, 59.

41 *Marcos-Ricardo Barnatan, “El tigre de Blake,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 9 March 1996.

42 *Juan Carlos Melagón, “Los paraísos perdidos de Blake: La obra del poeta y pintor visionario,” Guía del Ocío [Madrid], 11 March 1996.

43 Anon., “‘Los mundos eternos’ de William Blake: Salas de la Fundación ‘La Caixa,’ Madrid,” Nueva Alcarria, 15 March 1996 (one paragraph).

44 Anon., “Los paraísos perdidas,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 23 March 1996.

45 Anon., “William Blake, genio y visionario,” Ideal [Granada], 23 March 1996.

46 *Pedro Alfageme Ruano, “Sublime William Blake,” El Correo [Sevilla], 24 March 1996.

47 *Juan J. Luna, “Las imagenes de Blake,” Tribuna de Actualidad, 25 March 1996, 66-67.

48 *Alpy, “Blake, romántico y visionario,” Cordoba, 28 March 1996.

49 *Anon., “Poeta y pintor,” Economics [Madrid], March 1996 (one paragraph).

50 *Anon., “William Blake,” Ronda Iberia, March 1996, 7 (one paragraph).

51 *Anon., “William Blake,” Nuevo Estilo [Barcelona], March 1996, 78 (one paragraph).

52 *Anon., “William Blake, visiones de mundos eternos,” Correo del Arte [Madrid], March 1996, 35.

53 *Pilar Gómez, “William Blake: Artista simbolista,” Reseña [Madrid], No. 270 (March 1996): 41.

54 *Harry Kampianne, “William Blake, peintre-poète,” Muséart, March 1996, 101.

55 *Luis Racionero, “William Blake: El profeta de la New Age,” Ajoblanco [Barcelona], March 1996, 58-61.

56 *Guillermo Solana, “El demiurgo ambidiestro: William Blake, visiones del mundos eternas,” Arquitectara Viva [Madrid], March-April 1996, 61-63.

57 Anon., “Romanticismo sublime,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 1 April 1996.

58 *Anon., “William Blake,” Tribuna de Actualidad, 1 April 1996 (one paragraph).

59 *Anon., “‘Los mundos eternos’ de William Blake: Salas de la Fundación ‘la Caixa,’ Madrid,” Nueva Alcarra, 5 April 1996.

60 *Anon., “William Blake,” El Pais [Barcelona], 12 April 1996.

61 *Anon., “William Blake, l’avanlguarda actual vista al segle XVIII,” Avui [Barcelona], 12 April 1996.

62 *Jorge Muñoz, “William Blake,” inversión, 12 April 1996, 57-58.

63 *Anon., “Los mundos eternos de William Blake,” Guía del Ou o, 12-18 April 1996.

64 *Anon., “Innovadores de distinto signo,” El Periódico [Barcelona], 14 April 1996.

65 Anon., “Barclani, William Blake,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 14 April 1996.

66 *Olga Spiegel, “Sublime William Blake,” La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 14 April 1996, 3 pp.

67 Anon., “Spain, Barcelona,” International Herald Tribune, 15 April 1996.

68 Anon., “Exposiciones: William Blake,” El Periódico [Barcelona], 16 April 1996.

69 *Catalina Serra, “El arte visionario de Blake, en Barcelona: La Fundación La Caixa exhibibe mas de 150 obras del creador inglés,” El Pais [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

70 Olga Spiegel, “Una exposición muestra al Blake dibujante y grabador,” La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 17 April 1996 [a different story than the one above].

71 *Marie-Claire Uberquoi, “La Fundació la Caixa reúne acuarelas, dibujas y grabados de William Blake: Ningún museo-espanól tiene obra de este precursor del romanticismo: Las imágines más fascinantes del artista corresponden a los monotipos,” El Mundo [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

72 *Maria Angela Molina, “La sicodelia visionara de William Blake, en la Fundació la Caixa,” ABC [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

73 *Anon., “La Fundació ‘la Caixa’ discubra las profecías y visiones de William Blake,” ABC [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

74 *Monse Frisch, “L’obra de l’illumant’ William Blake arriba per primer cop a Barcelona: La Fundació La Caixa expasa un ampli conjunt de debuixos i gravats de l’innovador artista i poeta britanic,” Avui [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

75 Anon., “Muestu sobra las visiones de William Blake,” El Periódico [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

76 Anon. (Efe), “La Fundació ‘la Caixa’ exposa 150 pintures del poeta William Blake,” Punt Diari [Girona], 17 April 1996.

77 Anon., “S’inaugarer avui a Barcelona l’exposició de William Blake,” Diari de Girona, 17 April 1996.

78 M. Carme Gironès Oms, “Proposar William Blake,” Avui [Barcelona], 19 April 1996.

79 *Anon., “Des del 19 d’abril al Centre Cultural de Barcelona: ‘William Blake, visions de mons eterns,’” Panorama ([Barcelona: Fundació “la Caixa”] Abril 1996), 1, 16 (in Catalan) (announcement of the exhibition).

80 *Anon, “William Blake en la Caixa de Barcelona,” Museos, April-May 1996, 2 pp.

81 *Glória Bosch, “Un artiste visionaro: William Blake en el Centre Cultural de la Fundació ‘la Caixa,’” Guía del Ocio, 2 May 1996.

82 Anon., “Barcelona Art: ‘William Blake—Visions of Eternal Worlds,’” Wall Street Journal, 3 May 1996.

83 *Toni Dias, “William Blake, un visionari incomprès,” Revista Barcelona, 6 May 1996, 15.

6 A mahogany painting-table of c. 1780; when it was examined recently, it proved to have in the drawer a copy of R. C. Jackson’s 1923 catalogue and a drawing representing Blake.   The 1923 catalogue alleged without evidence that the table had been given by Gainsborough to Blake. Wilkie Collins also owned a Gainsborough painting-table, perhaps this very one. The table is now in London.

84 *Herve Gauville, “Virée catalane pour Blake le roc: Arts: A Barcelona, deux cents [sic] œuvres de William Blake, poète britanique du siècle dernier, artiste visionnaire et précurseur des conceptuels et minimalistes,” Libération, 9 May 1996.

85 *M. Montserrat Castillo, “Blake: visiones de mons eterns,” Avui [Barcelona], 9 May 1996.

86 *Tina Casademont, “Les visions eternes del William Blake dibuixant,” Punt Diari [Girona], 12 May 1996, 2 pp.

87 *Anon., “William Blake,” La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 14 May 1996.

88 *Alan Fleischer, “La Agenda de Hoy: Dia para propuestas inovadoras: contemplar edificues areque téctonicos naveganda por Internet, asistir a una muestra de coches de jugueta o ver peliculas del siempre conliovertido Alan Fleischer,” El Periódico de Catalunya [Barcelona],^[e] 14 May 1996.

89 Antoni Morell, “La Fundació ‘la Caixa,’” Opinió [Andorra], 19 May 1996, 13.

90 Anon., “William Blake, la Fundació la Caixa,” El Nou [Osona i Ripolles], 31 May 1996.

91 *Anon., “William Blake: Hasta el 2 de Juni—Fundació La Caixa Barcelona,” Casa & Jardin [Madrid], May 1996, 28 (one paragraph).

92 *Anon., “William Blake: un recursor a la Fundació ‘la Caixa,’” Barcelona informació cultural, May 1996 (one paragraph).

93 *Sara Armada, “William Blake (1757-1827): Visions de Mons Eterns: Centre Cultural de la Fundació La Caixa de passeig de Sant Edan,” Revista Barsalona, May 1996.

94 *Hans Móller, “La aventura vitalle William Blake,” Economics [Madrid], May 1996, 70-71.

95-96 *Anon., “Visiones de William Blake,” Regió 7 (Manresa], 1 June 1996; 3 June 1996.

97 *Roman Caselé, “Incisione e Presagi: La Fundacio la Caixa presenta a Madrid e Barcelona una mostra di William Blake,” Arte in: Bimestrale di critica e d’informagune delle arti visione, Anno 9 (June 1996): 53-54.

98 *Flor García, “William Blake: Aguest enigmàtic artista, poeta i gravador londinene ha estat protaginista el mes de maig d’una important exposició a la Fundació ‘la Caixa,’” Revista Illustradeó, July-August 1996.

99 *María Correas, “Más allá: William Blake: Visiones de mundos eternos Fundación ‘La Caixa,’” Gaceta de Belles Artes, No. 6 ([1996]): 34-35.

100 *Shantigarbha. “Visions of Eternity: Blake in Madrid: Exhibition at Fundacion ‘la Caixa,’ Madrid, February-April 1996,” Urthona 6 (1996): 83 (“an important event”). <Blake (1997)>.

14 November 1996

*Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Drawings and Watercolours. Auction: Thursday, 14 November, 1996, Sotheby’s (London: Sotheby’s, 1996)

The 28 Bunyan watercolors and the drawing of “The First Temptation” (Paradise Regained) from The Frick Collection (all reproduced in color in various sizes) were offered (estimate £260,000-£340,000) but apparently attracted not a single bid.

2 April-6 July 1997

*Patrick Noon. The Human Form Divine: William Blake from the Paul Mellon Collection. (New Haven & London: Yale UP [for the] Yale Center for British Art], 1997) 4°, pp. i-vii, 1-87, 61 color plates; ISBN: 0-300-07174 (cloth) and 0-930606-81-7 (paper).

