ARTICLES
William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 1997
The annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning William Blake and his circle records publications for the current year (say, 1997) and those for previous years which are not recorded in Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995), and “William Blake and His Circle” (1994-97). The organization of the checklist is as follows:
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles of Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions and Reprints
Section B: Collections and Selections
Part II: Reproductions of his Art
Part III: Commercial Book Engravings
Part IV: Catalogues and Bibliographies
Part V: Books Blake Owned
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies
Note: Collections of essays on Blake and issues of periodicals devoted entirely to him are listed in one place, with cross-references to their authors.
Division II: Blake’s Circle
This division is organized by individual (say, William Hayley or John Flaxman), with works by and about Blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. It includes Thomas Butts, Thomas Hartley Cromek, George Cumberland, John Flaxman and his family, Henry Fuseli, Thomas and William Hayley, John Linnell and his family, Samuel Palmer, James Parker, George Richmond, Thomas Stothard, and John Varley. It does not include important contemporaries with whom Blake’s contact was negligible or non-existent such as John Constable and William Wordsworth and Edmund Burke; such major figures are dealt with more comprehensively elsewhere, and the light they throw upon Blake is very dim.
begin page 138 | ↑ back to topReviews listed here are only for books which are substantially about Blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on Blake. These reviews are listed under the book reviewed; the authors of the reviews may be recovered from the index.
I take Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995), faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical authorities on Blake1↤ 1 Except for the states of the plates for Blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is R. N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991). and have noted significant differences from them.
N.b. I have made no attempt to record manuscripts, typescripts, computer print outs, radio or television broadcasts,2↤ 2 See A. A. Gill, “English File: Poetry Backpack: William Blake. BBC 2 daytime educational program for television. Broadcast Friday, 23 May 1997,” Sunday Times (London), Section 11, 31. calendars, furniture with inscriptions,3↤ 3 For a faux-antique wooden chest decorated with lines from “A Cradle Song,” see R. N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997,” Blake (1998), generously shown me in typescript. microforms,4↤ 4 Guide to Microforms in Author Title Print. Vol. I A-K 1996 (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1996) records: Blake Studies (1968-80) produced by University Microfilms International; America (O), Book of Thel (G), Europe (K), Jerusalem (E), Milton (A), Small and Large Book of Designs, Song of Los (A), Songs of Experience (B), Songs of Innocence (B), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (AA), Visions (P), watercolors for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Young’s Night Thoughts and the colored copy of Night Thoughts from Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, produced by Microform Academic Publishers (Wakefield, England); Jerusalem produced by Library Preservation Systems International Ltd. (Reading, England). music,5↤ 5 For instance, § Huib Emmer, Bethlehem Hospital: William Blake in Hell: Opera in Three Acts, 1985-88 (Amsterdam: Donemus, 1990). pillows, poems,6↤ 6 For instance, the following from Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines 1890-1970 Series One, ed. Marion Sader (Millwood, N. Y.: Kraus- Thomson Organization, 1976): 1 Blum, Etta. “For Blake’s Angels.” Poetry 94 (April 1959): 22. 2 Cruickshank, N.K. “God Creating Adam: (After the Picture By William Blake).” Poetry Quarterly 12 (Autumn 1950): 140-41. 3 Duncan, Robert. “Two Dicta of William Blake: Variations.” Poetry 99 (Dec 1961): 172-77. 4 Fletcher, John Gould. “William Blake.” Poetry 84 (Aug 1954): 280. 5 Greer, Scott. “After Blake: 1944.” Twice in a Year, No. 12-13 (Spring-Summer, Fall-Winter 1945), 387. 6 Johnson, Josephine W. “On a Cartoon by Blake: Ancient of Days.” Poetry 14 (April 1939): 7. 7 Martin, James Beverley. “To William Blake.” Poetry 45 (Feb 1935): 253. 8 Murray, Philip. “Ah Blake, my bleating mystic, Little Lamb . . .” Tyger’s Eye, I, No. 4 (June 1948), 34. 9 Mus, David. “Blake’s Seasons: From the English of Wm. Blake (1783).” Poetry 111 (Jan 1968): 226-28. 10 Nardi, Marcia. “No Emily’s and No Blake’s.” New Directions 11 (1949): 311. 11 Snider, Charles. “Blake.” New Directions 13 (1951): 58-59. 12 Tagliabue, John. “From ‘An Outdoor Blake Festival’ [collection].” Poetry 14 (July 1964): 222-23. 13 Tate, Allen. “William Blake.” Double Dealer, 4, No. 19 (July 1922): 28. 14 Thomas, John Ormond. “Personalization of a Theme of Blake.” Life & Letters 44 (March 1945): 157-58. posters, published scores, recorded readings and singings, rubber stamps, T-shirts, tatoos, video-recordings, or email related to Blake.
The chief indices used to discover what relevant works have been published were [U.S.] Books in Print 1997; Book Review Index: 1996 Cumulation (Detroit, N.Y., Toronto, London: Gale, 1997) and 1997 (1998); Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines 1890-1970 Series One, ed. Marion Sader (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1976); Humanities Index April 1996 to March 1997 (1997) and June 1997 (1997); Index to [British] Theses 44 (1995) and 45 (1996); Livres disponibles, 1997: French Books in Print (1997); Modern Language Association online bibliography (to August 1997, seen December 1997); and Whitaker’s [British] Books in Print 1997.
I am grateful for help of many kinds to Ballantine Books, Dr. E. B. Bentley, Julia Bentley, Finn Coren, D. W. Dörrbecker, Robert N. Essick, la Fundación “la Caixa,” John E. Grant, Greenwich Exchange, Alexander Gourlay, Kevin Hebborn, Nelson Hilton, Zongying Huang, Jeanne Moskal, Morton D. Paley, Princeton University Press, Sonia Rigolo, David Scrase, Anne Soler, State University of New York Press, University of Missouri Press, Joseph Viscomi, Wayne State University Press, and John Windle.
Research for “William Blake and his Circle” (1997) was carried out chiefly in the Australian Defence Force Academy Library, the Australian National University Library, the Huntington Library, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of China, and the University of Toronto Library.
Symbols
* Works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by Blake or depicting him. If there are more than 19 illustrations, the number is specified. If the illustrations include all those for a work by Blake, say Thel or his illustrations to Comus, the work is identified.
§ Works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority.
Abbreviations
BB | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
BBS | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
Blake | Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly |

The inking of some letters in pl. 25 is quite distinctly darker than others, particularly in an almost-vertical line about an inch in from the left margin: “coast,” “meadows,” “of,” “and the,” “France.”
In the title and the first line (the bottom of the letter “g,” the top of “f,” “iberty” and all the next line, “The . . . Earth”) but on no other letters on pl. 25-27, the outside of the letter prints nicely and darkly but the center is white, as if it were recessed and did not take the ink. This is not visible in copies H-I but partially visible in copies B, D-E. By comparison, on pl. 27, 1. 20, the last words, “Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease” are in larger letters than the rest but they are not hollow like the first ones on pl. 25.
