Volume 32 · Issue 4

Part I
Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles¹⁸↤ ¹⁸ 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

Watermarks in Paper Used by Blake Crown and Shield

Letter of 1 September 1800

America (1793[-1831?])

Copy N (bound with Europe [I])

History: (1) Perhaps America (N) and Europe (I) were among the “three or four of the Engraved books” which Catherine Blake sold about 1831 to the artist James Ferguson (1791-1871), “a gentleman in the far north”;¹⁹↤ ¹⁹ Gilchrist (1863) 366 (Blake Records [1969] 363-64). (2) Acquired by Sir George Grey (1779-1882) of Falloden, Northumberland, who wrote in it: “I purchased this book at the sale of the effects of a deceased artist, (I now forget his name), who had obtained it direct from Blake” (the posthumous character of the printing of America suggests that it was obtained from Catherine after Blake’s death)....

Descriptive Catalogue (1809)

Manuscript

In a letter of 5 August 1914, Richard C. Jackson said that “My Father [Francis Jackson] had Blake’s M/S of this [DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE], and I may have it still” (Victoria and Albert Museum Archives), but no other record is known of the manuscript of the Descriptive Catalogue. Jackson also said in a letter of 14 June 1913 to Palmer (V&A Archives) that

many of his [Blake’s] relics are here which my father acquired of M^rs Blake & Tatham—and here are his Clock and watch & chain & Seal—Still going & keeping fairly good time—

It seems possible that all these Blake treasures are the products of the fertile imagination of Jackson (father or son).

Copy U

History: The title page, p. 33, and Cumberland’s note are reproduced in Blake 31 (1998): 117, 119, 120.

Europe (1794[-1831?])

Copy I

History: For the possibility that it was first bought by James Ferguson, see America (N) with which it is bound.

For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)

Newly Recorded Print

Plate 18

History: (1) Offered and reproduced in Folio Fine Art Ltd Catalogue 5 (January 1968), #22, “second or third state . . . with 1” margins” for £38; Untraced.

For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (?1818)

A copy of pl. 18 offered at §Swann Galleries, “Works of Art on Paper” (12 November 1998), #185 (called “Second state,” platemark 11.5 × 9.0 cm, estimate: $1,200-$1,800, not sold) is shown by R. N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1998,” Blake (1999) to be an imitation.

An Island in the Moon (?1784)

Edition

An Island in the Moon. Ed. and Decorated by Gavin O’Keefe. ([Newport Ness (Virginia), later in 1998 Lilburn, Georgia:] Purple Mouth Press, 1998) 8o, iv, 28 pp.; ISBN: 0-9603-300-5-4.

In “The Work” (28), O’Keefe says that he has tried “to^[e] present as readable a version of the story as is possible”; some of his designs show a moon-scape.

Letters Newly Recorded Letter

Date	Postmark	Watermark	Collection
1800 Aug			Untraced
1800 Sept 1	SE[PT] [1] 800 fragments of BRIDGE Westminster A.S.A.	Crown and shield	Essick

1800 August?

History: (1) Sent by Blake to [John Aiken], the editor of The Monthly Magazine (who did not publish it) and quoted by Blake in his letter to Cumberland of 1 September 1800; (2) Untraced.

1800 September 1

History: The letter is reproduced in Blake 32 (1998): 6-9 (illustrating Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, “‘Dear Generous George Cumberland’: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake”).

1807 May. The copy sent by Cromek to Blake has disappeared. However, Cromek’s “duplicate copy” was (1) “found . . . amongst his father’s papers by the late T.H. Cromek,” who (2) “knowing Mr. Allan Cunningham personally, and as an old friend of his father, lent it to him at his request . . . in begin page 119 | ↑ back to top

1 Blake’s receipt of 9 September 1806 for £6.6.0 from Thomas Butts (courtesy of the Huntington Library, which acquired it in 1998).   Notice that the receipt itself is made out in an elegant clerkly hand, presumably that of Thomas Butts, while Blake’s signature is in a distinctly different hand. This receipt is unusual in specifying what the money was for; most of the Butts receipts say merely “on further account.” Not only did Butts make out in advance the receipt for Blake to sign, but he paid in advance for works not specified. The surviving receipts cover 1803-1810, but Butts certainly bought works from Blake both before and after this time, such as the illustrations for Milton’s Comus, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso (c. 1816).

1833 .... The letter he was never able to get back”;²⁰↤ ²⁰ John Bell, “Blake and Cromek,” Spectator 836 (1882): 1411. (3) The letter was lent by Peter Cunningham, for publication in Anon., “The Life and Works of Thomas Stothard, R.A.,” Gentleman’s Magazine, N.S. 38 (1852): 146-50; (4) Untraced.

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

Copy L

History: It is reproduced in Robert N. Essick, “Representation, Anxiety, and the Bibliographic Sublime,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1998): 503-28, Figures 9-10.

Copy M

History: It is reproduced in Blake 31 (1998): 116, 139, 144.

Editions

§*Matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno. (n.d.) Piccola enciclopedia 100. ISBN: 88-7710-288-8. In Italian.

*Le Mariage du Ciel et de l’Enfer. Postface de Giuseppe Ungaretti. Tr. Alain Suied. (Paris: Arfuen, 1996) Arfuen Textes anglais cahier no 106. 8o, 72 pp.; ISBN: 2-9088-25-49-X.