A catalogue of an exhibition of Paul Mellon’s Blakes 2 April-6 July 1997 (75-87), preceded by Patrick McCaughey, “Preface” (vii-viii) and Patrick Noon, “Introduction” [chiefly a history of Paul Mellon’s collections] (1-12). The “Introduction” is “adapted” in his “A ‘Mad’ but Compelling Vision: At the heart of the British Art Center’s collection is a trove of delicate works on paper by the English poet and artist William Blake. A show opening this month illustrates the breadth and depth of his durably disturbing appeal,” Yale Alumni Magazine 60 (April 1997): 26-32.

Reviews

1 *Deborah Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 23 April 1997, A16 (a “fascinating show” which suggests that Blake, “the British Van Gogh,” “is about as unbuttoned as they come” and that his “etchings grow hairier and hotter over time”).

2 *Milton Moore, “‘The Human Form Divine: William Blake’: A Man for all Millennia.” The Day [Connecticut], 13 April 1997, CI, 5 (chiefly derived from an interview with Patrick Noon; the exhibits are “visually stunning”).

13 April-6 July 1997

The Visionary Company: Blake’s Contemporaries and Followers. [Catalogue of an exhibition] April 13-July 6, 1997 [at the] Yale Center for British Art. ([New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1997]) 4° height, 12° width, 20 pp., no ISBN recorded.

The little work consists of:

1. 1 Anon., “Blake’s Contemporaries and Context.” 2-4.

2. 2 Jessica Todd Smith, “Visioning the Visionaries: Images of and by Blake’s Followers.” 5-7.

3. 3 Anon., “Checklist of the Exhibition.” 7-19.

1 November-11 January 1997

*Malcolm Cormack. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job. [Exhibition 1 November 1997-11 January 1998 at the] Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1997) 4°, viii, 84; ISBN: 0-91706-49-8.

The work consists of (1) Katherine C. Lee (Director, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), “Foreword” (v); (2) Malcolm Cormack, “Preface” (vi-vii); (3) “Acknowledgements” (viii); (4) “William Blake: Chronology” (1-6), (5) “Blake Studies and Engravings for the Book of Job: Introduction”; (6) David Bindman, “Afterword: The Book of Job Designs” (75-82, “adapted and reprinted . . . from his introduction to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job” [Blake Trust, 1987] <BBS >), plus (7) reproductions of all the Job engravings and many drawings for it.

Part VI Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies

Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) 8°, 399 pp., 136 reproductions; ISBN: 1-85619-278 4 <Blake (1996)>. B. (London: Minerva, 1996) 8°, xv, 442 pp., 64 reproductions; ISBN: 0-7493-9176-6 C. (N.Y.: Ballantine Books, July 1997) 8°, 398 pp., 121 plates; ISBN: 345-37611-0.

The 1996 paperback edition is reset without acknowledged change on paper about 1″ × 1″ smaller; all the reproductions on the 1995 text-pages are omitted in the 1996 edition, and the other reproductions are reduced in size.

The 1997 hard cover edition seems to be reproduced from the 1995 edition.

Reviews

21 §Observer Review 3 September 1995, 14.

22 §New Statesman and Society [Middlesex, N.J.] 8 (8 September 1995): 36.

23 §Times, 11 September 1995, 17, and 14 September 1995, 38.

24 §Spectator 275 (23 September 1995): 36+.

25 §Maclean’s 107 (6 November 1995): 80.

26 §Spectator 275 (25 November 1995): 48.

27 §Observer [London], 26 November 1995, 7.

28 §Publishers Weekly 243 (26 February 1996): 90 (combines “meticulous scholarship with uncanny psychological insight”†).

29 §Library Journal [Merion, Ohio] 121 (1 April 1996): 80+.

30 § Wall Street Journal [Mid-West Edition] 77 (9 April 1996): A17 (“Superb . . . makes Blake live”†).

31 § New York Times Book Review 101 (14 April 1996): 5 (“a brilliant guide and interpreter”†).

32 §Los Angeles Times Book Review, 19 May 1996, 4.

33 §New Yorker 72 (27 May 1996): 126+ (“he is always letting his bucket deeper and deeper down the historical well”†).

34 §Bookwatch [Oregon, Wisconsin] 17 (May 1996): 8.

35 §Book World [Washington Post] 26 (12 May 1996): 1+.

36 §World & I [Washington, D.C.] 11 (August 1996): 260+.

37 §Wilson Quarterly [Palm Coast, Florida] 20 (1996): 96+.

38 §Antioch Review 54 (1996): 487+.

39 §Publishers Weekly 243 (4 November 1996): 42.

40 §New York Times Book Review 101 (8 December 1996): 85.

41 Morton Paley, Blake 30 (1996): 58-61 (because “questionable statements pervade Ackroyd’s Blake,” the book “is a disappointment” [59, 60]).

42 §Booklist [Aurora, Illinois] 92 (1996): 1338, 1349 (“intelligently researched and highly sensitive”†).

43 §Kirkus Reviews [N.Y.] 64 (1996): 267 (“so sensitive to its subject, it seems to have conjured [Blake] from the beyond”†).

44 §Booklist 93 (January 1997): 359.

45 §Choice 34 (May 1997): 1493.

46 §Baltimore Sun (“Fascinating”†).

47 §Chicago Tribune (“lyrical and illuminating”†).

48 §Daily News [N.Y.?] (“always absorbing . . . admirable”†).

49 §Miami Herald (“The events of Blake’s life are radiantly resurrected here”†).

50 §St. Louis Post-Dispatch (“Splendid . . . Peter Ackroyd humanizes Blake”†).

51 §San Francisco Chronicle (“Ackroyd . . . plays with the oddities of time and reality”†).

52 §Sunday Oregonian (“Refreshing . . . stylish narrative”†).

53 §Virginian-Pilot (“Readers almost feel what Blake felt when he saw the visions”†).

† = quoted from the puffs on the Ballantine edition.

*Ahearn, Edward J. “An Anatomy of the Visionary: Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Chapter 1 (13-33, 175-78) of his Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age. (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1996) Also passim.

*Allen, Graham. “Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” 217-23 of chapter 9 (“Romantic allegory,” 205-20) in Approaching Literature: Romantic Writings. Ed. Stephen Bygrave. (London: Routledge, 1996).

Discussion and question in a book “designed to prepare readers for higher levels of study” [at the Open University] (v).

Allen, L. H. “Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller.’” Southerly: The Magazine of the Australian English Association 2 (April 1941): 25-27.

An analysis of the interpretations of the poem by W. M. Rossetti and Damon “stressing certain analogies with Tiriel” (25), as a supplement to his essay on Tiriel.

Allen, L. H. “Tiriel: The Death of a Culture.” Australian Quarterly 12 (June 1940): 158-66.

Mostly paraphrase in the service of allegory; “Milton is the prototype of Tiriel” (60).

An, Young-ok. “Between Prometheus and the monster: Gender configurations in Romantic revolutionary poetics.” DAI 57 (1997): 3945A. Southern California Ph.D., 1996.

Concerns Blake (especially Milton), Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

*Anon. “New Exhibition: William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job.” Calendar Virginia Museum of Fine Art, 80 (November-December 1997): 3-5.

Announcement of the 1997 exhibition.

Aoyama, Keiko. “Blake no ‘London’ ni taisuru mouhitotsu no Yomi no Kanosei—Bungaku Tekusuto no seijiteki Chihei aruiwa Romantikku Rabu: A Realizable Possibility to Read William Blake’s ‘London’: A Secret Relationship between Political Consciousness and Romantic Love in Literary Texts.” Gakushuin Joshi Tankidaigaku Kiyo: Bulletin of Gakushuin Women’s Junior College 35 (1997): 23-25. In Japanese.

§*Baker, Marcia. If You Only Imagine: The Wondrous World of William Blake. (San Francisco: A K Press Distribution, September 1996) ISBN: 1-858-63837-2, $9.95. (N.b. The information above derives from Books in Print 1997, but A K Press, Inc. of San Francisco tells me that this “is not a title we carry.”)

A shorter version appeared in Journal of the Blake Society of St James, [I] (1995): 26-30.

Barry, Robert Adrian, III. “Songs of innocence and experience: Annie Dillard’s and Denise Levertov’s discovery of the silken twine of joy that runs through creation.” DAI 57 (1996): 688-689A. Saint Louis University Ph.D., 1995.

Chapter 4 focuses on “the belief, shared by Dillard, Levertov, and William Blake, that the imagination connects the individual with the world and God,” and chapter 5 is on Blake and Jung.

§*Baskin, Leonard. “Blake.” Massachusetts Review 5 (Autumn 1963): 102.

Baulch, David Monroe. “Forms sublime’: William Blake’s aesthetics of the sublime in ‘The Four Zoas,’ ‘Milton,’ and begin page 160 | ↑ back to top ‘Jerusalem.’” DAI 57 (1997): 3029. Washington Ph.D., 1996. Deals particularly with Golgonooza, Burke, and Kant.

Baulch, David M. “‘To rise from generation’: the sublime body in William Blake’s illuminated books.” Word and Image 13 (1997): 340-65.

A reading of “To Tirzah” in the context of Burke, Reynolds, and the sublime.