According to Joseph Viscomi (see above), Marriage pl. 25 was cut from the top left corner of a copperplate, pl. 26 from the top right corner of a copperplate, and pl. 27 (upside down) was from the top right corner of a copperplate. However, the platemarks indented on these prints in copy M are sharp, though one might have expected to find rounded corners on the uncut plate.
[View this object in the William Blake Archive]
Introduction
Blake Discoveries in 1997
Two exciting new texts by “William Blake” were first described in 1997: a previously unknown letter to George Cumberland of 1 September 1800 and the Sophocles Manuscript.
The Blake letter is not yet published, but a transcription is promised soon by Morton Paley and Robert N. Essick, the new owner and the most redoubtable scholar-collector of Blake since the death in 1982 of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. It is especially surprising that a letter to Cumberland should appear at this late date, almost 200 years after it was written, for most of Cumberland’s letters went in 1849 to the British Museum (now the British Library). Perhaps Cumberland tucked this letter into his copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (F), until it was sold in 1857. The contents of the new letter are very surprising.
The Sophocles Manuscript, still in private hands, has been seen by very few Blake scholars. The only two who have analyzed it in print came to diametrically opposite conclusions as to its connection with the poet William Blake. Michael Phillips believes that the “William Blake” signatures scattered throughout the manuscript were written by the poet-artist William Blake, that he may have owned it begin page 140 | ↑ back to top from 1772 through 1812, and that perhaps he wrote the translation of Sophocles’ Ajax and the learned commentary on it. If Michael Phillips is correct, we must rethink carefully and extensively the implications of the knowledge of Greek and Latin and the absorption in the classics which the Sophocles Manuscript implies in Blake.
If, on the other hand, G.E. Bentley, Jr., is right in concluding that none of the three or four hands in the Sophocles Manuscript is that of the poet-artist, we may learn from it more about one of the poet’s many contemporary namesakes, but it will tell us nothing of the author of Songs of Innocence and Illustrations of the Book of Job.
Copies of several long-lost works by Blake have suddenly reappeared. Europe pl. 1 (“The Ancient of Days”), last traced in the G. C. Smith sale in 1938 (BB 340), has turned up in a private New York collection, and another copy, long believed to have been printed posthumously, has been shown by its new owner, Robert N. Essick, to be from the 1794 printing.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (M), consisting of pl. 25-27, first and last recorded in the 1918 Linnell sale, was apparently acquired then by Frank Rinder. Copy M was lost to sight in the Rinder family, perhaps because it was tucked into a copy of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. The Job was included in a lot of furniture brought in to be sold at Christie’s, discovered there by John Windle in June 1997, and sold at Christie’s in November.
Comparison of copy M with the same plates of Marriage (L), now owned by Robert N. Essick, indicates that they were probably printed at the same time in the same dark grey or very dark brown ink and with the same variant on pl. 25 found in no other copy and not previously associated with copy M. More important, copy M has no inked text at the bottom of pl. 27 where other copies have the eight-line Chorus of “A Song of Liberty.” However, the uninked, indented fragments of the text of the Chorus seem to be visible where the Chorus should be (see illus. 1-3). No very plausible motive for Blake to omit the Chorus has yet occurred to GEB or his numerous perplexed advisers. Surely Blake had not decided he was wrong to say that “every thing that lives is Holy” or that it was indiscrete or indelicate to write of “pale religious letchery.” As is usual with Blake discoveries, the new copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell raises more fascinating new problems than it solves.
The most exciting newly found copy of a known work by Blake is Descriptive Catalogue (U), which had been bought by George Cumberland Jr., in November 1809, sent to his father, and lost to sight for 188 years. It was brought in off the street to Marlborough Rare Books in London in the summer of 1997 and rapidly moved to the collection of Robert N. Essick. Copy U is enriched with corrections by Blake, two of them not previously known, plus letters and descriptions by John Linnell and George Cumberland about Blake.
While some important and unique Blake originals have been found, others have been lost. The letter from Blake of 11 December 1805 and the letter to Blake of 17 April 1800 are in some untraced limbo between the Keynes Family Trust and the Fitzwilliam Museum and Cambridge University Library to which the other Blakes from the Keynes Collection went at the death of Sir Geoffrey, and none of the interested parties can say what has become of them.
A surprising number of newly recorded printings of Blake’s poems between his death in 1827 and Gilchrist’s biography in 1863 have been found, some 30 in all. They are in locations as obscure as the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1842-49)7↤ 7 See Andrew M. Stauffer, “The First Known Publication of Blake’s Poetry in America,” N&Q 241 [N.S. 43] (1996): 42-43. and as obvious as William Hone’s EveryDay Book (1827-89). Blake was a good deal more accessible in odd snippets than we have hitherto known.
Exhibition Catalogues
A major Blake exhibition was held at the Yale Center for British Art which silently celebrates the transfer of the last of Paul Mellon’s Blakes to the Center. In the long run, such exhibitions have major effects upon the understanding and appreciation of Blake among students and scholars and reflective lovers of the arts; in the short term, they are the occasion for conclusions such as that in the Wall Street Journal (23 April 1997) that Blake’s “etchings grow hairier and hotter over time.”
Blake’s works are very rapidly becoming better known in Spain, most particularly in 1996-97 through the work of the Fundación “la Caixa,” which sponsored a major exhibition with catalogues in Spanish (Madrid) and Catalan (Barcelona). At last count, these exhibitions had stimulated 100 reviews, notices, announcements, and puffs.
Scholarship and Criticism
The volume of publications concerning William Blake, his art and his poetry, seems to continue unabated. This 1997 checklist records 11 books about Blake, 15 editions, 10 catalogues, 155 articles and parts of books, 20 dissertations (mostly doctoral theses), and 194 reviews. In addition to those published in English in Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, and the U.S.A., there were a substantial number of publications in less familiar scripts, including Braile (1), Chinese (2), Danish (1), French (6), German (12), Italian (4), Japanese (8), and Spanish and Catalan (109).
Among the most useful new works for cybernauts are Nelson Hilton’s On-Line Blake Concordance8↤ 8 http://www.english.uga.edu/Blake_Concordance at the University of Georgia and the Blake Archive9↤ 9 http:/jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake; see Blake (1997). at the University begin page 141 | ↑ back to top of Virginia, both of which are still maturing and each of which offers means of access to Blake’s works which would be much more cumbersome using hard copies.
The most basic work in cumulating new Blake information is of course provided in Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace” and in “William Blake and His Circle” in Blake.
A good deal of light has been thrown on Blake’s life by Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi in their revelation that the fumes from copper bathed in acid as in the etching process are toxic, that Blake’s process of relief etching required much longer etching than most etchers used, and that indeed Blake may have died from biliary cirrhosis of the liver caused by chronic copper intoxication.10↤ 10 Lane Robson & Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s Death,” Blake 29 (1996): 36-49. The newly discovered hazard of his profession is likely to shock most of us. But as Blake lived to be almost 70, a very respectable age in the 1820s, we may wonder how much sclerosing cholangitis shortened or indeed affected his life.