English and French texts are on facing pages; “Petit glossaire du Ciel et de l’Enfer” (61-62); Ungaretti, “Sur William Blake,” tr. Gerard Pfister 63-66); “Note Biographique” (67-70).

↤ ²¹ The MS, which had been owned by Ruthven Todd, was sold from Marvin Sadik Fine Arts, Catalogue 1 (April 1998) to John Windle and by him to the Huntington Library in May 1998, with funds provided by Robert N. Essick.

Receipts signed by Blake (see illus. 1)

Payer	Date	Sum	Location of MS
Thomas Butts	9 Sept 1806	£6.6.0	Huntington21

Songs of Experience (1794[-1802])

Edition

*Les chants de l’expérience. Tr. Alain Suied. (Paris: Arfuen, 1993) Arfuen Textes anglais cahier no 91. 8o, 94 pp.: ISBN: 2-908825-295.

English and French texts are on facing pages; “Abstrait humain, concret divin” (83-88).

Songs of Innocence (1789[-1808?])

Edition

*Les chants de l’innocence. Tr. Alain Suied. (Paris: Arfuen, 1992) Arfuen Textes anglais cahier no 83. 8o, 80 pp.; ISBN: 2-9088-242-01 <Blake (1994)§>.

English and French texts are on facing pages. “Révélation et Révolution” (71-74); biography of Blake (75-79).

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794[-1831?])

Copy F

History: (1) Cumberland may have acquired Songs (F) in August 1800. On 2 July 1800, Blake wrote to Cumberland begin page 120 | ↑ back to top

2 (a) Headpiece and (b) tailpiece, both perhaps by H. Vizetelly who signed the second, for Blake’s “The Ecchoing Green” (here called “A Summer Evening on a Village Green” and shorn of its first stanza) as printed in Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons, ed. Mary Howitt (1854) <Collection of R. N. Essick>.   Blake’s “Ecchoing Green” in Songs of Innocence (1789) also has a headpiece and a tailpiece (see illus. 3a-b). The headpiece, of children playing “under the oak” round which sit “the old folk” is related sufficiently closely to the headpiece of the Pictorial Calendar, with children dancing round a huge oak tree, to make one wonder whether the designer had seen Blake’s plate.
An even closer analogy in Innocence to the Pictorial Calendar head-piece of dancing on the green is in the tailpiece for “Nurse’s Song” (illus. 3c).
Blake’s tailpiece of children walking homeward (illus. 3b) is quite unlike the Pictorial Calendar tailpiece of handkerchief dancing in a village street (illus. 2b).

about the “deep pit of Melancholy” from which “I begin to Emerge.”²²↤ ²² William Blake’s Writings 1535. Cumberland may have tried to lift Blake from his depression by offering to sell Blake’s books and by buying Songs (F), which was “prepared by him [Blake] expressly for an intimate friend [Cumberland],”²³↤ ²³ Kerslake’s Catalogue (after Dec 1857), Lot 733. However, Songs (F) is fairly clearly a made-up copy, for the Innocence leaves are printed (early?) on both sides of the leaves and watercolored in a late style, while those in Experience are color-printed on only one side of the leaf. and with which Blake’s thankful letter of 1 September 1800 was apparently kept. Cumberland may even have acquired at the same time the copies of America (F), Europe (C), Song of Los (D), Visions (B) (these four works bound together), Thel (A), and For Children (C) which he also owned.²⁴↤ ²⁴ Cumberland owned no work of Blake in Illuminated Printing written after 1800, though he did acquire Descriptive Catalogue (U) in 1809 and Job in 1828. In August Cumberland apparently told Blake of his ill-success in trying to sell Blake’s works, and on 1 September Blake replied: “To have obtained your friendship is better than to have sold ten thousand books.”

begin page 121 | ↑ back to top

3 (a) Headpiece and (b) tailpiece of “The Ecchoing Green,” and (c) tailpiece to “Nurse’s Song,” pl. 6-7, 24 from Songs of Innocence (1789) [all three as reproduced in William Blake’s Writings (1978) 26-27, 47].   The headpiece to “The Ecchoing Green” and the tailpiece to “Nurse’s Song” seem to be significantly related to the headpiece to the version of “The Ecchoing Green” printed in Mary Howitt’s Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons (1854) (see illus. 2a).

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794[-1831?])

Copy I

History: Reproduced in Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart (1998).

Copy W

History: Reproduced from the Blake Trust reproduction (1991) in Eskyldens og Erfaringens sanger: som viser menneskes: elens to motstridende tistander, tr. Geir Uthaug (1997).

Copy b

History: Reproduced in Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart (1998).

Editions

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1991), Blake Trust <BBS 136>.

The Blake Trust reproductions of copy W are reproduced in Geir Uthaug’s Norwegian translation (1997).

§Chansons d’innocence et d’expérience: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Tr. Armand Sedaine. Ill. Sam Jones. (La Tilv, 1997) 86 pp., ISBN: 2-909159-19-1. In French.