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 29, Number 4 ([July] 1996)

1 Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1995, Including a Survey of Blakes in Private Ownership.” 108-30. (Text inadvertently omitted from 117-18 is given in Blake 30 [1996]: 62-63.)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 30, Number 2 (1996 [1997])

1 Lane Robson & Joseph Viscomi. “Blake’s Death.” 36-49. (Blake probably died of “liver failure due to biliary cirrhosis,” one of the causes of which is “sclerosing cholangitis” which might have been “caused or aggravated by chronic copper intoxication” [37], to which Blake was more subject than other engravers because the technique of relief-etching he invented requires much longer acid-biting and therefore more inhalation of the noxious copper-fumes than in ordinary intaglio etching.)

2 G. E. Bentley, Jr. “The Death of Blake’s Partner James Parker.” 49-51. (Details from his will.)

3 *Morton D. Paley. “William Blake, Jacob Ilive, and the Book of Jasher.” 51-54. (Blake may have known of the anti-Mosaic Book of Jasher, tr. Alcuin [i.e., forged by Jacob Ilive] [1751].)

Reviews

4 Michael J. Tolley. Review of The Continental Prophecies, ed. D.W. Dörrbecker (“199?”). 54-57. (It is an admirable “variorum edition.”)

5 Morton D. Paley. Review of Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995). 58-60. (Because “questionable statements pervade Ackroyd’s Blake,” the book “is a disappointment” [59, 60].)

6 Sheila A. Spector. Review of Eugenie R. Freed, “A Portion of His Life” (1994). 60-62. (“Freed’s book is provocative, relevant, learned, erudite, well documented, and painstakingly designed” [62].)

Errata

7 Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1995.” 62-63. (Supplies the text “inadvertently omitted” from 117-18 of Blake [1996].)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 30, Number 3 (1996-97)

1 Marc Kaplan. “Jerusalem and the Origins of Patriarchy.” 68-82. (“Blake’s vision is anti-patriarchal while still being hierarchically masculinist” [71].)

Review

2 *D. W. Dörrbecker. “Veils, Infinity, a Roof, and ‘One thought’ in Contemporary Art: A Note on Four Exhibitions.” 82-87. (The exhibitions are: [1] Verena Immerhauser, Vala: Arbeiten zu Blake, Berner Galerie, 1-24 November 1988, no catalogue; the shimmering plastic veils “irritated and fascinated the eye” [82]; [2] Dieter Löchle, William Blake: Roof’d in from Eternity, Universitätsbibliothek, Tübingen, 3 April-25 May 1995 <Blake (§1996; 1997)>; [3] Jaume Plensa, “One thought fills immensity,” Städtische Galerie, Göppingen, Germany, 2 July-6 August 1995 (see above)—Blake’s Proverbs are blind-stamped on polyester panels in “a highly personal interpretation of Blake” [85]; [4] Nikolaus Utermöhlen, 1992 Nikolaus Utermöhlen “An Infinite Painting” on A Vision of the Last Judgment by William Blake 1808. Zwinger Galerie, Berlin, 5 September-10 October 1992—“In lieu of a catalogue, the gallery issued an ‘artist’s book’ in an exceedingly small (and expensive) edition . . . briefly reviewed in Die Tageszeitung, 15 Sept. 1992”; “the artist’s references to a Blakean model [are] . . . a fairly banal attempt to dignify with iconographical content . . . [an] experiment in replacing the old-fashioned brush with a xerox machine,” producing “a decorative color rhythm quite appropriate for a postmodern ice cream parlor” [83].)

Minute Particulars

3 Helen Hollis. “Seeing Thel as Serpent.” 87-90. (Thel is “a parody or false Christ” whose “transformation into the serpent finally confirms her identity as Thel—Female Will” [89, 90].)

4 Deborah McCollister. “The Seduction of Self-Abnegation in The Book of Thel.” 90-94. (“If the female driving the snake is Thel, she looks not so much frightened as determined” [94]. For the restoration of a line which had dropped out, see “Correction,” Blake 31 (1997): 39.)

Newsletter

5 “Jah Wobble Inspired by Blake.” 95. (The “rock singer John Wardle, aka Jah Wobble” has recorded The Inspiration of William Blake, which, according to Robert Sandall, Sunday Times, 22 September 1966, 28, gives Blake’s poetry in a voice “somewhere between that of a panto villain and a loquacious London cabbie.”)

6 “Armand Hammer Museum Exhibition of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.” 95. (Prints from the Essick Collection will be shown 4 January-9 March 1997.)

7 “New Issue of Romanticism on the Net.” 95.

8 “Blake’s Notebook Facsimile Available.” 95. (The Erdman edition at $13.95.)

9 “Romantic Circles Web Site.” 95. (It is to be “a metaresource that will be openended, collaborative, and porous.”)

10 “Call For Papers: Carolinas Symposium on British Studies.” 95.

11 “Correction: Blake Archive.” 95. (The correct address is: http:/jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake.)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 30, Number 4 (Spring 1997)

1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1996.” 100-20. (An impressive survey.)

2 *G. E. Bentley, Jr., with the Assistance of Keiko Aoyama for Japanese Publications. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 1996.” 121-52.

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 31, Number 1 (1997)

1 Wes Chapman. “Blake, Wollstonecraft, and the Inconsistency of Oothoon.” 4-17. (“Blake is consistent with the letter of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy, but utterly at odds with its spirit” [13].)

2 R. Paul Yoder. “Not from Troy, But Jerusalem: Blake’s Canon Revision.” 17-21. (Jerusalem “is an attempt to replace the legacy of Trojan Brutus with a national/poetic myth based on Jesus” [19].)

3 Lorenz Becher. “Lorenz Becher: An Artist in Berne, Switzerland.” 22-24. (He “painted, sprayed, printed, masked on and steel wooled off” his “visual . . . reaction” to Blake’s Songs on top of his transcription of Blake’s text [22].)

Reviews

4 Christopher Heppner. Review of Frank Vaughan, Again to the Life of Eternity (1995). 24-29. (The book is characterized by “disturbing errors of fact,” Vaughan “too often ignores or misreads details,” the “interpretations bend the evidence uncomfortably at times,” and the book badly needs the attention of “both a good designer and a good copyeditor” [29, 27, 29, 24].)

5 David L. Clark. Review of Angela Esterhammer, Creating States (1994). 29-34. (“Esterhammer’s instantiation of Blake’s work” is “lucidly argued and elegantly written” [33, 30].)

6 John B. Pierce. Review of Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History (1995). 35-38. (Though “Lincoln is persuasive . . . I remain slightly unclear about the exact parameters of his notion of ‘history’” [37].)

7 James McKusick. Review of George Coats, 20/20. 38-39. (20/20 is “a dramatic and musical performance based on the life and work of William Blake” produced in Sao Paulo and San Francisco, with “Urizen playing the bass guitar” and with “digital manipulation of Blake’s paintings and engravings to create the illusion of three dimensions when viewed by the audience through special 3-D glasses.”)

8 “Correction.” 39. (Restoration of a line which had dropped out of Deborah McCollister, “The Seduction of Self-Abnegation in The Book of Thel,” Blake 30 [1996-97].)

Newsletter

9 “Tyger and Other Tales.” (A CD with “soft and smooth ‘art-rock’ renderings of romantic poems.”)

10 “Blake Society Web Site.” (It is “http://www.efirstop.demon.co.uk/BlakeSociety/.”)

11 “Blake Society Program for 1997.”

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 31, Number 2 (1997 [1998])

1 *Michael Phillips. “William Blake and the Sophocles Manuscript Notebook.” 44-49 plus 35 reproductions on 49-64. (The Sophocles Manuscript, “contain[ing] a series of what appear to be William Blake’s early autograph signatures,” “may have been in possession of [the poet] William Blake from . . . 1772-79 . . . probably through 1812” [45, 48].)

2 *G. E. Bentley, Jr. “William Blake and the Sophocles Enigma.” 65-71 plus 35 reproductions on 49-64. (“The handwriting in the Sophocles Manuscript is not that of [the poet] William Blake” [70].)

Review

3 A. A. Gill. “English File: Poetry Backpack: William Blake. BBC 2 daytime educational program for television. Broadcast Friday, 23 May 1997.” 71. Reprinted from The Sunday Times (London), Section 11, 31. (“This was frightful. Beyond parody or invective . . . [a] travesty.”)

Bolton, Betsy. “‘A Garment dipped in blood’: Ololon and Problems of Gender in Blake’s Milton.” Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 61-101.

About “the consequences of Blake’s ‘misreading’ of Ololon” and “Milton’s confusion over gender and eroticism” (66, 67).

Brandist, Craig. “Deconstructing the Rationality of Terror: William Blake and Daniil Kharms.” Comparative Literature 49 (1997): 59-75.

“For Bakhtin, Kharms, and Blake, to think critically is to be aware of the reverse of the actual” (74).

§Bresson, Marianne. William Blake: som teologisk udfordrin. (Copenhagen: Forlaget Arken, 1992 [i.e., 1993]) Arken-Tryk 105. ISSN: 0107-4520 [there is no ISBN], 61 pp.

*Brett, Bernard. “The Visionaries.” Chapter 24 (152-58) of his A History of Watercolour. (London: Optimum Books, 1984)

A standard chapter on Blake, with references to his disciples (including Flaxman), and a paragraph on Fuseli.