More oblique light is thrown on Blake by the account of the sudden and quite unexpected death in 1805 of James Parker,11↤ 11 “The Death of Blake’s Partner James Parker,” Blake 29 (1996): 49-51. Blake’s fellow apprentice (1773-79), his housemate and partner in a print-shop (1784-85), and his lifelong friend. It would be surprising if Blake had not been intimately familiar with the details of his old friend’s abrupt death and of his irregular will.
The books on Blake recorded here range from Peter Davies’ modest little student primer called William Blake (1996)12↤ 12 Davies has apparently not attempted “the colossal effort required to elucidate” “the prophetic books” (62), which does not leave a great deal of Blake’s poetry beyond Poetical Sketches, the Songs, and unpublished lyrics. to the collection of essays on Poetical Sketches called Speak Silence, ed. Mark Greenberg (1996), and three books which apparently grew out of dissertations.13↤ 13 I ignore here Marcia Baker, If You Only Imagine: The Wondrous World of William Blake (1996), Marianne Bresson, William Blake: som teologisk udfordrin (1993), Christian Frommert, Heros und Apokalypse: Zum Erhabenen in Werken Johann Heinrich Fuesslis und William Blakes (1996), and William Blake: des Chants d’innocence au Livre d’Urizen, ed. Christian La Cassagnère (1996), because I have been unable to see them. Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997) is a fervently partisan feminist exercise which laments that “Blake often let women and their rights slip from his work” (32) and that Blake studies seems to be afflicted by “patrician disinterest” in feminism (32, 182). Her very extensive research has produced a mass of fascinating information about attitudes to women in Blake’s time. Some of her arguments and conclusions may afflict or astonish readers, but the extent and thoroughness of her research must compel admiration.
Kathryn Freeman’s Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (1997), is part of a series on Western Esoteric Traditions, but it is chiefly concerned with Blake’s myth rather than with Western Esoteric Traditions. Her conclusion that “Blake emblematizes the epic nostos, the homecoming as a return to wholeness” (159) does not seem to require an esoteric tradition to justify it.
William Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic (1997), argues that we have uncritically accepted the conclusions that Blake’s early work is gothic and his late work anti-classical. A good deal of evidence supports the contrary—or at least an ambivalent—conclusion about Blake’s attitude to gothic and classical ideals. The connection of evidence and conclusion in the book is sometimes curiously unpersuasive, but the argument was worth making.
Two of the most impressive essays on Blake’s writings in the past year are by Joseph Viscomi and Hisao Ishizuka. In “The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 281-44, Viscomi makes a customarily detailed and powerful argument that the Marriage evolved through distinct sequential stages of composition, that some of the parts may have been conceived and even intended for publication separately, and that the whole was imagined and completed in 1790, not in ?1790-?1793 as in previous conventional wisdom. All future accounts of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell must take serious account of Viscomi’s argument—an argument which is not yet completed, for he promises sequels to this essay.
The most original and persuasive of the hundreds of Japanese articles and books I have seen over many years is Hisao Ishizuka’s “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. He argues, with abundant and persuasive detail from Thel and from eighteenth-century medical and conduct books, that Thel recognizably suffers from green-sickness fostered by the unnatural cultural imperatives of sexual modesty and repression for adolescent girls. Her flight, shrieking, from the Vales of Har “is, therefore, not a commendable resistance to ideology; rather, it is a literal and imbecile enactment of the cultural imperative” (262).
The essays of Viscomi and Ishizuka take us far from the paths of conventional wisdom—and they persuade me that these are the paths we shall have to follow in future to reach a recognizably Blakean destination.
The Roads Not Taken
Other essays beckon us down byways which seem singularly unpromising. Steven Goldsmith thinks that in the frontispiece of Jerusalem Los is holding in his hand an “explosive device (his ‘globe of fire’). . . he looks guilty as hell.”14↤ 14 Steven Goldsmith, “Blake’s Agitation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 756. begin page 142 | ↑ back to top Janet Marie Schriver is concerned with “the spiritual in digital art” against the background of William Blake.15↤ 15 Janet Marie Schriver, “On the spiritual in digital art,” DAI 57 (1997): 2717A. Eijun Senaha finds that “The Sick Rose” is about “a woman’s masturbation,” with “a carefully designed illustration of the female genitalia,”16↤ 16 Eijun Senaha, “Autoeroticism and Blake: O Rose Art Thou Sick!?,” 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 University Press, 1996) 11, 12. which previous viewers had thought to be a rose. Helen Hollis sees the serpent on the last plate of The Book of Thel as Thel herself,17↤ 17 Helen Hollis, “Seeing Thel as Serpent,” Blake 30 (1996-97): 87-90. while Deborah McCollister thinks that Thel is “the female driving the snake.”18↤ 18 Deborah McCollister, “The Seduction of Self-Abnegation in The Book of Thel,” Blake 30 (1996-97): 90-94.
My favorite argument is that of Elizabeth O’Higgins, who discerns on the head of the child in Blake’s design of “The Death of Earl Goodwin” the letters “CCeil.” This proves to her satisfaction that “The child’s name is O’Neill,” and this in turn “establishes the meaning of the picture”19↤ 19 Elizabeth O’Higgins, “The Wild Deer: Introduction to William Blake’s Hidden Designs,” Dublin Magazine, N.S. 30 [i.e., 29] (Jan-March 1954) [N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967]:9. —at least it may do so if one believes, as she does, that Blake’s father was named O’Neill. For those who persist in thinking that the grandfather and father of “English Blake” were named James Blake,20↤ 20 Blake’s father’s name is given in the poet’s baptismal register, and his grandfather’s name is given in his father’s apprenticeship indenture (Blake Records [1969] 51). the significance of CCeil is not so transparent.
But one should be grateful for the invitation to follow such byways. And perhaps, when we know more or are wiser, they will seem as promising as those of Joseph Viscomi and Hisao Ishizuka.
Division I: William Blake
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 |
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.
begin page 144 | ↑ back to top
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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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
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 | — |
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], 4a and 5a, 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. 4a and 5a 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.
begin page 148 | ↑ back to topHistory: (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. 24r, 43v, 48v, 50r, 71r, 79r, 91r, and 114r, and “Blake” deletes “Sunderland” on f. 43v, 91r, and f. 114r. , 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. 35r), 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 18th 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. 96r, 101r, 102r, 104r, 106r, 107r, 115v, and 116r) 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. 35r, 43v, 45v, 48v, 51r[?], 60r, 71r[?], 79r, 81r, 83r, 91r, 103r, 113r, 114r, 116v), generally on pages with little or no other writing,49↤ 49 “Blake” is written at the top of f. 35r which now bears Edmund Blunden’s essay, and “Taffy Williams” is written between two “Blake”s on f. 103r. The adjacent leaves are blank. “Sunderland” is associated with the “Blake” on ff. 43v, 71r, 79r, 91r, and 114r. “Blake,” “Wm Blake,” or “William Blake” is written in old brown ink, once in mirror-writing (“BLAKE” on f. 116v), and twice in stipple (“Wm Blake” on ff. 43v, 45v).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. 71r is an ornamental B followed by a flourish, with two drawings beneath it.