Eskyldens og Erfaringens sanger: som viser menneskes: elens to motstridende tistander. Ed. and tr. Geir Uthaug. Med komplette gjengivelse av William Blakes etsninger, 20 I farger. (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1997) 4o, 144 pp., ISBN: 82-03-17794-8.

begin page 122 | ↑ back to top

“Forord” (5-6); “William Blake” (7-23); Norwegian translation facing reproductions in black-and-white and color from the Blake Trust facsimile (W); “Kommentarer til de enkelte dikt” (15-144).

Part II
Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings

Part III
Commercial Book Engravings

Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)

1826 New Locations: Kanagawa Kindai Bijutsukan [Kanagawa Modern Fine Art Museum, Japan], Santa Barbara Museum.

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

1808 New Locations: Kanagawa Kindai Bijutsukan [Kanagawa Modern Fine Art Museum, Japan], Victoria College (University of Toronto—Northrop Frye’s copy).

B. H. Malkin’s important letter of 4 January 1806 (Blake Records, 421-31), showing the variety of Blake’s talents (like the “Advertisement” to Poetical Sketches [1783]) and praising Blake’s watercolors for Blair’s Grave and Fuseli’s encomium of them printed in the two prospectuses for it of November 1805 (Blake Records Supplement 31, 35), which is of such tenuous relevance as printed in Malkin’s Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806), may have been drafted as the “Preface . . . by BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN” advertised in the November 1805 Prospectus to The Grave. The part of the “Preface Containing an Explanation of the Artist’s View in the Designs” (November 1805) probably became the essay “Of the Designs” in The Grave (1808), 33-36.

For Thomas Sivright’s sale of a “Volume of Drawings by Blake, Illustrative of Blair’s Grave, entitled ‘Black Spirits and White, Blue Spirits and Grey,’” see 1-19 February 1836.

Dante, Blake’s Illustrations of Dante (1838)

New Location: Kanagawa Kindai Bijutsukan [Kanagawa Modern Fine Art Museum, Japan].

Donne, John, Poetical Works (1779)

The unpublished proof for Bell’s Edition of The Poets of Great Britain of a winged figure flying from the viewer is tentatively ascribed in BB A1450 to Bell’s edition of Donne’s Poetical Works and in Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake (1983), 236-37, Figure 105, to Bell’s edition of Paradise Lost.

There are two copies of the print in the British Museum Print Room, Essick has acquired a copy, and another is in John Windle’s List Twenty-Nine (1998), #73.

Flaxman, John, Compositions from . . . Hesiod (1817)

New Locations: Detroit Mercy, Minnesota.

Flaxman, John, The Iliad of Homer (1805)

New Location: Detroit Mercy.

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

Set of Unrecorded Date New Location: Detroit Public.

Hartley, David, Observations on Man (1791)

A proof of Blake’s frontispiece before signature, on wove paper, was acquired by R. N. Essick in 1998.

Hayley, William, Ballads (1805)

New Location: Fogg Museum (Harvard University).

An examination of the probable costs, sales, and profits or losses of the publication of Hayley’s Ballads (1805) may elucidate the obscurity of this crucial period of Blake’s life.

The expenses of the volume would have been:

↤ ²⁸ Hayley to Phillips, 28 Feb 1805 (BR 159). The cost-per-copy is the total manufacturing cost (£238.4.6) divided by the number of copies printed (1,000) = 4s 9d. ↤ ²⁹ In 1799, Bensley estimated that for Du Roveray’s Gray, 1,000 ordinary + 250 large paper copies in 8° would cost £12.12.0 per sheet, and 1,250 + 250 large paper copies would cost £14.10.0 (MS in the Huntington; see G. E. Bentley, Jr., “F. J. Du Roveray, Illustrated-Book Publisher 1798-1806: II: The Amateur and the Trade,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 12 [1990]: 69); therefore 250 ordinary copies would cost £1.18.0 (£14.0.0 less £12.12.0), and 1,000 would cost £7.12.0 (4 times £1.18.0) per sheet. I presume that this cost includes setting the text, paper (27 1/2 reams at £2.10.0 per ream), printing, labels, hotpressing, and sewing and boarding. The cost of paper derives from that in Malkin’s Memoirs (Jan 1806) (BB 595]). In correspondence with Phillips, Seagrave insisted that he should be paid at the rates of London Printers.

↤ ³⁰ All expenses for 1,000 duodecimo copies of the 21 sheets of George Cumberland’s Original Tales (1810), including 19 advertisements, came to £147.18.9 (British Library Add. MSS 36,503, ff. 240-241; see G. E. Bentley, Jr., A Bibliography of George Cumberland (1754-1848) [N.Y. & London: Garland Publishing, 1975] 27).

↤ ³¹ Letter of 22 March 1805 (William Blake’s Writings [1978] 1624). The costs of the copyright of the designs, copper, captions, and corrections were presumably included in Blake’s fee. ↤ ³² As in Flaxman’s Iliad (April 1805) (BB 561). Prints could be pulled as needed. ↤ ³³ Ibid. Note that the cost of printing 8° plates may have been substantially less than for the folio plates in Flaxman’s Iliad.