§Brion, Marcel. “William Blake Today.” Tr. Robert Sage. Transition, No. 9 (December 1927): 204-07.

Browning, Elizabeth. The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley & Ronald Hudson 5 (1987): 308.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote on 6 April 1842 to Mary Russell Mitford: “Blake! Mr Kenyon had just lent me those curious ‘Songs of innocense’ [sic] &c with their wild glances of the poetical faculty thro’ the chasms of the singer’s shattered intellect—& also his life by Cunningham.”

Bruder, [Helen] P. “Historicizing Blake in ‘a land of Men and Women too!.’” Index to [British] Theses 44 (1995): 26. Oxford Brookes [formerly Oxford Polytechnic] Ph.D., 1993.

“The proto-feminist aspect . . . of his work . . . is one of the best reasons for our continued reading and viewing of his texts.”

Her book entitled William Blake and the Daughters of Albion grew out of the dissertation.

*Bruder, Helen P. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 8°, ix, 291, 8 plates; ISBN: 0-312-17481-0. B. §(London: Macmillan Press, 1997) ISBN: 0-333-64036-5.

This is a “partisan exercise” in “feminist-historicist methodology,” “fervently so in places,” which suggests that Blake “often let[s] women and their rights slip from his work” (2, 179, 132). It concentrates on Thel, Visions, America, Marriage, and Europe, with extensive background (a third of the book is notes), and with frequent complaints about “patrician disinterest” in her subject (182).

The book grew out of her dissertation, and a version of her essay on “The Sons of the Fathers: Patriarchal Criticism and The Book of Thel,” 147-58 of Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark & David Worrall (1994) is in chapter 2 with the same title.

Bull, Malcolm. “Blake and Watts in Songs of Experience.” N&Q 241 (N.S. 43) (1996): 27-29.

Bull offers vague parallels to suggest that in “The Sick Rose” and “The Garden of Love” we can see Blake’s “rewritings of Watts” in his “The Rose” and “The Church the Garden of Christ.”

Burdon, Christopher. “Rewriting Apocalypse: Shelley and Blake.” Chapter 6 (174-208, 233-35) of his The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1770-1834. (London: Macmillan Press Ltd; N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) Studies in Literature and Religion

Blake is on 180-208; “to the Blake of every period a prophet is inescapably political” (182).

*Bygrave, Stephen. “Romantic Poems and Contexts.” Chapter 1 (3-46) of Approaching Literature: Romantic Writings. Ed. Stephen Bygrave. (London: Routledge, 1996)

Texts, discussion, and questions about “The Chimney Sweeper,” “Nurses Song,” and “Introduction” from Innocence and “London” and “A Poison Tree” from Experience (18-20, 30-45) in a book “designed to prepare readers for higher levels of study” [at the Open University] (v).

Chandler, David. “Blake’s Man in the Iron Mask.” N&Q 242 [N.S. 44] (1997): 321-22.

Details in The French Revolution, ll. 29-32, may derive from popular prints and a play; Blake’s innovation is to make the Man in the Iron Mask still alive in 1789, though he was supposed to be a brother of Louis XIV (1638-1715).

Clark, Lorraine, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (1991) <BBS 438>.

Review

8 §Church History 44 (1995): 694+.

§*Clark, Roger. ‘O Clouds Unfold!” Independent, 3 June 1997, Supplement, 6-7.

Interest in Blake is high.

Clark, Steve, & David Worrall, ed. Historicizing Blake (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

9 Helen P. Bruder. “The Sins of the Fathers: Patriarchal Criticism and The Book of Thel.” 147-58. A version of the essay appears with the same title as chapter 2 in her William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997).

Cooper, Andrew M. “Irony as Self-Concealment in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” a\b: Auto/Biography Studies 2 (1986-87): 34-44.

“Blake’s rampant perspectivism annihilates any distinct authorial presence” (34).

Cooper, Christine Marie. “Revolutionary burden: The reproduction of political agents in Britain, 1790-1826.” DAI 57 (1996): 1146A. Michigan Ph.D., 1995.

The dissertation “looks at how gendered narratives of reproduction inform understanding of political power,” especially in Burke, Blake (stressing The Song of Los), and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, and Mary Shelley.

§*Coupe, Lawrence. “Rewriting the Answers: The Radical Vision of William Blake.” English Review 7 (February 1997): 38-41.

Crafton, Lisa Plummer. “The ‘Ancient Voices’ of Blake’s The French Revolution.” 41-57 of The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture. Ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton. (Westport, Connecticut, & London: Greenwood Press, 1997) Contributions to the Study of World Literature Number 87.

“Blake is distinct in consistently representing revolution in moral mythological terms” (42).

*Dalman, Miquel. “Un visionari en el segle de la raó.” Panorama ([Barcelona: Fundació “la Caixa”] Abril 1996): 16. In Catalan.

An essay related to the Barcelona exhibition: “William Blake constitueix un cas únic en la historia del’art.”

Davies, Darmian Walford. “Blake, Donne, and Death.” N&Q 241 (N.S., 43) (1996): 40-41.

The source of “I cannot consider death as anything but a removing from one room to another” is in Donne, “Of the Progress of the Soul” [though of course others said the same thing].

Davies, J. M. Q., Blake’s Milton Designs (1992) <Blake (1995)>.

Review

5 Robert Dingley, AUMLA 82 (1994): 129-30 (“despite its occasionally contentious readings, a useful addition to Blake studies”).

Davies, Peter. William Blake. (London: Greenwich Exchange, 1996) Greenwich Exchange Student guide. 8°, vii, 76; ISBN: 1-871551-27-7.

A well-informed and sensitive summary of Blake’s life and poetry, though it concludes that “the prophetic books cannot possibly repay, as works of art, the colossal effort required to elucidate them” (62).

d’Ottavi, Stefania. “Frye e Blake.” 217-24 of Ritratto di Northrop Frye. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1989) Studi e Ricerche^[e] 27. English abstract (“Frye and Blake”) on 426.

“Frye’s explanation of Blake’s mythological universe is central for understanding his own theory of archetypal meanings . . .” (426).

Eaves, Morris, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy (1992).

Review

10 Ralph Pite, “Some Versions of Blake,” English 45 (1996): 175-81 (with E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast) (Eaves’s book is “highly informative and detailed” despite “the thinness of his overall argument” [182, 180]).

Esterhammer, Angela, Creating States (1994) <Blake (1996).

Reviews

2 David L. Clark, Blake 31 (1997): 29-34 (“Esterhammer’s instantiation of Blake’s work” is “lucidly argued and elegantly written” [33, 30]).

3 David Gay, English Studies in Canada 23 (1996): 347-49 (it is “timely and important” [347]).

4 Tannenbaum, Leslie, Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 284-91 (with Milton, The Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, ed. Lisa Low & Anthony John Harding [1993]) (Esterhammer’s book “has its moment of interest” [286]).

*Finch, Christopher. Nineteenth Century Water Colors. (N.Y., London, Paris: Abbeville Press, 1991) 124-30.

Franklin, William Neal, Jr. “Awen barddas and the age of Blake.” DAI 58 (1997): 883A. North Texas Ph.D., 1997.

It is especially about Blake and “the transcendental source of inspiration within the context of the Welsh writers of his era.”

Freed, Eugenie R. “A Portion of His Life” (1994) <Blake (1996)>.

Review

1 Sheila A. Spector, Blake 30 (1996): 60-62 (“Freed’s book is provocative, relevant, learned, erudite, well documented, and painstakingly designed” [62]).

Freeman, Kathryn. “Narrative Fragmentation and Undifferentiated Consciousness in Blake’s The Four Zoas,” European Romantic Review 5 (1995): 178-92 <Blake (1997)>.

Sections of chapters 1 and 3 are reprinted in her Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (1997).

*Freeman, Kathryn S. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. x + 208 pp., ISBN: 0-7914-3298-X (paperback) and 0-7914-3297-1 (hardback) <Blake (1997) §>.

“Blake emblematizes the epic nostos, the homecoming as a return to wholeness” (159).

“Sections of chapters 1 and 3 are reprinted” from her “Narrative Fragmentation and Undifferentiated Consciousness in Blake’s The Four Zoas,” European Romantic Review 5 (1995): 178-92 <Blake (1997)>, and the book is presumably related to her Yale Ph.D. on “‘The Four Zoas’: Apocalypse according to Blake’s sleeper” (1990).

Freeman, Kathryn Sue. “‘The Four Zoas’: Apocalypse according to Blake’s sleeper,” Yale Ph.D. (1990) <BBS 475>.

The thesis is presumably related to her book called Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (1997).

§Frommert, Christian. Heros und Apokalypse: Zum Erhabenen in Werken Johann Heinrich Fuesslis und William Blakes. (Aachen, Germany: Augustinus-Buchhandlung Stephan Keres, 1996) ISBN: 3-86073-562-4.

Based on a recent doctoral dissertation.

§Gill, A. A. “English File: Poetry Backpack: William Blake. BBC 2 daytime educational program for television. Broadcast Friday, 23 May 1997.” Sunday Times (London), Section 11, 31. B. Blake 31 (1997): 71.

“This was frightful. Beyond parody or invective . . . [a] travesty.”