There are very small, simple, amateurish sketches in pencil or Black ink on ff. 71r, 79r, 147r, 148v, 149v, 150r, 181r, 182v, and 183r.
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
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).
Section B: Collections and Selections 53↤ 53 Here and below I ignore mere reprints.
Table of Reprints of Blake’s Works before 1863
(Addenda)
1827
“The Chimney Sweeper” from Innocence. William Hone, The Every-Day Book, or, Everlasting Calendar (London: Hunt & Clark, 1826; also 1826, 1827, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833-35, 1835, 1837, 1838, 1839, 1841, 1860, 1866, 1868, 1888, 1888-89).
1830
“The Chimney Sweeper” from Innocence. William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book (London: Thomas Tegg; Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Co.; Dublin: John Cumming, 1830), Vol. II, columns 628-29. Also 1831-, 1832, 1833-35, 1835, 1837, 1838, 1839, 1841, 1866, 1868, 1882, 1888, 1888-89.
1842
“The Chimney Sweeper [from Innocence].” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (9 June 1842): 2.
“A Dream.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (29 September 1842): 68.
“The Divine Image.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (21 July 1842): 28.
“The Little Black Boy.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 2 (10 March 1842): 160.
“Night.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (23 June 1842): 12.
1844
“The Little Black Boy.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (12 December 1844): 112.
1845
“A Little Boy Lost.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 4 (25 September 1845): 68.
“On Another’s Sorrow.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (20 February 1845): 152.
“On Another’s Sorrow.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (15 May 1845): 200.
1848
“Ah! Sunflower.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 9 (14 September 1848): 64.
1849
“The Chimney Sweeper [from Innocence].” National Anti-Slavery Standard 10 (1 November 1849): 92.
§“Ah! Sunflower.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 9 (14 September 1848): 64.
Antologia bilingüe (1987, 1996); see Visiones (1974)
begin page 150 | ↑ back to topBlake Concordance On-Line
Nelson Hilton has created a Blake Concordance On-Line which is accessible at http://www.english.uga.edu/Blake_Concordance. It is based on The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (1988), which has been re-arranged in approximately chronological order.
The concordance uses a computer program (written in Perl) to accept a pattern of characters or characters and “wild cards,” to match that string line-by-line against the more than fifty thousand lines of the data file, and to return any lines containing a match. Each returned line is identified as to work, plate or page (e.g., Europe pl. 6), and page in the Erdman edition on which it appears. Either of these identifiers may be entered on a separate screen to retrieve the larger context of a matched line.
Browsers which are “frame-enabled” may have all four (resizable) screens (two input, two result) in a single window.
Email links make possible the reporting of errors to the concordance editor, for correction of the on-line database. The Blake Concordance On-Line is an alternative to A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman et al. (1967), which is keyed to The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1957).
*The Blake Project: Spring. Ed. Finn Coren. (Oslo: Bard Records, [1997]). 20 pp.
A handsomely illustrated little brochure (12 × 12 cm.) with 20 texts from the Songs plus “Memory, hither come” (called “Melancholy”) from Poetical Sketches and the Jerusalem lyric from Milton, created to accompany the CD recordings of Finn Coren which have been ecstatically reviewed in the music press: “Thunderingly brilliant!” (Arbeiderbladet), “Absolutely magnificent” (Rogaland Avis), “a sensation” (BEAT Magazine).
*“Catalogue descriptif des scenes, inventions historiques et poétiques.” Tr. Christine Savinel. Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 56/57 ([Musée Pompidou, Paris] 1996) 189-209.
A translation of Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue and prospectus “To the Public.”
“The Chimney-Sweeper [from Innocence].” The Chimney Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing-Boy’s Album, ed. James Montgomery (1824) <BB #238>.
The Blake section is reprinted in William Hone’s EveryDay Book, and Table Book (1830 ff.)
§“The Chimney Sweeper [from Songs of Innocence].” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (9 June 1842): 2.
§“The Chimney Sweeper [from Songs of Innocence].” National Anti-Slavery Standard 10 (1 November 1849): 92.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (1988) <BBS 162>.
See Blake Concordance On-Line, which is based on it.
The Continental Prophecies, ed. D. W. Dörrbecker (1995).
Review
1 Michael Tolley, Blake 30 (1996): 54-57 (an admirable “variorum edition”).
§“The Divine Image.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (21 July 1842): 28.
§“A Dream.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (29 September 1842): 68.
The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, & Joseph Viscomi (1993) <Blake (1994)>.
Review
3 Dennis M. Welch, English Studies 78 (1997): 90-93 (with Jerusalem [1991] and Milton . . . and the Final Illuminated Books [1993]) (all the volumes display “consistently meticulous” scholarship).
*Favorite Works of William Blake: Three Full-Color Books. ([N.Y.:] Dover Publications [1997?]) 12°, ISBN: 0-486-29086-7.
Favorite Works of William Blake is merely a box containing the Dover Songs of Innocence (1971) <BB #168)>, Songs of Experience (1984) <BBS 134>, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1994) <Blake (1995)>.
*Lauschet der Stimme des Barden! Tr. & ed. Bernhard Langer. (Fulda, Germany: Gallimathias, 1995) Memories 7. 55 pp. ISBN: 3-925654-06-2.
Langer, “Bio-Graffiti” (3-5). Selections from Poetical Sketches, Songs, and All Religions are One are given in parallel English and German texts (6-51).
§Libres profétics de Lambeth, I: profecies polítiques. Versió i próleg de Miquel Desclot. (Barcelona: Proa, 1987) Els llibres de l’Ossa Menor; 147. 91 pp.; ISBN: 84-7588-178-5. In English and Catalan.
The poems are Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, and Europe.
§“The Little Black Boy” by Blake the painter. National Anti-Slavery Standard 2 (10 March 1842): 160.
§“The Little Blakc Boy.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (12 December 1844): 112.
§“A Little Boy Lost.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 6 (25 September 1845): 68.
begin page 151 | ↑ back to topMilton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, ed. Robert N. Essick & Joseph Viscomi (1993) <Blake (1994)>.
Review
8 Dennis M. Welch, English Studies 78 (1997): 90-93 (with Jerusalem [1991] and The Early Illuminated Books [1993]) (all the volumes display “consistently meticulous” scholarship).
§“Night.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 (23 June 1842): 12.
§*Obra Poética. Tr. Pablo Mañé Garzón. (Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 1997) 166 pp., 19 cm., ISBN: 84-7175 426 6.
The ISBN codes indicates that this edition is distinct from the three editions of Poesía Completa, tr. Pablo Mañé Garzón (. . . 1984, 1986; 1986; 1980-95).
§“On Another’s Sorrow.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (20 February 1845): 152.
§“On Another’s Sorrow” “from Songs of Innocence and of Experience [not published in America].” National Anti-Slavery Standard 5 (15 May 1845): 200.