↤ ³⁴ As in Malkin’s Memoirs (Jan 1806) (BB 595). There were puffs and ads for Hayley’s Ballads in (1-2) Phillips’ Monthly Magazine (1 April, 1 July 1805), (3) Edinburgh Review 6 (July 1805): 495, (4) Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (Aug 1805), and (5) a Phillips Short List (n.d.). ↤ ³⁵ It was reviewed in (1) Critical Review 3 S, 5 (1805): 439, (2) Literary Journal 5 (1805): 884, (3) Guardian of Education 4 (1805): 416-26, (4) Monthly Mirror 20 (1805): 184-85, (5) British Critic 26 (1805): 563-64, (6) Eclectic Review 1 (1805): 923, (7) Flowers of Literature 4 (1805): 417, (8) New Annual Register 26 (1805): 355, (9) Annual Review 4 (1806): 576-77, (10) Phillips’ Monthly Magazine 20 Supplement (1806): 614-15, and (11) Poetical Register for 1805 5 (1807): 489. ↤ ³⁶ Blake is known to have given copies of the Ballads (1805) to Mr. Weller and to Lady Hesketh (BR, 163, 162), and doubtless there were more which cannot now be identified.

On the publication in June 1805 of Hayley’s Ballads (1805), Blake became liable for his share (c. £23³⁷↤ ³⁷ Blake’s share was half the total publication cost (£256.0.7) minus the £105 credit for his engravings. ) of the publication costs, and, though he expected to receive half the proceeds from the sales,³⁸↤ ³⁸ The price given in the Eclectic Review 1 (1805): 923, was 10s 6d. (Phillips’ Monthly Magazine [1805]: 583, must be in error in giving the price as 6s.) Of this 10s 6d, the bookseller’s discount was 16 2/3% (1s 9d), leaving 8s 9d for the publishers. Sixty copies, given to Hayley (30), to Blake (10), and for review (20), were not available for sale. this was slow in coming in and probably never equalled his investment in cash and kind. To pay his debt to Phillips, Blake may have had to borrow money, and the sacrifices he had to make to repay his debt may well have reduced him to living on a pittance. Perhaps after all Cromek was right that in the autumn of 1805 the Blakes “were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half-a-guinea a week!”

We can only guess how many copies of Hayley’s Ballads (1805) were sold—probably not many. Had the number been large, Phillips would surely have published another edition.

Profit and Loss Related to Copies Sold

In order to make a profit, 564 copies of the Ballads had to be sold, and almost certainly the total sales were fewer than this.

↤ ³⁹ Prints could be pulled and copies boarded as they were called for, but the other costs are constant.

It seems very likely that Blake received no profit from the sales of the Ballads, though he did receive credit for £105 for his engravings—from which, of course, he had to deduct the 10s for the copper.

Hayley, William, Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802) We do not know how many copies of the Designs were printed or what Seagrave’s charges were for printing and paper, but we may make estimates based upon Blake’s statement that he paid Seagrave £30⁴⁰↤ ⁴⁰ On 28 December 1804 Blake thanked Hayley for “the Twelve Guineas which you Lent Me when I made up 30 Pounds to pay our Worthy Seagrave in part of his Accounts” (William Blake’s Writings [1978] 1619). I take the “part” of Seagrave’s account to be £12.12.0 rather than the £30. Hayley said Blake had “paid a Bill of 30£ for paper” (letter of 3 April 1803 [Blake Records [1969] 114) which I take to represent payment to Seagrave for paper and printing of the Designs.When Blake wrote on 11 Dec 1805 that he “should be able to Settle with him [Seagrave] Soon what is between us” (William Blake’s Writings 1631), he was presumably referring to his indebtedness not for the Designs (1802) but for the Ballads (1805), for which the publisher Richard Phillips “will go equal shares with me in the expense and the profits, and . . . Seagrave is to be the printer” (letter of 22 Jan 1805 [William Blake’s Writings 1631]). and on contemporary printing prices. On 10 October 1800 Thomas Bensley estimated that the cost of printing 1,000 quarto copies of Thomson’s Seasons (5 sheets) for F.J. Du Roveray would be £15.15.0 per sheet (£78.15) for paper, printing, and hotpressing.⁴¹↤ ⁴¹ Quoted from the MS in the Huntington Library; see G. E. Bentley, Jr., “F.J. Du Roveray, Illustrated-Book Publisher 1798-1806: The Amateur and the Trade,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 12 (1988): 70.

At this rate, £29.10.8 would pay for 250 quarto copies of the 7½ sheets of Hayley’s first four Ballads. Assuming that Seagrave’s provincial rates were lower than those of the metropolitan fine printer Bensley, and that Seagrave did not hotpress the Designs, his charges for 250 copies would have been somewhat lower than £29.10.8. On the other hand, the paper on which Blake printed the whole-page plates (the same as for the text, watermarked “1802”) are not included in this cost. The 312½ sheets for the five whole-page engravings at £5 per ream of 500 sheets would have come to about £3 more.

Presumably Seagrave printed 250 copies of each Ballad and sent them to Blake; Blake and his wife then printed three designs on text plates plus a frontispiece and a separate print for each Ballad—but they printed them only as the need arose, not all at once. When there proved to be demand for no more than a few score copies (only 12 copies of the first Ballad have been traced in public collections), Blake was left with perhaps 200 copies (1500 sheets) of the Designs. These were of no commercial value, but the paper alone had cost about £15. Blake cannily kept these sheets, even taking them back to London with him in 1803, at considerable trouble, and he drew on them for the rest of his life, including designs for Blair’s Grave (1805), Malkin’s Memoirs (1806), Job and Dante (c. 1824).