§Ginsberg, Allen. “Blake Experience.” On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).

Gleckner, Robert F. “Blake’s ‘Double Dark Vision of Torment’ Unfolded: Innocence to Jerusalem.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 700-28.

A persuasive essay on echoes of Milton.

Goldsmith, Steven. “Blake’s Agitation.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 753-96.

In the frontispiece to Jerusalem, Los, holding in his hand an “explosive device (his ‘globe of fire’) . . . is on a self-appointed guerilla mission to agitate . . . he looks guilty as sin” (756).

Greenberg, Mark L., ed. Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996) 8°, 221 pp.; ISBN: 0-8143-1985-8.

The contents are:

1. 1 Mark L. Greenberg. “Preface.” 11-12. (Most of the papers originated at a meeting of the Modern Language Association.)

2. 2 Mark L. Greenberg. “Introduction: Poetical Sketches: Critical Pivots and Pirouettes.” 13-26. (On differing responses to Poetical Sketches.)

3. 3 Susan J. Wolfson. “Sketching Verbal Form: Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” 27-70. (“Part of my discussion in this section appears in somewhat different form and context of argument in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994], and another version with the same title appears in her Formal Changes: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997) 31-62, 249-55.)

4. 4 Stuart Peterfreund. “The Problem of Originality and Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” 71-103. (Reprinted from ELH 70 [1985]: 673-705.)

5. 5 Thomas A. Vogler. “Troping the Seasons: Blake’s Helio-Poetics and the ‘Golden Load.’” 105-52.

6. 6 Vincent A. De Luca. “‘Crouding After Night’: Troping and the Sublime in Poetical Sketches.” 153-64. (“I seek to connect Blake’s early style with his aspiration to become a poet in the sublime mode” [154].)

7. 7 Nelson Hilton. “The Rankest Draught.” 165-201. (Chiefly about “then She bore Pale desire.”)

8. 8 Robert F. Gleckner. “Obtuse Angled Afterword.” 203-16. (Gentle responses to the previous essays, most of which criticize his Blake’s Prelude [1982].)

Hampton, Christopher. “Blake’s Dialectic: The Prolongation of Mental War.” Chapter 10 (205-20) of his Socialism in a Crippled World. (London: Penguin, 1981) Also passim. <Blake (1997) §>.

“Blake saw things deeply but [sic] clearly,” and “Like Marx, he understood the situation in his own way” (207, 206).

Hampton, Christopher. “Blake’s witness: keeping the divine vision in time of trouble.” Chapter 5 (55-67) of his The Ideology of the Text. (Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open UP, 1990) <Blake (1997) §>.

A Marxist analysis of the “kind of contribution the millenarian writing of William Blake might have to make to the fundamental issues that confront us” (55).

Haya, Kenichi. “William Blake to 18-19 seiki Igirisu Shakai: William Blake and English Society in a Transitional Age between 18th. and 19th. Centuries.” Meiji Daigaku Jinbunkagaku Kenkyujo Kiho: Memoirs of The Institute of Humanities, Meiji University 41 (1997): 197-228. In Japanese, with an English abstract on 198.

Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs (1995) <Blake (1996)>.

Reviews

1 David Wagenknecht, Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 661-66 (an “excellent but slightly reductive book” with “very convincing and lively readings of a series of pictures” [666, 664]).

2 Edward Larrissy, British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 339-41 (the first part is “sensible, shrewd and valuable,” but “the self-denying ordinance about learning from Blake himself [i.e., from his mythology] is a deadly handicap in some of the particular interpretations” of pictures not attached to his poetry [340, 341]).

Hone, William. “The Last Chimney Sweeper.” Vol. II, columns 615-626 of his THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK | AND| TABLE BOOK; | OR, | [Gothic:] Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, | SPORTS, PASTIMES, CEREMONIES, MANNERS, | CUSTOMS, AND EVENTS. | INCIDENT TO | Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days,| IN PAST AND PRESENT TIMES, | FORMING A | COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE YEAR, MONTHS, AND SEASONS,| AND A | PERPETUAL KEY TO THE ALMANAC;| INCLUDING | ACCOUNTS OF THE WEATHER, RULES FOR HEALTH AND CONDUCT, REMARKABLE | AND IMPORTANT ANECDOTES, FACTS, AND NOTICES, IN CHRONOLOGY, ANTI- | QUITIES, TOPOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, NATURAL HISTORY, ART, SCIENCE, AND| GENERAL LITERATURE; DERIVED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES, AND | VALUABLE ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS, WITH POETICAL ELUCIDATIONS, | For Daily Use and Diversion. | - | BY WILLIAM HONE. | - | [12 lines of verse from] | Herrick. | - | WITH FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS.| -| IN THREE VOLUMES. | VOL. I[-III]. | LONDON: PUBLISHED, BY ASSIGNMENT, FOR THOMAS TEGG, 73, CHEAPSIDE; | AND SOLD BY RICHARD GRIFFIN AND CO., GLASGOW,| AND JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN. 1830. <Toronto>

B. §1831 - C. §1832. D. §1833-1835. E. §1835. F. §1837. G. §1838. H. §1839. I. §1841. J. §1866. K. §1868. L. §1882. M. §1888. N. §1888-1889.

The sympathetic account of the hardships of chimney-sweeps concludes (II, col. 628-629):

Montgomery’s ‘Chimney Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing Boys Album,’ <BB #238> . . . contains a variety begin page 165 | ↑ back to top of beautiful compositions in prose and verse: one of them is — The Chimney Sweeper
Communicated by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very rare and curious little work, Mr. Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence.’

Hone, William. “No May Day Sweeps.” Vol. II, columns 616-626 (for 1 May 1826), of THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK; | OR,| [Gothic:] Everlasting Calendar | OF | POPULAR AMUSEMENTS, | SPORTS, PASTIMES, CEREMONIES, | MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND EVENTS, INCIDENT TO | EACH OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS, | IN PAST AND PRESENT TIMES; | FORMING A COMPLETE HISTORY|OF THE YEARS, MONTHS & SEASONS.| AND| A | PERPETUAL KEY TO THE ALMANACK; | INCLUDING | ACCOUNTS OF THE WEATHER, RULES FOR HEALTH AND CONDUCT, REMARKABLE | AND IMPORTANT ANECDOTES, FACTS, AND NOTICES, IN CHRONOLOGY, | ANTIQUITIES, TOPOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, NATURAL HISTORY, ART, SCIENCE, | AND GENERAL LITERATURE; DERIVED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES, | AND VALUABLE ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS, WITH POETICAL ELUCIDATIONS, | FOR DAILY USE AND DIVERSION. | - | BY WILLIAM HONE. | - | [12 lines (two columns) of verse by] Herrick. | - | IN TWO VOLUMES. | WITH THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ENGRAVINGS. | - | VOLUME I[-II]. | = | LONDON: PUBLISHED FOR WILLIAM HONE BY HUNT AND CLARKE, YORK-STREET, | COVENT-GARDEN. | - | 1826[-1827]. Vol. II, Column 626. <Huntington; also Amherst, California (Berkeley), Cleveland Public, Duke, Free Library of Philadelphia, Harvard, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio State, NYPL, Newberry, North Carolina, Princeton, Seattle Public, Southern California, Tennessee,^[e] Texas, Union College (Schenectady, N.Y.)>.

B. §(London: T. Tegg, 1830) <BL, LC, &c>.

C. §(London, 1831) <BL, Library Company of Philadelphia>.

D. §London: T. Tegg; Glasgow: R. Griffin & Co, 1832) <Kentucky, Ohio State, Virginia>.

E. §(London: Tegg, 1833-35) <North Carolina>.

F. §(London: T. Tegg, 1835) <Harvard, Michigan, Virginia>.

G. §(London: T. Tegg, 1837) <Southern Illinois>.

H. §(London: T. Tegg, 1838) <LC, &c>.

I. §(London: T. Tegg, 1839) <Yale, &c>.

J. §(London: T. Tegg, 1841) <BL, Harvard, &c>.

K. The Every Day-Book: or the Guide to the Year: Relating the Amusements, Sports, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs, and Events incident to The Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, in Past and Present Times; Being a Series of Five Thousand Anecdotes and Facts; Forming a Perpetual Key to the Almanac;^[e] Including . . . With Four Hundred and Thirty-Six Engravings. In Two Volumes. (London: William Tegg and Co., [c. 1860]) Vol. II, 626. <Huntington>.

L. §(London: W. Tegg, 1866) <LC, &c>.

M. §(London: W. Tegg, 1868) <Michigan>.

N. §(London & N.Y., 1888) <BL>.

O. §(London & N.Y.: Ward, Lock & Co, 1888-89).

“No May Day Sweeps.” Vol. II, columns 616-626 for 1 May 1826, concludes by quoting “The Chimney Sweeper” “Communicated [to Mr. Montgomery’s ‘Chimney Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing Boys’ Album’”] by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very rare and curious little work, Mr. Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’” (column 626).

The Every-Day Book is wonderfully similar to Hone’s Every-Day Book and Table Book, with which it is combined, and the text, at least in this section on chimney sweeps, is often identical. Libraries reporting holdings of one work have often confused them with the other work, and there is likely to be significant overlap in what is reported here.