§*Poesía Completa: Edición Bilingüe. Tr. Pablo Mañé Garzón. (Barcelona, 1980) Libros Rio Nuevo No. 29-30. Seriá Vol. 21-22. 2 vols. B. §*Corregida y revisada por E. Caracciolo Trejo. (Barcelona, 1984) 2 vols. C. §(Barcelona, 1992) 320 pp. <BBS 161>. D. (Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 1995) Libros Rio Nuevo/XIV. 8°, 463 pp., ISBN: 84-7175-372-3. In Spanish.
In 1995, Pablo Mané Garzón, “Prologo” (15-21); Mariano Vazquez Alonso, “Introduccion” (25-42), poems (English and Spanish on facing pages) from Poetical Sketches, An Island in the Moon, Thel, Tiriel, Innocence, Experience, Notebook, The French Revolution, and Visions, plus, oddly in an edition of Poesía, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (45-463). Of course most of Blake’s poetry is omitted in this edition of his “Poesía Completa.”
The ISBN number indicates that this is a different edition from Mané’s Poesía Completa of . . . 1984, 1986 and of 1986.
§*Poesía Completa. Edición Bilingüe. Prólogo, Pablo Mañé; introducción Mariano Vazquez Alonso; corrección y revisión, E. Caracciolo Trejo; [traducción, Pablo Mañé]. [Second edition.] (1984) C. §(Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 1986) 2 vols., 452 pp., 15 cm.; ISBN: 84-7175-186-0. In Spanish.
The ISBN number indicates that this is a different edition from Mané’s Poesía Completa of 1980, 1984, 1992, 1995 and of 1986 and his Obra Poética (1997).
§Poesía Completa. [Traducción, Pablo Mañé Garzón] ([Madrid]: Hyspamérica, 1986) Biblioteca personal 4. 246 pp., 21 cm. ISBN: 84-599-1217-5. In Spanish.
The ISBN numbers and the pagination indicate that this is a different edition from Mañé’s Poesía Completa (. . . 1984; 1986 and 1980, 1984, 1992, 1995) and his Obra Poética (1997).
The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (1946) <BB #306>.
It is the basis for Zwischen Feuer und Feuer: Poetische Werke, tr. Thomas Eichhorn (1996).
§Primeros libros proféticos: Poemas. Prólogo y traducción de Augusti Bartra. (Mexico [City], 1961.) Colección Poemas y ensayos. 1993 pp., in Spanish. <BBS 163) B. §[Second Edition] (Mexico [City]: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1990) 193 pp.
[Selected Poems of William Blake]. Tr. Yuan Kejia54↤ 54 Probably this is the same as Yuan, K’o-chin (1957) in BB #3063. et al. into Chinese. (Beijing: Beijing’s People’s Literature Press, 1957) 176 pp.
[Selected Poems of William Blake]. Tr. into Chinese by Zha Liangzheng. (Beijing: People’s Literature Press, 1957)
[Selections from the Poetical Works. (Edinburgh: Royal Blind School, 1920)] Folio, perforated in Braile.
Based on the [?Sampson] edition from London: Oxford UP.
Songs of Innocence. (London & Glasgow: Collins’ Clear-Type Press [c. 1927]).
It prints the “Introduction” (called “Reeds of Innocence”) from Innocence, “My Silks and Fine Array,” and “Loves Secret” (“Never seek to tell thy love”) with anonymous designs for a childish audience.
§Visiones. Tr. Enrique Caracciolo Trejo. (Mexico [City]: Editorial Era, 1974) Biblioteca Era: poesia. B. Antologia bilingüe. Ed. & tr. Emrique Caracciolo Trejo. (Madrid: El Libro de Bolsillo Alianza Editorial, 1987). 8°, 237 pp., ISBN: 84-206-0238-8. <BBS 167>. C. (1996).
In the 1987 and 1996 editions, the text of Visiones is slightly revised, and “Por razones de espacio” Vala, Milton, and Jerusalem are omitted. In 1987 and 1996 the work consists of E.C.T., “Introducción” (9-14), “Bibliografia sugerrida” (15-16), “Vocablos de sentido especial en la cosmogonia de Blake” (223-26), “Cronologia de William Blake” (227-29), “Situación de William Blake” in literary history (231-32), plus texts (English and Spanish on facing pages) of Poetical Sketches, Songs, Thel, Marriage, America, Urizen, and “The Everlasting Gospel” (11-221).
begin page 152 | ↑ back to topWilliam Blake. Ed. Peter Butter. (London: J.M. Dent, 1996) Everyman’s Poetry. 8°, xx, 107 pp.; ISBN: 0-460- 87800-X.
“Note on the Author and Editor” (vii); “Introduction” (xvi-xx); “Notes” (104-07).
Zwischen Feuer und Feuer: Poetische Werke. Tr. & ed. Thomas Eichhorn; afterword by Susanne Schmid. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996) 501 pp. ISBN: 3-423-02397-X.
Bilingual selections from Poetical Sketches to “The Everlasting Gospel” (omitting the long prophecies) derive from The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (1946); there is also a chronological table, a short bibliography, and Schmid’s “Nachwort” (439-90).
Part II Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A Illustrations of Individual Authors
Bible: Job
William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (Blake Trust, 1987) <BBS>.
David Bindman’s introduction is “adapted and reprinted” in Malcolm Cormack, William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job [Exhibition 1 November 1997-11 January 1998 at the] Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (1997) 75-82.
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress
Blake’s designs are reproduced in color in various sizes in the Sotheby catalogue of their sale 14 November 1996 <Blake (1997)§>.
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 & Co 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+.
begin page 155 | ↑ back to top5 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 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 Robin Hamlyn, “William Blake (1757-1827)” (12-29 in Spanish {and Catalan}; 219-28 in English): A general account for a Spanish audience.
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 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 *[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 “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.
begin page 157 | ↑ back to top55 *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.

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.
begin page 158 | ↑ back to top94 *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 Anon., “Blake’s Contemporaries and Context.” 2-4.
2 Jessica Todd Smith, “Visioning the Visionaries: Images of and by Blake’s Followers.” 5-7.
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+.
begin page 159 | ↑ back to top30 § 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.)
begin page 161 | ↑ back to topBlake/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.”
begin page 162 | ↑ back to topBruder, [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:
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.
begin page 163 | ↑ back to topThe 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.
begin page 164 | ↑ back to topGoldsmith, 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 Mark L. Greenberg. “Preface.” 11-12. (Most of the papers originated at a meeting of the Modern Language Association.)
2 Mark L. Greenberg. “Introduction: Poetical Sketches: Critical Pivots and Pirouettes.” 13-26. (On differing responses to Poetical Sketches.)
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 Stuart Peterfreund. “The Problem of Originality and Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” 71-103. (Reprinted from ELH 70 [1985]: 673-705.)
5 Thomas A. Vogler. “Troping the Seasons: Blake’s Helio-Poetics and the ‘Golden Load.’” 105-52.
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 Nelson Hilton. “The Rankest Draught.” 165-201. (Chiefly about “then She bore Pale desire.”)