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

A 1803-4 New Location: Wayne State.

Blake said that

My Wife has undertaken to Print the whole number of the Plates for [the first two volumes of] Cowpers work which She does to admiration & being under my own eye the prints are as fine as the French prints & please every one. . . . The Publishers are already indebted to My Wife Twenty Guineas for work deliverd [letter of 30 January 1803.]

However, after the Blakes had printed 12 proof sets of the two plates for Vol. 3 of Cowper, Blake had to “send the Plates to [Joseph] Johnson who wants them to set the Printer to work upon” (letter of 31 March 1804). R. N. Essick remarks that

The plates for vols. 1-2 are much more clearly and darkly printed in the second edition .... One hesitates to blame Mrs Blake for the poor impressions of the first states, but that may indeed be the case [William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991)].

Malkin, Benjamin Heath, A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806)

New Location: Minnesota.

For evidence that the prefatory essay on Blake may have originated as the “Preface . . . by BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN” advertised in the November 1805 Prospectus to Blair’s Grave (1808), see Blair (above).

Edition

Malkin, Benjamin Heath. A Father’s Memoirs of His Child 1806. (Poole & Washington, D.C.: Woodstock Books, 1997) ISBN: 1 85477 210 4.

J[onathan] W[ordsworth], “Introduction) (7 pp.).

Scott, John, Poetical Works (1782)

New Location: Minnesota.

Stedman, J. G., Narrative of a five years expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796, 1806, 1813) 1796 New Location: Detroit Public.

Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (1797)

New Locations: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Kanagawa Kindai Bijutsukan [Kanagawa Modern Fine Art Museum, Japan], Victoria College, (University of Toronto—Northrop Frye’s copy. Given to him in 1954 by Jay Macpherson).

A copy in “original boards with ‘printed label on upper cover’” in §Sotheby (London) catalogue (7 May 1998), #30, exhibits a label not recorded elsewhere.

Part IV
Catalogues and Bibliographies

1-19 February 1836

Catalogue of the Extensive and Valuable Collections of Books, Pictures, Drawings, Prints, and Painters’ Etchings, Ancient Bronzes and Terracottas, Etruscan Vases, Marble Busts, Antique Carvings and Chasings in Wood and Metal, Coins, Minerals, Gems and Precious Stones, Philosophical Instruments, Wines, Spirits, &c. &c. of the late Thomas Sivwright Esq. of Meggetland and Southouse, Which Will Be Sold by Auction by Mr. C.B. Tait, In His Great Room, 11, Hanover Street, on Monday, February 1, and Sixteen following lawful days, at One O’Clock (Edinburgh: Printed by Thomas Constable, M.DCCC.XXXVI [1836])

Lot 1835 was a “Volume of Drawings by Blake, Illustrative of Blair’s Grave, entitled ‘Black Spirits and White, Blue Spirits and Grey’” [sold for £1.5.0].⁴²↤ ⁴² The quotation is from Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, V, ii (often appropriately interpolated into eighteenth-century performances of King Lear, IV, 1). For a fuller account of the sale, see “Thomas Sivright and the Lost Designs for Blair’s Grave,” Blake 29 [1984-85]: 103-06; the information here did not make its way into BBS.

This “Volume of Drawings by Blake” for Blair’s Grave (still untraced) presumably consisted of the 20 finished drawings which Cromek chose in 1805 from the 40 designs Blake had made for The Grave.⁴³↤ ⁴³ According to Flaxman’s letter of 18 Oct 1805 (Blake Records [1969] 165-66). Only two finished drawings have survived, both listed in the first 1805 Prospectus but neither engraved: “The Widow Embracing her Husband’s Grave” (Yale Center for British Art) and “Death Pursuing the Soul through the Avenues of Life” (collection of Robert N. Essick). We know the subjects of two further Blair designs, both untraced: “Friendship” (listed in the first prospectus of November begin page 127 | ↑ back to top

4 Title page of J. F. Bastien’s La Nouvelle Maison Rustique (Paris: Deterville & Destray, 1798) with the signature of “W^m Blake” who is almost certainly one of the numerous contemporaries who bore his names, presumably a land-owner or tenant-farmer.   The signature is disconcertingly similar to the one dated 29 May 1773 on the title page of anon., A Political and Satirical History of the Years 1756 and 1757 (London: E. Morris, [?1757]) (see the reproduction in Blake Books Supplement [1995]) 315).

Nothing at all is known of the other six finished designs for Blair’s Grave which Cromek bought from Blake.⁴⁴↤ ⁴⁴ However, there are preliminary sketches for all but pl. 2, 8, 10, 12, plus four alternative versions of the title page.

No surviving drawing or book by Blake has been traced to the collection of Cromek or Sivright.

However, Allan Cunningham evidently saw the design described in the first 1805 Prospectus as “Death Pursuing the Soul through the Avenues of Life.”⁴⁵↤ ⁴⁵ Cunningham (1830) paragraph 21 (Blake Records 487), a reference generously pointed out to me by Essick. However, Cunningham thought the drawing an illustration for The First Book of Urizen; one of Urizen’s “exploits is to chase a female soul through a narrow gate and hurl her headlong down into a darksome pit.” No such action is described or depicted in Urizen. Cunningham had good opportunity to see Cromek’s watercolors for Blair’s Grave, for he lived with Cromek when he first came to London in 1810, and Cromek’s son later lent him Cromek’s copy of his letter to Blake of May 1807 (q.v.). Apparently the designs for Blair’s Grave were still in the Cromek family as late as 1830 and passed thereafter to Thomas Sivright of Meggetland.