§Howe, Elisabeth A. “‘Blood, Milk and Tears’: L’Ecriture feminine et le refus du maternel dans La Jeune Parque de Valéry et dans le Book of Thel de William Blake.” Bulletin des Etudes Valeyreines 23 (1996): 253-62.

*Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): “William Blake: Images and Texts.”

1 Robert N. Essick. “Introduction.” 277-80.

2 *Joseph Viscomi. “The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 281-344. (A detailed and impressive argument that the production of the Marriage “resulted from four or five distinct and recognizably sequential periods of composition, all presumably taking place in 1790” [285], with pl. 21-24 etched first perhaps as an autonomous unit.)

3 *Anne K. Mellor. “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft.” 345-70. (Visions is directed against Mary Wollstonecraft because she advocated modesty and deplored Free Love.)

4 David Bindman. “Blake’s Vision of Slavery Revisited.” 373-82. (About Blake’s attitude toward Africans in “The Little Black Boy,” Visions, and The Song of Los, partially in correction of Erdman, “Blake’s Vision of Slavery” [1952].)

5 *Tilottama Rajan. “(Dis)figuring the System: Vision, History, and Trauma in Blake’s Lambeth Books.” 383-411.

6 Morris Eaves. “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t.” 413-39. (“In Blake . . . the codes are simply too complex and cryptic . . . to be cracked by straightforward references to big public categories such as ‘evangelical,’ ‘Christian,’ ‘rationalist,’ and ‘abolitionist,’ not to mention big late-twentieth-century categories such as ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ and so on” [438].)

7 *W. J. T. Mitchell. “Chaosthetics: Blake’s Sense of Form.” 441-58. (“Blake’s art becomes not just intelligible, then, but also identifiable as truly itself only if we give full play to the problematics of chaos and madness in his work” [458].)

The 48 plates include Visions (E) “reproduced here and in full color for the first time” (280).

Hutchings, Kevin D. “‘Everything That Lives’: Anthropocentrism, Ecology, and The Book of Thel.” Wordsworth Circle 27 (1997): 166-77.

“Blake’s poem is acutely concerned with the ways in which nature is inevitably constructed in and by social discourse” (167).

*Ishizuka, Hisao. “Thel’s ‘Complaint’: A Medical Reading of Blake’s The Book of Thel.” Eibungaku Kenkyu Nihon Eibungakkai: Studies in English Literature, The English Literary Society of Japan 73 (1997): 245-63.

An impressive argument that Thel suffers from “chlorosis” or “green sickness,” characterised by paleness and suppression of the menses, which, according to an authority of 1794 “indisputably arises from stifling or suppressing the calls of nature [i.e., sexual intercourse] at its vernal season” or puberty; it is found, according to another authority of 1795, “in boarding-schools in particular” where girls were taught modesty and the suppression of sexual desire; “Thel’s refusal to enter into the [sexual] cycle is, therefore, not a commendable resistance to ideology; rather, it is a literal and imbecile enactment of the cultural imperative . . .” (256, 259, 262).

[Jame]S., [Henr]Y. “William Blake’s Poems.” Spirit of the Age, I (25 August 1849): 113-14 <BB #1948>. B §National Anti-Slavery Standard 9 (6 Sept 1849): 60.

Journal of the Blake Society of St James, [I] (1995)

6 Marcia Baker, “If You Only Imagine: The Wondrous World of William Blake.” 26-30. (It was printed in extended form as If You Only Imagine: The Wondrous World of William Blake [1996].)

Kawasaki, Noriko. “Satan no Chokoku—Blake no Milton ni tsuite (8): Transcending Satan-Self in Blake’s Milton (8).” Gifu Shiritsu Joshi Tankidaigaku Kenkyu Kiyo: Bulletin of Gifu City Women’s College 46 (1996): 25-42. In Japanese.

The seven previous parts appeared in the same journal in 1989-95.

Keynes, Geoffrey. “A Gift to the Nation. Blake Drawings from the U.S.A. ‘Ninepence Each.’” The Times, 28 July 1928 <BB 2028>. B. The Times, 28 July 1997 (under “On this Day,” omitting “‘Ninepence Each’”).

Kogan, Pauline. Northrop Frye: the high priest of clerical obscurantism. (Montreal: Progressive Books & Periodicals, Ltd, April 1969) Literature and Ideology Monographs #1.

“The ideas Frye claims to have learned from Blake had been there long before . . . Frye distorts Blake by making a thorough idealist and clerical obscurantist out of him” (61).

§La Cassagnère, Christian, ed. William Blake: des Chants d’innocence au Livre d’Urizen: textes réunis et présenté par Christian La Cassagnère. (Lyon: C.E.R.A.N. Université Lumière, 1996) Etudes anglaises, Cahiers et documents 14.

Lincoln, Andrew, Spiritual History (1995) <Blake (1997)>.

Reviews

1 John B. Pierce, Blake 31 (1997): 35-38 (though “Lincoln is persuasive . . . I remain slightly unclear about the exact parameters of his notion of ‘history’” [37]).

2 Edward Larrissy, N&Q 242 [N.S. 44] (1997): 282-83 (it manifests “judiciously displayed erudition and incomparable textual expertise”).

Lussier, Mark S. “Blake’s Deep Ecology.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1996): 393-408.

“Blake’s work participates in a recognizable ecocritical perspective” (403).

M., M.A. “Los ‘rugidos’ del tigre.” ABC [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

Marrat, Rev. Jabez. “William Blake, Poet and Painter.” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 6 S., 5 (1881): 423-29.

A summary biography of Blake stimulated by Gilchrist (1880), which is a “brilliant monogram” (423).

Mattesich, Stefan. “Blake and Pynchon: A study in discursive time.” DAI 57 (1997): 4736A. Yale Ph.D., 1996.

An attempt “to establish a theoretical context problematizing conventional approaches to the work of William Blake and Thomas Pynchon.”

McKeever, Kerry Ellen. “Naming the Name of the Prophet: William Blake’s Reading of Byron’s Cain: A Mystery.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995): 615-36.

“In Blake’s view Byron is the nineteenth-century Elijah” (616).

§Melaney, William D. “Blake’s Use of Allegory: Redemption in Myth and History.” Platte Valley Review 24 (1996): 78-80.

Michael, Jennifer Davis. “‘Cities not yet embodied’: Blake’s urban romanticism.” DAI 57 (1997): 4756A. Northwestern Ph.D., 1976.

Minney, Penelope. “Job’s Gethsemane: Tradition and Imagination in William Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job.” Durham M. Litt. in Theology and English, 1997. xxviii, 190 pp., 81 reproductions.

This careful study focusing on Blake’s Job watercolors for Butts of 1805-10 concludes: “We do not see Job’s moral progress from a state of self-righteousness to a healthier state of humility, but his spiritual progress through purgation, illumination, to union with God” (157).

§Miyake, Hiroshi. “William Blake to Sozoryoku—Tengoku to Jigoku no Kekkon ni okeru ‘Risei’ on Keimo [William Blake and Imagination—‘Reason’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell].” Hokuriku Shukyo Bunka [Hokuriku Religion and Culture] 9 (1997): 49-68. In Japanese.

Morton, A. L. The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (1958) <BB #2251>. B. Blake to Ranters: Blake Shiso no Gensen [Blake and Ranters: Sources of Blake’s Thought]. Tr. Shoichi Matsushima into Japanese. (Tokyo: Hokuseido Shoten, 1996) <Blake (1997)>.

Review

1 Ayako Wada, Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism, 21 (1997): 118-21. In Japanese.

Moskal, Jeanne, Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

Review

12 Dan Albergotti, European Romantic Review 7 (1997): 194-97 (“an extraordinarily thorough and engaging study” [195]).

Niimi, Hatsuko. “Blake no Milton ni okeru ‘Jiko Mekkyaku’: ‘Self-Annihilation’ in Blake’s Milton.” Nihon Joshi Daigaku Kiyo, Bungakubu: Journal, Faculty of Humanities, Japan Women’s University 46 (1996): 292-339. In Japanese.

§Noad, Charles E. “Frodo and His Spectre: Blakean Resonances in Tolkien.” Mythlore 21 (1996): 58-62.

Nuckels, Rosa Turner. “Visions of light in the poetry of William Blake and Emily Dickinson.” DAI 57 (1997): 4734A. North Texas Ph.D., 1996.

A comparison of “the broad outlines of Blake’s and Dickinson’s thought”; the parallel “includes all essentials of their thought.”

O’Higgins, Elizabeth. “The Wild Deer: Introduction to William Blake’s Hidden Designs.” Dublin Magazine, N.S.30 [i.e., 29] (January-March 1954) [N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967]: 7-15.

The child depicted in “The Death of Earl Godwin” has on his forehead the letters “CCeil” indicating that “The child’s name is O’Neil,” and “The identity of the child establishes the meaning” of the picture (9).

O’Neill, Michael. “Blake and the Self-Conscious Poem.” 145-59 of Trends in English and American Studies: Literature and the Imagination: Essays in Honour of James Lester Hogg. Ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Wolfgang Görtschacher, & Holger M. Klein. (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter [Wales]: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996) <Blake (1997)>. B. “‘And I Stain’d the Water Clear: Blake.” Chapter 1 (3-24) of his Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

“I wish to claim for Blake, then, a simultaneous ability to affirm and question the poet’s role” (A, 149; B, 13). The 1996 essay is “a version” of that of 1997 (B, viii).