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).
begin page 166 | ↑ back to topHutchings, 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).
begin page 167 | ↑ back to top§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 XVIIe et XVIIIe 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 10th, 1793.” Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe 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.
begin page 168 | ↑ back to topMostly 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 “Melancholia and the Search for a System” (13-47, 226-29).
2 “Images of Authorship/Experiments with Ethics” (48-75, 229-31).
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.
begin page 169 | ↑ back to topSenaha, 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.
Appendix
Watermarks: A Cumulative Table
Watermarks in Paper Used by Blake
Blake wrote and drew on many sizes, kinds and shades of paper and on canvas, card, cardboard, copper, ivory, linen, mahogany, muslin, and pine. Of these, only paper is very precisely identifiable because of the watermarks almost always placed in fine paper, though the watermark may not show when the paper is less than a whole sheet.
All Blake’s manuscripts and his works in Illuminated Printing were created entirely by Blake, with the assistance of his wife, and we can confidently assume that copies which are not demonstrably posthumous are on paper chosen by Blake or his wife. Most of his separate prints were also almost certainly on paper chosen by Blake, as of course were his drawings and paintings.
Blake’s commercial book engravings are not included because he rarely did the printing, and, even when he did as with Hayley’s Cowper (wove paper without watermark), the publisher would have chosen the paper. However, Hayley’s Little Tom the Sailor (1800) was printed by Blake with paper he chose, and presumably there were working proofs of most of Blake’s commercial engravings pulled by Blake at his own press. Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802) is an exception, for not only did Blake print the plates on paper watermarked “1802” but he also used the remainder for scrap paper—see BB 574-75 and BBS 221-22.
Information here about the paper used in Blake’s writings in manuscript and in print derives from BB (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), BBS (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and the supplements thereto in “William Blake and His Circle” from Blake (1994 ff.). An asterisk in a letter designating a copy of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing indicates that more than one kind of watermark has been found in that copy.
Blake’s separate prints of “Canterbury Pilgrims,” “Christ Trampling Satan” (Blake-Butts), George Cumberland’s card, “Earl Spencer,” “Falsa ad Coelum,” “Joseph of Arimathea Preaching,” “Lavater,” “Lear and Cordelia” (Blake-Butts), “Wilson Lowry,” “The Man Sweeping,” Moore & Co advertisement, and “Mrs Q” are taken from Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983). The dates attached to these separate prints are for the specific state on that paper; however, a few prints, such as “Canterbury Pilgrims,” Cumberland’s card, and “Christ Trampling Satan,” were pulled long after Blake’s death.
Blake’s drawings and paintings are recorded (“Butlin #”) from Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981); the table of watermarks on 627 was correlated with the entries themselves for the dates. N.b. Most of the entries in Butlin imply but do not say that they are on paper, and very few of those so identified record anything about a watermark.
Works in BB (etc.) which are also in Butlin and Essick are taken from BB.
↤ 64 The Sophocles MS is on paper with a watermark of Britannia and a crown and a countermark of GR, but I do not think the Sophocles MS has anything to do with the poet William Blake.A
Cumberland card (1827)
C BALL
Marriage (L)
R BARNARD | 1827
Letters (1, 4 August 1829)
BASTED MILL 1820
Butlin #714 (1820)
A B[LACKWELL?]
Letter (7 October 1803)
A BLACKWELL | 1798
Letters (10 January 1802; 25 April, 6 July, 13 December 1803; 14, 27 January 1804)
C BRENCHLEY | 1804
Butlin #725, 731, 738, 741 (1820)
W BRIDGES 1794
Butlin #503 (1800-03)
Britannia design | 17[]
Cumberland card (1827)
Britannia design in a circle beneath a crown Cumberland card (1827)64
begin page 172 | ↑ back to top BUTTANSHAW
Innocence (Y), Songs (3 pl.); “Lear and Cordelia” (1806-08); Butlin
Butlin # 358 (1802)
BUTTANSHAW | 18[]
Letter (19 October 1801)
BUTTANSHAW | 1802
Innocence (?O), Songs (P, *Q)
Crown design
“Falsa ad Coelum” (1790); “Christ Trampling Satan” (1806-08)
CURTEIS & SON
Letter (18 October 1791)
W DA[C]IE | 1803
Letter (25 March 1805)
W D[AC]IE & CO. | 1804
Letter (4 December 1804)
MD or ND
Cumberland card
E & P
America (C-E, G-K, *R), Europe (H), “Man Sweeping” (1822), Marriage (A, F), Songs of Innocence (*E-F, I-J, M), Songs (C-D, F, 2 pl.), Vala?, and Visions (J-K, M) E & P | 1802
Innocence (*P), Jerusalem pl. 28 (Morgan)
EDMEADS & [PINE]
Innocence (*Q), Jerusalem (1 pl.)
EDMEADS & PINE 1802
Innocence (*Q), Jerusalem (3 pl.)
W E[LGAR] + fleur de lys
Butlin #812 passim (1824-27)
W ELGAR 1796
Butlin # 812 passim (1824-27)
F in a circle
Butlin #214 (1793-04)
FAO
“Christ Trampling Satan” (1806-08)
GATER 1805
Butlin # 621 (1805), 771 (1820)
GR and coat of arms
Island, Tiriel; Butlin #12, 15, 17, 25-28, 30, 34, 37-38, 40-42, 45-46
(1774-77)
GR and PRO PATRIA
Butlin #R8 (n.d.)
J GREEN | 1819
Butlin #709, 736, 763 (1820)
[]EEN []9
Butlin #792 (1820)
FRANCE
“Canterbury Pilgrims” (1820 ff.)
JH in monogram
Butlin #693 (1818), 699 (1820)
F HAYES | 1798
Letters (11 September 1801; 22 November 1802; 16 August 1803)
[HAYES] & WISE
Butlin #619 (1805)
HAYES & WISE | 1799
America (M)
F J Head & Co
“Christ Trampling Satan” (1806-08)
N HENDON[?]
“Exhibition of Paintings”
IVY MILL | 1806
Letters (18 January 1808 [A-C])
JUBB and PRO PATRIA
[not, as stated, in Butlin #120]
M & J LAY 1816
Butlin # 543 1-2, 6, 9, 12, 544 1, 6, 11, 704, 712, 715, 768 (1816-20);
Butlin #830, 832 (1824-27)
[LE]PARD
Vala
MA[FRIN]S
For Children (A)
[]ORA[]
“Mrs Q” (1820)
AP| 1807
“Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims,” Descriptive Catalogue
HP
Butlin #120 (1780-85)
PRO PATRIA
Butlin #R1 (1777-78); Butlin # 85-86 (1785-90)
J RUSE | 1800
“Lavater” (1801)
[]R (perhaps I TAYLOR)
Vala
R & T
Europe (*I)
RUSE AND TURNERS
Butlin #757 (1820)
RUSE & TURNERS | 1810
Letters (31 January, 16 July 1826; ?February 5, 31 March, 19 May, 2, 5, 29 July, 1 August?; 27 January, 15, 18 March, 12, 25 April, 3 July 1827?)