23-25 July 1923

Catalogue of . . . R.C. Jackson (London: Goddard & Smith, 1923) <Blake (1998)>.

Additional information about R. C. Jackson’s Blake collection is given in Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater (N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons’ London: Everett & Co., 1907); Vol. 2 is largely based on information from R. C. Jackson, information which subsequent Pater scholars have controverted⁴⁶↤ ⁴⁶ For example, Jackson is a “bizarre halluciné” whose “témoigne est . . . profondément suspect à nos yeux” (Germaine d’Hangest, Walter Pater: L’Homme et l’Œuvre [Paris: Didier, 1961] 287); Jackson “never seems to have realised the boundary between the world of his dreams and the realities of his situation,” and none of Pater’s known friends had apparently heard of Jackson (Samuel Wright, “Richard Charles Jackson,” Antigonish Review 1 [1971]: 82, 86). There is no reference to Jackson in the indices to Samuel Wright, An Informative Index to the Writings of Walter Pater (West Cornwall, Connecticut: Locust Hill Press, 1987), or in Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). or, more commonly, ignored. For instance, Wright claimed that Jackson is the original of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and that Pater “spent far more of his time in the company of Mr. Jackson than in that of any other friend” (21, 42).

On the other hand, Wright does present some hard evidence in the form of photographs representing Jackson c. 1882 (as “Brother a Becket”), c. 1886 (as “Marius the Epicurean”), c. 1890, and August 1906 (“in Mr. Wright’s study at Olney”) (53, 78, 172, 233) as well as Jackson’s richly cluttered rooms in Camberwell (181, 185, 189, though with no table like the one owned by Gainsborough and Blake).

Jackson’s library may not have been, as Wright claimed, “one of the most valuable private libraries in England,”⁴⁷↤ ⁴⁷ Thomas Wright 81. but it was sufficiently extensive to allow Jackson to give 850 books on Dante to Southwark Public Library in 1900,⁴⁸↤ ⁴⁸ Samuel Wright, “Richard Charles Jackson,” Antigonish Review 1 (1971): 87. and Wright’s book reproduces from it photographs of (1) Virgil, Sebastian Brandt’s edition, commentary by Christophoro Landino (Argent: Johannis Gruninger, 1502) (255, 258, 261), (2) Homer (Venice, 1525) with over 100 woodcuts (265, 269, 273, 276), (3) Dante, Divine Comedy (Venice, 1529) (248), (4) The Workes of our Antient and learned English Poet Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Bonham Norton, 1598) (237, 241, 245), and (5) John Guillim, Display of Heraldry, Fourth Edition (London: Richard Bleme, 1660) with “every coat . . . properly colored at the time of publication” (268). Wright begin page 128 | ↑ back to top also refers to “an early edition of Caxton and a pre-Caxtonian copy of the Golden Legend, with beautiful binding and clasps” and “first editions of Carlyle and Blake” (174).

In particular, the “Blake treasures” which Jackson showed to Pater consisted of ↤ ⁴⁹ Wright 180. Wright does not mention a number of works associated with Blake in the 1923 catalogue: portraits of Dante and Chaucer (#182), a pen-and-ink drawing (#245), a “letter from Blake to Flaxman” (#293), Blake’s chair (#465), his painting table (#579f), and 37 volumes from “The Library of William Blake” (#812)—perhaps Jackson acquired these after Pater’s death in 1894 or after Wright’s book was published in 1907.

an engraving of the Canterbury Pilgrims, Blake’s original oil-colour sketch for Chaucer, several copies of Blake’s works in proof state, including the plates to the Book of Job, Young’s Night Thoughts, and Blair’s Grave—all in uncut states, and a copy of the famous ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell,’ coloured in water-colours by Blake’s own hand.⁴⁹

Of these works by Blake, the only one which appears in the 1923 sale is the engraving of the Canterbury Pilgrims (#293, not attributed to Blake)—perhaps the others had been.

Published “Proofs” of Job (1826) and Blair’s Grave (1808) are not uncommon, but no other copy of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) is known to be “in proof state.” “Blake’s original oil-colour sketch for Chaucer” which Wright says Jackson owned is not otherwise known.⁵⁰↤ ⁵⁰ Blake’s tempera for the Canterbury Pilgrims has been in the Stirling-Maxwell family since 1853 (Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1981) 475), and the uncolored pencil sketch has been in the Cunliffe family since 1895 (476). It is exceedingly unlikely that Blake ever made a sketch for Chaucer in oil, as opposed, say, to watercolors. Of the eight known colored copies of the Marriage, copies F-I could not have belonged to Jackson, and it is exceedingly unlikely that A, C-E did.

Almost certainly Jackson did not own a proof copy of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), “Blake’s original oil-colour sketch for Chaucer,” or a copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, though he could have had the Marriage facsimile of Hotten (1868) or of Muir (1884).

September 1949

§Maggs Bros Catalogue 117, Mercurius Britannicus.