§Ono, Yoko. “Eve no Saikochiku—Blake no me o toshite miru Milton no Eve [Recreation of Eve—Blake’s View of Milton’s Eve].” Kobe Eibei Ronso, Kobe Eibeigakkai, Kobe Daigaku [Journal of the Society of English-American Literature, Kobe University] 10 (1996): 267-80. In Japanese.

Persyn, Mary Kelly. “‘Eternal death’ and imaginative life: Sacrifice vs. self-annihilation in the works of William Blake.” DAI 57 (1996): 696-697A. University of Washington Ph.D., 1995.

“Blake employs sacrifice and self-sacrifice . . . to dramatise the disastrous effects of self-aggrandisement.”

Peterfreund, Stuart. “The Din of the City in Blake’s Prophetic Books.” ELH 64 (1997): 99-130.

“This is language-as-labor made language-as-free-play—language free and enfranchised to create the universe anew repeatedly” (119).

Peterfreund, Stuart. “The Problem of Originality in Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” ELH 70 (1985): 673-705. <BBS 603>. B Reprinted in Speak Silence, ed. Mark L. Greenberg (1996).

*Pharobod, Hélène. “L’Esthétique de l’Expression: La Violence picturale chez Blake et chez Füssli.” Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVII^e et XVIII^e Siècles 44 (Juin 1997), 73-91.

“Chez Blake comme chez Füssli, la question de la violence mène donc à la source première du sentiment du sublime: l’infini” (90).

Phillips, Michael. “Flames in the Night Sky: Blake, Paine and the Meeting of the Society of Loyal Britons, October 10^th, 1793.” Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVII^e et XVIII^e Siècles 44 (juin 1997), 93-110.

Graphic accounts of how Tom Paine was denounced and ritually burned in effigy by gatherings in 1792-93 of the Society of Loyal Britons in Gloucestershire and Lancashire and perhaps by the meeting in Lambeth near where Blake lived.

Pritchard, William H. “Responding to Blake.” Hudson Review 49 (1996): 389-99.

A hasty survey of criticism from Frye to Ackroyd.

*Proctor, Roy. “The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: The book of Job according to Blake: Museum hopes patrons will ‘get it’ this go ’round.” Richmond Times-Despatch, 2 November 1997, H1-2.

Mostly an interview with the curator Michael Cormack; the “Exhibit provides insight.”

Punter, David. “Blake: His Shadowy Animals.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1997): 227-38.

Concerns “a moment in Blake where singularity is fractured by multiplicity” (236).

Rainsford, Dominic. Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce. (Basingstoke: Macmillan; N.Y.: St Martin’s Press, 1997)

Part I: William Blake consists of three chapters:

1. 1 “Melancholia and the Search for a System” (13-47, 226-29).

2. 2 “Images of Authorship/Experiments with Ethics” (48-75, 229-31).

3. 3 “The Analyst and the Agent of Wrongs” (76-95, 231-33).

“The reader’s awareness of apparent lapses from ethical responsibility, on Blake’s part, which Blake makes no effort to conceal, positively strengthens his work, as a vehicle for productive literary debate” (6).

The book began as his thesis on “Necessary Evils” (1995).

Rainsford, D. M. “Necessary Evils: authorship, ethics and the reader in Blake, Dickens, Joyce.” Index to [British] Theses 44 (1995): 1434. London Ph.D., 1994.

It is about how Blake, Dickens, and Joyce “construct their ethical status as authors.” The work was published as Authorship, Ethics and the Reader (1997).

*Ramos, Rafael. “Peter Ackroyd redescubre al artista.” La Vanguarda [Barcelona], 17 April 1996.

Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1997 [copyright 1996]) 8°, xiv, 197 pp. 7 plates; ISBN: 0-8262-1077-5. <Blake (1997) §>.

Richey argues that^[e] Blake’s early work is often critical of the gothic (pace Malkin and Frye) and adopts classical models and that his late work echoes the classics regularly: “in The Four Zoas and Milton, he once again rejects the self-exulting classical morality that had been so central to his earlier compositions” (145). The evidence, however, is often wonderfully vague, e.g., “the description of the Cherub as a ‘brooder of tempests & destructive War’ in [Jerusalem] plate 91 alludes to both the storm-driven adventures of Ulysses and the martial exploits of Achilles” (164).

The book “reprint[s] portions” of his essays on “The Neoclassical Gothicism of Blake’s Early Poetry and Art,” Poetica 39-40 (1994): 73-91 (apparently in chapter 1) and on “The French Revolution: Blake’s Dialogue with Edmund Burke,” ELH 59 (1992): 817-37.

Review

1 §Choice 34 (May 1997): 1499.

Richey, William. “The French Revolution: Blake’s Epic Dialogue with Edmund Burke.” ELH 59 (1992): 817-37. <Blake (1994, 1995)>.

His Blake’s Altering Aesthetic )1997) reprints “portions” of the essay (ix).

Richey, William. “The Neoclassical Gothicism of Blake’s Early Poetry and Art.” Poetica: An International Journal for Linguistic-Literary Studies 39-40 for 1993 (1994): 73-91. <Blake (1997) §>.

It is chiefly about “Joseph of Arimathea” and Poetical Sketches.

His Blake’s Altering Aesthetic (1997) reprints “portions” of the essay (ix), apparently in chapter 1.

*Robbins, Ruth. “William Blake (London: 1784-1827).” 26-32 of The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820. Ed. James K. Bracker & Joel Silver. (Detroit, Washington, St Louis: Gale Research, 1995) Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume One Hundred Fifty-Four.

A useful biographical summary; “Blake was not a publisher in the strict sense of the word” “in the sense that they [his books] became available to a wide audience” (31, 32).

§Roob, Alexander. Theorie des Bildromans. (Cologne: Salon-Verlag, for the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo Rom, 1997) Passim.

A theory of the pictorial novel which refers to Blake’s illuminated books in general and to Milton in particular.

Saka, Junichi. “Muku to Keiken kara Yurushi no Tetsugaku e—Fukamariyuku Blake no Kirisutokyo Shiso: From ‘Innocence and Experience’ to ‘Forgiveness of Sin’: An Essay on Blake’s Christian Thought.” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism, 21 (1997): 17-25. In Japanese.

Schorer, Mark. “Mythology (For the Study of Blake).” Kenyon Review 4 (1942): 366-80 <BB #2668>. B. Incorporated in his William Blake (1946) <BB #2672>. C. §“Mythology:^[e] For the Study of Blake.” 268-82 of Theories of Myth: Literary Criticism, and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. (N.Y.: Garland, 1996).

Schriver, Janet Marie. “On the spiritual in digital art.” DAI 57 (1997): 2717A. Texas (Dallas) Ph.D., 1996.

It is “a photographic artist’s attempt to bring an eighteenth century Romantic tradition through the history of art into the art of computer technology,” introducing “a Techno-Romantic style . . . against a historical background . . . from William Blake . . . to the author’s own photo-based computer images,” in the context of Thomas Taylor.

Senaha, Eijun. “Autoeroticism and Blake: O Rose Art Thou Sick!?” Chapter 1 (11-28) of Sex, Drugs, and Madness in Poetry, from William Blake to Christina Rossetti: Women’s Pain, Women’s Pleasure. (Lewiston [N.Y.], Queenston [Ontario], and Lampeter [Wales]: Mellen UP, 1996).

“The Sick Rose” is about “a woman’s masturbation,” and the illustration is “a carefully designed illustration of the female genitalia” (11, 12). The book is clearly related to her 1995 dissertation.

Senaha, Eijun. “Woman’s pain, woman’s pleasure: Sex, drugs, and madness in poetry from Blake to C. Rossetti.” DAI 56 (1996): 3142A. South Carolina Ph.D., 1995.

The dissertation is clearly related to her 1996 book.

*Simpson, M. “Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in ‘Songs of Experience.’” Style 30 (1996): 220-46.

“Reader-response criticism” and “affective stylistics” suggest “a dual audience” coping with “the versatile grammar of the poem and the self-monitoring reading persual” (200, 258).

§Sleasby, R. E. “Dual Reality: Echoes of Blake’s Tiger in Cullen’s Heritage.” CLA Journal 39 (December 1995): 219-27.

Stanger, James Aaron. “The true faculty of knowing: William Blake’s anatomy of the romantic body.” DAI 58 (1997): 1727A. California (Riverside) Ph.D., 1997.

“I examine Blake’s deployment of the body and the book.”

Stauffer, Andrew M. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning Reads William Blake?” Victorian Poetry 34 (1996): 114-17.

A number of quotations from her letters in The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley & Ronald Hudson (1984-) are implausibly identified there as being from Blake.

Stauffer, Andrew M. “The First Known Publication of Blake’s Poetry in America.” N&Q 241 [N.S. 43] (1996): 42-43.

The 11 printings of poems by Blake published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, 1842-49) were probably selected by the editor, Lydia Maria Child.

*Taylor, Charles H., & Patricia Finley. Images of the Journey in Dante’s Divine Comedy: An illustrated and interpretive guide to the poet’s social vision, with 257 annotated illustrations selected from six centuries of artistic response to the poem. (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1997).