RUSE & TURNERS | 1812
America (N), Europe (*I)
RUSE & TURNERS | 1815
Thel (N-O), Marriage (G), Visions (N-P), Songs (U, ?T, 3 pl.), Urizen
(G), Milton (D)
S[ ]
No Natural Religion (F)
SMITH & ALLNUTT | 1815
Letter (14 July 1826); Butlin #703, 713, 730, 728 (1820)
T STAINS
America (*Q), Europe (*L)
T STAINS | 1813
America (*Q), Europe (*L)
[ ]TH
Letter (6 December 1795)
T above an arch
“Wilson Lowry” (1825)
I TAYLOR
No Natural Religion (B, L1), All Religions Are One (*A), Thel (F), Marriage (*D), America (*R), Songs (A, *C, R), Europe (B, *C, D-G, c), Urizen (A, *B, J); Butlin #229, 337 141 [?] (1793); Butlin #614
(1806)
1794 | I TAYLOR
All Religions Are One (*A), Marriage (*D), Urizen (B)
W TURNER & SON
Butlin #708, 711 (1820)
IS IxVILLEDARY
Butlin #636 (1805)
W 1815
Butlin #700 (1820)
J WHATMAN
Thel (a), Innocence (C, *E, G, U, W), Marriage (C), Visions (G-E, H), America (*R), Songs (*C, E, H, o, 1 pl.), Urizen (*D, E, pl.); Moore & Co ad (1797-98); “Christ Trampling Satan” (1806-08); “Man Sweeping” (1822); Butlin #2, 13-14, 16, 18-20, 22-24, 29, 31-33, 35-36, 39, 44, 47 (1774-77); Butlin #167-68 (1785); Butlin #140 (1780-90); Butlin #820 (1785-97, 1824-27); Butlin #56, 58 (1793); Butlin #315 (1795); Butlin #826 (1800-10, 1824-27); Butlin #77 (1805-10); Butlin #582 (1807); Butlin #654 (1809-10); Butlin #679 (1815); begin page 173 | ↑ back to top Butlin #698, 788 (1820); Butlin #175, R11 (n.d.)
J WHATMAN [ ]
Innocence (*P), Songs (e, 3 pl.)
1794 J WHATMAN
Visions (F-G, R), America (A-B, *R, pl. d), Europe (A, *C), Urizen (B, *D, J, 1 pl.), Vala, “Albion Rose” (D); “Lavater” (1801); Butlin #316 (1795); Butlin #330 passim [Young] (1795-97); Butlin #335 1-116
[Gray] (1797-98)
J WHATMAN | 1801 Milton (B)
J WHATMAN | 1804
Innocence (*Q, ?T), Songs (*Q); “Newton”
J WHATMAN | 1808
Innocence (S), Songs (*R, S), Milton (A-C)
J WHATMAN | 1811
Flaxman, Hesiod (1817) proofs
J WHATMAN | 1813
Flaxman, Hesiod (1817) proofs; Butlin #678A (1815)
J WHATMAN | 1815
Marriage (I); Flaxman, Hesiod (1817) proofs
J WHATMAN | 1816
Flaxman, Hesiod (1817) proofs
J WHATMAN | 1818
America (O), Songs (V, *W), Europe (*K), For the Sexes (B), Jerusalem (*A, B, *C, 1 pl.)
J WHATMAN | 1819
Europe (*K), Jerusalem (*A, *C)
J WHATMAN | 1820
America (*O), Europe (*K), Jerusalem (*A, *C, D-E), Ghost of Abel (D); Butlin #552 (1821); Butlin #825 (1824-27)
J WHATMAN | 1821
Ghost of Abel (A), Illuminated Genesis MS; “Man Sweeping” (1822)
J WHATMAN TURKEY MILL1821 Butlin #828 1 (1826-27)
J WHATMAN | 1824
Jerusalem (*F); Butlin #802A (1825), 819 (1824-27)
J WHATMAN | 1825
“Joseph of Arimathea Among” (E), Songs (*W, X-AA), For the Sexes (C-D); Butlin #688 (1825)
J WHATMAN | 1826
For the Sexes (F, H-*J), “Laocoon” (B), Jerusalem (*F), Illuminated Genesis MS; Butlin #828 2, 7 (1826-27)
J WH[ATMAN] 18[ ] Butlin #802 1 (1825)
J WHATMAN | 1828
“Joseph of Arimathea Among” (E); Butlin #546 (on mount) (1820-25)
J WHATMAN | 1831
America pl. 14-16; Songs (*a, b-d, ?e, f-i, *j, k, m, ?n, *o, p, 2 pl.), Jerusalem (*H, *I, J, 1 pl.)
J WHATMAN | 1832
America (P), Europe (b, ?M), Songs (*a, h, p), Jerusalem (*H, *I, 1 pl.)
J W[HATMAN] | TURKE[Y MILL]| 18[ ] Songs (1 pl.)
H WILLMOTT | 1810
“Blake’s Chaucer: An Original Engraving” 179[ ]
Letter (16 September 1800)
1794
Thel (*F), Urizen (1 pl.), “Accusers” (G), “Joseph of Arimathea Preaching” (1793-96); Butlin #656 (1809) [17]96
Letter (16 September 1800); George Cumberland’s card (1827)
1797
Tasso MS
1798
List of Apostles [ ] 18[ ]
Butlin #535 (1807) 180[2?]
Letter (14 October 1807)
1802
Hayley, Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802); Butlin #683 (1805); Butlin #781 (1825)
1806
Butlin #692 passim (1819)
1808
“Canterbury Pilgrims” (1810 ff.)
1810
Butlin #748 (1820) [18]11
No Natural Religion (H-J)
1811
“Earl Spencer” (1813)
1815
Butlin #916 (1824-27); Butlin #801 (1825)
1818
“Everlasting Gospel” MS; letter (March 1825)
1821
On Homer (C)
1832
Songs (*b, o) 19[?]