Sixteen Blake drawings are recorded in R. N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 1998,” Blake (1999).

1983

*Robert N. Essick. The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (1983) <BBS 301>.

For “New Information about Blake’s Engravings” for The Separate Plates, see Blake 31 (1998): 136.

1991

*Robert N. Essick. William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991) <BBS 310>.

For “New Information about Blake’s Engravings” for William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations, see Blake 31 (1998): 136.

1995

Bentley, G. E., Jr., Blake Books Supplement: A Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake 1971-92 being a Continuation of Blake Books (1995).

Review

5 David Worrall, Blake 32 (1998): 46-48 (“Blake Books/Records/Supplements” are “such a Herculean set of labors, and such wonderful achievements” that they should be merged and published on CD-ROM [48]).

6 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 396-97 (“encyclopaedic and indispensable”).

2 April-16 July 1997

Patrick Noon, The Human Form Divine (1997)

Review

3 §Robert Orme, Art Book Review 5 (1998): 44-45.

22 June-6 September 1998

*William Blake and his Circle: Exhibition Guide, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 22 June -6 September 1998. (Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 1998) 4o, 8 pp., 47 entries.

The exhibition consists of 17 Blakes and 26 works by Calvert, Francis Oliver Finch, Fuseli, Linnell, Palmer, Richmond, James Smetham, Stothard, and Varley.

Reviews, Announcements, &C.

1 *Dave Freak, What’s On: Birmingham and Central England, 13-26 June 1998, 28.

2 Anon., “Midlands & North West Previews,” Art Review, July/August 1998 (“A programme of theatrical events, readings, lectures and children’s workshops has been organised by the Museum to complement this significant exhibition”).

3 *Terry Grimley, “Visions of a new Jerusalem: Terry Grimley welcomes a rare public showing for Birmingham’s William Blake collection,” Birmingham Post, 30 June 1998 (“The heart of Birmingham’s Blake collection consists of six” Dante watercolors).

4 *Anon., “William Blake & His Circle,” What’s On: Your Leading Leisure Guide, July 1998, 35 (“All but four of the images on show in this exhibition . . . are owned by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery”).

11 July-11 October 1998

William Blake Hangaten [Exhibition of William Blake’s Engravings]. Kanagawa Kindai Bijutsukan Bekkan. (Kanagawa, Japan, 1998) In Japanese.

A sheet folded in three with:

1. 1 Hidefumi Hashi. “Blake no Hanga ni miru Jukosa to Shinpisei [Depth and Mystery in Blake’s Engravings].”

2. 2 “Sakuhin Kaisetsu [Works Commentary].”

3. 3 “William Blake Ryakunenpu [Short Chronicle of William Blake].”

4. 4 “Shuppin Risuto [List of Exhibits].”

The works exhibited were Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), Blair’s Grave, Virgil’s Pastorals (1977), Job (1826), and Dante (1838), all from the Kanagawa Modern Fine Art Museum.

Autumn 1998

*John Windle, Antiquarian Bookseller. List Twenty-Nine: William Blake. (San Francisco: John Windle, Autumn [November] 1998) 8o, [50] pp., 221 lots, no ISBN.

Chiefly books with Blake’s commercial illustrations, reprints of his art and poetry, and books about him.

Part V
Books Blake Owned
Newly Recorded Title

CUMBERLAND, George

= | THE CAPTIVE OF THE | CASTLE OF SENNAAR | AN AFRICAN TALE: | CONTAINING VARIOUS | ANECDOTES OF THE | SOPHIANS HITHERTO | UNKNOWN TO MANKIND | IN GENERAL. | = | BY GEORGE CUMBERLAND. | = | LONDON: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR; AND SOLD| BY MESS. EGERTON, OPPOSITE THE ADMIRALTY. | M DCC XCVIII [1798].

Collection:: Untraced.

Description: The novel, set in the island of Sophis in central Africa, concerns a Utopian community embodying the best qualities of classical Greece but with radically liberated sexual customs. Cumberland gave copies to his friends, but one of them warned him that, as Cumberland reported, it would be “dangerous under Mr Pitts’ maladministration, to publish it,” and therefore “it was never published or a single copy sold to any one.” Only six copies are known, in Australian National University, Bodley (corrected), Bristol Central Library (corrected), British Library, John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester (corrected), and Yale (see G. E. Bentley, Jr., A Bibliography of George Cumberland [1975], 20-23).

Blake almost certainly received one of the gift copies, for on 1 September 1800 he wrote to Cumberland: “Your Vision of the Happy Sophis I have devourd. O most delicious book.”

Newly Recorded Title

CUMBERLAND, George

SOME ANECDOTES | OF THE LIFE OF | JULIO BONASONI, | A BOLOGNESE ARTIST, | WHO FOLLOWED THE STYLES OF THE BEST | SCHOOLS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. | Accompanied^[e] By a CATALOGUE OF THE | ENGRAVINGS, WITH THEIR MEASURES, OF THE | WORKS OF THAT TASTEFUL COMPOSER. | AND REMARKS ON THE GENERAL CHARACTER | OF HIS RARE AND EXQUISITE PERFORMANCES. | = | TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, | A PLAN FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE | ARTS IN ENGLAND. | = | BY GEORGE CUMBERLAND. | = |—I’ll write it straight; | The Matter’s in my Head, and in my Heart. | Shakspeare’s As You Like It. | = | LONDON | Printed by W. Wilson, Ave-Maria Lane; | And sold by G. G. J. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row. | M DCC XCIII [1793].