There are 36 plates by Blake, 12 by Flaxman, and 3 by Fuseli.

Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast (1993) <Blake (1996)>.

Thompson gathered material for a major study of the romantic movement which was never completed. “A great part of the chapter on William Blake was published separately as Witness Against the Beast,” and “the nearest we can get to completing the study” is given in his The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (N.Y.: The New Press, 1997), according to Dorothy Thompson (ibid., 1-2). The Romantics itself does not deal significantly with Blake.

Review

22 Ralph Pite, “Some Versions of Blake,” English 45 (1996): 175-81 (with Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy) (Thompson’s book is “decisive and meticulous” [176]).

Trigilio,^[e] Tony. “A poetics of prophecy: Continuities of visionary history in Blake, H.D. and Ginsberg.” DAI 58 (1997): 1703A. Northeastern Ph.D., 1997.

“The prophetic poetry of William Blake, H.D. and Allen Ginsberg creates a counter-history which resists religious and literary orthodoxy.”

Trobaugh, Elizabeth Ariel. “‘A prospect in the mind’: The convergence of the millenial tradition and Englightenment philosophy in English Romantic poetry.” DAI 57 (1996): 698-699A. Massachusetts Ph.D., 1996.

Concerns “The ideal of progress found in the poetry of Blake [especially Jerusalem], Wordsworth, and Shelley” and “the influence of Enlightenment philosophy.”

Trowbridge, Katelin E. “Blake’s A Little Girl Lost.” Explicator 54 (1996): 139-42.

“Socially instilled guilt and self-denial, rather than sexual expression, destroy a maiden’s virtue” (139).

Vardy, Alan Douglas. “Romantic ethics.” DAI 57 (1997): 3953A. Washington Ph.D., 1996.

It includes “new readings” of Blake (Visions, Milton), Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.

Vaughan, Frank A., Again to the Life of Eternity (1996) <Blake (1997)>.

Review

1 Christopher Heppner, Blake 31 (1997): 24-29 (the book is characterized by “disturbing errors of fact,” Vaughan “too often ignores or misreads details,” the “interpretations bend the evidence uncomfortably at times,” and the book badly needs the attention of “both a good designer and a good copy-editor” [29, 27, 29, 24]).

*Vine, Steven. “‘That Mild Beam’: Enlightenment and enslavement in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Chapter 3 (40-63) of The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Ed. Carla Plasa & Betty J. Ring. (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1994).

He “examines the critical energies in Visions’s account of the body, sexuality, and slavery, and maps the struggles of begin page 170 | ↑ back to top the poem to expose structures of sexual and colonial enslavement in the name of visionary enlightenment” (41).

Viscomi, Joseph, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

Reviews

21 Theresa M. Kelley, European Romantic Review 7 (1997): 197-200 (a “monumental study” dealing masterfully with “a daunting array of evidence” [197]).

22 G. E. Bentley, Jr., “The Foundations Move,” A&B: Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, N.S. 9 (1995 [i.e., March 1997]): 68-79 (“Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book is one of the epoch-marking books of Blake scholarship. He has created a salutary earthquake. . . . All successive writers on Blake will be indebted to Joseph Viscomi or will be condemned to irrelevance” [68, 76]).

23 M. L. Twyman, N&Q 240 (N.S. 42) (December 1995): 503 (it is “a major work of investigation” which has “redirected Blake scholarship”).

Visely, Suzanne Araas. “William Blake’s visions of the daughters of science: A gendered critique of eighteenth-century materialism and rationalism.” DAI 67 (1997): 3042-3043 A. Iowa Ph.D., 1996.

“Blake’s sensitivity to women’s dilemmas is rare in his time,” but he has “disturbingly mysogynist passages.”

Wada, Ayako. “The Evolution of ‘Vala/The Four Zoas’: its formation, collapse and regeneration.” Durham Ph.D., 1995. vii, 314.

The “crystallization of the manuscript” is understood by Mrs. Wada “as the gradual regenerative process of a poem which collapsed as a result of a fatal structural failure.” A chapter of the dissertation is the basis of her essay on “The Fluctuating Myth of the Fall . . .,” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu (1997).

Wada, Ayako. “The Fluctuating Myth of the Fall: Four Zoas versus Spectre and Emanation in Night III of Blake’s Vala/The Four Zoas: An Essay on Blake’s Christian Thought.” Igirsu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism, 21 (1997): 5-18.

“Rather than remaining Man’s psychic members, the Zoas are turned into Man’s fellow beings” (15). The “paper is based on a chapter” of her 1995 dissertation.

Wall, William Garfield. “‘Now my lot in heaven is this’: A study of William Blake’s own acknowledged sources: Shakespeare, Milton, Isaiah, Ezra, Boehme, and Paracelsus.” DAI 58 (1997): 466A. Massachusetts Ph.D., 1996.

The abstract of this 135-page effort scarcely mentions the sources of his title; it claims to validate “to a large extent Northrop Frye’s, and to a lesser extent, Harold Bloom’s reading of Blake,” though even they ignore the fact that “Blake is not an intellectual, but a preacher . . . the end is theology.”

*Wemyss, Henry. “Blake Watercolours from The Frick Collection: An exquisite group of watercolours have an intriguing history which is unravalled.” Sotheby’s Preview, November 1996, 18-19.

A herald of the auction of^[e] the Bunyan drawings on 14 November 1996.

§White, Elizabeth. “Woman’s Triumph: A Study of the Changing Symbolic Values of the Female in the Works of William Blake.” Washington Ph.D., 1972.

Yamakage, Takashi. “Oe Kenzaburo Atarashii Hito yo mezameyo to Natsukashii Toshi eno Tegami ni okeru Blake to Dante no Inyo Shiku to sono Yoho: Blake and Dante in Oe Kenzaburo.” Jinbunkagaku Kenkyu, Niigata Daigaku Hinbungakubu: Studies in Humanities, Faculty of Humanities, Niigata University, 92 (1996): 95-122. In Japanese.

Yamazaki, Yusuke. “Blake no ‘Muku to Keiken no Uta’—Gattai Shishu no Nazo, ‘Kyuyaku’ to ‘Shinyaku’ o kaimei suru tameni: Blake’s Suggestion of the Combined Book—Illuminated Testaments: Songs of In[nocence] & Ex[perience].” Nagasaki Kenritsu Daigaku Ronshu: Journal of Liberal Arts and Economics, The Institute of Nagasaki Prefectural University 30 (1997): 495-512. In Japanese.

Zecchi, Stefano. La Magia dei Saggi: Blake, Goethe, Husserl, Lawrence. (Milano: Jaca Book, 1984) Di Fronte e Attraverso 125.

Division II Blake’s Circle

Calvert, Edward (1799-1883)

Artist, Disciple of Blake

D. W. Dörrbecker. “Calvert, Edward.” Band 15, 623-25 of Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker. (München-Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 1997)

A densely packed essay with an extensive bibliography and picture locations.

Flaxman, John (1756-1826)

Sculptor, Friend of Blake

§Daniel Bell. A Pious Bacchanal: Affinities Between the Lives of John Flaxman and Aubrey Beardsley. (Peter Land, 1994) ISBN: 0-8204-2318-1.

Fuseli, John Henry (1741-1825)

Artist, Friend of Blake

§Füssli pittore di Shakespeare: pittura e teatro 1775-1825. Ed. Fred [S.] Licht, Simona Tosini Pizzetti, & David H. begin page 171 | ↑ back to top Weinglass. [Exhibition catalogue] (Milan: Electa, for the Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Mamiano di Traversetolo [Parma], 1997).

§*Christoph Becker, with contributions by Claudia Hattendorf. Johann Heinrich Füssli: Das verlorene Paradies. [Catalogue of the exhibition at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.] (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje for the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1997) ISBN: 3-7757-0665-8.

A large number of Fuseli’s Milton designs for his 1799 exhibition were gathered for the first time in almost two centuries. The exhibition was widely reviewed in the German press.

§Vernissage: Die Zeitschrift zur Ausstellung, V, 9 ([September] 1997), Fuseli issue, with

1 Claudia Hattendorf. “Johann Heinrich Füsslis Milton-Galerie: Ein Schoepfungsmythos der Kunst.” 6-15.

2 Christofer Conrad. “Im Elysium der Phantasie: Die Bildwelten des Johann Heinrich Füssli.” 16-31.

3 Christofer Conrad. “Aufklaererisches Verlachten und romantischer Schauer: Füsslis Erfolgsbid ‘Der Nachtmahr.’” 32-41.

4 Christopher Conrad. “Füsslis Frauen.” 44-54.

Johnson, Joseph (1739-1809)

Bookseller, Patron of Blake

Carol Hall. “Joseph Johnson (London: 1761-1809).” 159-69 of The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820. Ed. James K. Bracker & Joel Silver. (Detroit, Washington, St Louis: Gale Research, 1995) Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume One Hundred Fifty-Four.

A useful account.

Linnell, John (1792-1882)

Painter and Engraver, Blake’s Patron

See Palmer below.

Palmer, Samuel (1805-1881)

Artist, Blake’s Disciple

Christiana Payne. “John Linnell and Samuel Palmer in the 1820s.” Burlington Magazine 124 (1982): 131-36.

On what Samuel Palmer’s art owes to John Linnell.

Watermarks: A Cumulative Table