Songs (*j)
Index to Blake and His Circle
Ackroyd, Peter 159, 160
Ahearn, Edward J. 159
Albergotti, Dan 167
Alcántara, Francisco José 153
Allen, Graham 159
Allen, L. H. 159
Alonso, Mariano Vazquez 151
An, Young-ok 159
Aoyama, Keiko 137, 155, 159
Autoeroticism 142
Baker, Marcia 160, 166
Barry, Robert Adrian, III. 160
Bartra, Augusti 151
Baskin, Leonard 160
Baulch, David M 160
Baulch, David Monroe 160
Becher, Lorenz 161
Becker, Christoph 171
Bell, Daniel 171
Bentley, Dr. E. B. 138
Bentley, G. E., Jr. 137, 140, 155, 160, 161, 170
Bentley, Julia 138
Bergup, Bernice 155
Bindman, David 152, 158, 166
Blake Archive 140
Blake Concordance On-Line 150
Blunden, Clare 148
Blunden, Edmund 148
Blunden, Edmund, collection 148
Bolton, Betsy 161
Brandist, Craig 162
Bresson, Marianne 162
Brett, Bernard 162
Brion, Marcel 162
begin page 174 | ↑ back to topBruder, Helen P. 141, 162
Bull, Malcolm 162
Burdon, Christopher 162
Butlin, Martin 154
Butter, Peter 152
Bygrave, Stephen 162
Byrne, John 148
Chandler, David 162
Chapman, Wes 161
Churchill, W. A. 148
Clark, David L. 161, 163
Clark, Lorraine 162
Clark, Roger 162
Clark, Steve 162
Coats, George 161
Conrad, Christofer 171
Cooper, Andrew M 162
Cooper, Christine Marie 163
Coren, Finn 138, 150
Cormack, Malcolm 152, 158
Coupe, Lawrence 163
Crafton, Lisa Plummer 163
Cumberland, George (Jr.) 143
Cumberland, George, letter to 139
Dalman, Miquel 163
Davies, Darmian Walford 163
Davies, J. M. Q. 163
Davies, Peter 141, 163
de Diego, Estella 156
De Luca, Vincent A. 164
Desclot, Miquel 151
Dingley, Robert 163
Dörrbecker, D. W. 138, 150, 155, 160, 171
d’Ottavi, Stefania 163
Eaves, Morris 150, 163, 166
Eichhorn, Thomas 152
Erdman, David V. 150
Espinosa, Gabriel Sánchez 155
Essick, Robert N. 138, 140, 147, 150, 151, 160, 166
Esterhammer, Angela 161, 163
Every-Day Book 140
Exchange, Greenwich 138
Finch, Christopher 163
Finley, Patricia 169
Fitch, Donald 155
Franklin, William Neal, Jr. 163
Freed, Eugenie R. 160, 163
Freeman, Kathryn 141, 163
Frommert, Christian 141, 164
Garzón, Pablo Mañé 151
Gay, David 163
Gill, A. A. 161, 164
Ginsberg, Allen 164
Gleckner, Robert F. 164
Goldsmith, Steven 141, 164
Gómez, Monserrat 156
Gourlay, Alexander 138
Goyder, George 153
Grant, John E. 138
Greenberg, Mark L. 141, 164
Hall, Carol 171
Hamlyn, Robin 156
Hampton, Christopher 164
Harding, Anthony John 163
Hattendorf, Claudia 171
Haya, Kenichi 164
Heawood, Edward 148
Hebborn, Kevin 138
Heppner, Christopher 161, 164, 170
Hilton, Nelson 138, 150, 164
Hollis, Helen 142, 160
Howe, Elisabeth A. 165
Huang, Zongying 138
Hudson, Ronald 162
Hutchings, Kevin D. 166
Immerhauser, Verena 160
Ishizuka, Hisao 141, 166
Jackson, Richard C. 154
Journal of the Blake Society of St James 166
Kaplan, Marc 160
Kawasaki, Noriko 166
Kazin, Alfred 151, 152
Kejia, Yuan 151
Kelley, Philip 162
Kelley, Theresa M. 170
Kerslake, Thomas 146
Keynes, Sir Geoffrey 139, 146, 166
King, James 155
Kogan, Pauline 166
La Cassagnère, Christian 141, 166
la Fundación “la Caixa,” 138
Langer, Bernhard 151
Larrissy, Edward 164, 166
Lee, Katherine C. 158
Liangzheng, Zha 152
Licht, Fred S. 171
Lincoln, Andrew 161, 166
Linnell, John 152
Collection 147
Löchle, Dieter 155
Low, Lisa 163
Lussier, Mark S 166
M., M.A. 166
Marrat, Rev. Jabez 166
Matheson, C. S. 155
Mattesich, Stefan 167
McCollister, Deborah 142, 161
McKeever, Kerry Ellen 167
McKusick, James 161
Melaney, William D 167
Mellon, Paul 142
Mellor, Anne K. 166
Michael, Jennifer Davis 167
Minney, Penelope 167
Mitchell, W. J. T. 166
Miyake, Hiroshi 167
Monreal, Luis 156
Montgomery, James 150
Moore, Milton 158
Morán, Adela 156
Morton, A. L. 167
Moskal, Jeanne 138, 167
Mulhallen, Karen 155
Niimi, Hatsuko. 167
Noad, Charles E. 167
Noon, Patrick 158
Nuckels, Rosa Turner 167
O’Higgins, Elizabeth 142, 167
Oliver, Marcial 153
O’Neill, Michael 167
Ono, Yoko 167
begin page 175 | ↑ back to topPaley, Morton D. 138, 145, 159, 160
Persyn, Mary Kelley 167
Peterfreund, Stuart 164, 167
Pharobod, Hélène 168
Phillips, Michael 139, 161, 168
Pierce, John B. 161, 166
Pite, Ralph 163, 169
Pizzetti, Simona Tosini 171
Plensa, Jaume 155
Pritchard, William H. 168
Proctor, Roy 168
Punter, David 168
Rainsford, Dominic 168
Rajan, Tilottama 166
Ramos, Rafael 168
Richey, William 141, 168
Rigolo, Sonia 138
Rinder, Frank 140, 147
Robbins, Ruth 168
Robson, Lane 141, 160
Roob, Alexander 169
Rota, Anthony 148
Rota, Bertram 148
Sacks, Russell B. 155
Sage, Robert 162
Saka, Junichi 169
Sardá, Ignasi 155
Savinel, Christine 150
Schmid, Susanne 152
Schorer, Mark 169
Schriver, Janet Marie 141, 169
Scrase, David 138, 146
Senaha, Eijun 142, 169
Serraller, Francisco Calvo 156
Sessler’s 147
Simpson, M. 169
Sleasby, R. E. 169
Soler, Anne 138
Solomon, Deborah 158
Spector, Sheila A. 160, 163
Stanger, James Aaron 169
Stauffer, Andrew M. 140, 169
Stothard, Thomas, artist 143
Sunderland, Earl of 148
Tannenbaum, Leslie 163
Taylor, Charles H. 169
Thompson, E. P. 169
Tolley, Michael J. 150, 160
Trejo, Enrique Caracciolo 151, 152
Trobaugh, Elizabeth Ariel 170
Trowbridge, Katelin E. 170
Twyman, M. L. 170
Utermöhlen, Nikolaus 155
Vardy, Alan Douglas 170
Vaughan, Frank 161
Vaughan, Frank A. 170
Villena, Elvira 155
Vine, Steven 170
Viscomi, Joseph 138, 141, 150, 151, 160, 166, 170
Visely, Suzanne Araas 170
Vogler, Thomas A. 164
Wada, Ayako 167, 170
Wagenknecht, David 164
Wall, William Garfield 170
Watermarks 148
Weinglass, David H. 171
Welch, Dennis M. 145, 150, 151
Wemyss, Henry 170
White, Elizabeth 170
Williams, Taffy 149
Windle, John 138, 143, 147
Wolfson, Susan J. 164
Woodring, Carl H. 154
Worrall, David 162
Wrigley, G.W. 154
Yamakage, Takashi 170
Yamazaki, Yusuke 171
Yoder, R. Paul 161
Zahn, Mabel, bookseller 147
Zecchi, Stefano 171