Collection: Untraced.

Description: Cumberland almost certainly gave a copy to Blake, for Blake urged the editor of the Monthly Magazine to “notice a Proposal made some years ago in a Life of Julio Bonasoni . . . [concerning] the Erection of National Galleries for the Reception of Castes in Plaster from all the Beautiful Antique Statues Basso Relievos &c that can be procured” (quoted in his letter to Cumberland of 1 September 1800).

Appendix
Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake

BASTIEN, J.-F.

LA NOUVELLE | MAISON RUSTIQUE,| OU | ÉCONOMIE RURALE, | PRATIQUE ET GÉNÉRALE | DE TOUS LES BIENS DE CAMPAGNE. | Nouvelle Édition, entièrement refondue, considérablement augmentée, | et mise en ordre, d’après les expériences les plus sûres, les auteurs les | plus estimés, les mémoires et les procédés de cultivateurs, amateurs, et artistes, chacun dans les parties qui les concernent; Par J.-F. BASTIEN: | AVEC 60 FIGURES. | TOME PREMIER[-TROISIEME]. | - | A PARIS, | Chez DETERVILLE, libr., rue du Battoir, no. 16, près celle de l’Éperon. | DESRAY, libraire, rue Hautefeuille, no. 36, près S.-André-des-Arcs.| -| AN VI.—M. DCC. XCVIII [1798]. (Beinecke Library, Yale University) <BB #755>

The signature of “W^m Blake” in old brown ink at the top of each quarto volume (see illus. 4) is similar to that of the poet but is almost certainly that of one of the score or more of contemporaries who bore his names, presumably one of the “propriétaires de terres” or cultivateurs” to whom the book is addressed. The volume has been at Yale since at least 1941.

Part VI
Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies

§Abramovitch, N.Y. “[Aestheticism and Eurotics [sic], . . . Blake].” Obrazovanye 5 (1906): 21-51, section 2. In Russian.

Ackroyd, Peter. Blake (1995) <Blake (1996)>.

Review

54 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 begin page 130 | ↑ back to top (1998): 398 (“a careful assemblage of the narrative from his highly eclectic sources”).

Alexander, Bryan Nemo, “Dialectical Nightmares: The Historicity of the Romantic-era Doppelganger in the Works of Godwin, Hogg, Blake, Burney, and the Shelleys.” DAI 58 (1998): 3927A. Michigan Ph.D., 1997, 147 pp.

“Blake (Jerusalem) and Shelley (Prometheus Unbound) offer a eucatastrophic double, whose characters deliberately will doubt as a weapon.”

§Allen, Graham. Romantic Allegory. (London: Routledge, 1996)

Compares “The Ancient Mariner” with Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Anon. “Blake House.” Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 7 October 19[ ].

About Blake’s South Molton Street residence which is for sale to “William Blake enthusiasts” for £1,500,000.

Anon. “Blake, John.” Vol. I (1835), p. 522 of Neues allgemeines | Künstler-Lexicon | oder | Nachrichten | von dem | Leben und den Werken | der | Maler, Bildhauer, Baumeister, Kupferstecher, | Formschneider, Lithographen, Zeichner, Me- | dailleure, Elfenbeinarbeiter, etc.|= | Bearbeitet von | Dr. G.K. Nagler.| - | Erster Band.| A—Boe.| - | München,| 1835. | Verlag von E.A. Fleischmann. <Getty Library, Malibu>.

“Blake, John, Bruder William’s, ebenfalls Zeichner and Kupferstecher, arbeitete mehreres für literarische Erzeugnisse. Im Jahre 1817 stach er die Umrisse zu Hesiod’s Theogonie nach Flaxmann. Die näheren Lebensverhältnisse dieses Künstler sind uns nicht bekannt.”

The reason why nothing more could be found about this engraver named John Blake is that he did not exist. William Blake did have a brother named John, but he was a baker and soldier and ne’er-do-well.

Flaxman’s Hesiod (1817) is said on the title page to be “Engraved by William Blake,” but it was advertised in Edinburgh Review 28 (1817): 261, and New Monthly Magazine 7 (1817): 246 as having plates “Engraved by J. Blake” (BB 560), and the plates are also said to be “by J. Blake” in Friedrich Adolph Ebert, Allgemeines Bibliographisches Lexikon 2 (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1821): 199 <BR #535>.

Anon., “Blake, William,” the preceding article in Neues allgemeines Kunstler-Lexicon, is recorded under “Nagler” in BB #2267.

Anon. “Blake-Lovers Walked In: Cottage Owner’s Complaint.” Bognor Regis Post, 16 October 1965.

Dorothy Howell complains about the plaque the Council put on her cottage in Felpham.

*Anon. “Blake’s Cottage to be allowed to retire.” Evening News, 12 October 1965, 15.

Because tourists invaded the Felpham Cottage when a plaque was put on it, the Council has agreed to remove the plaque.

*Anon. “Council Remove Sign to Restore Blake’s ‘Heaven.’” Evening Argus, 12 October 1965, 18.

The plaque on Blake’s Felpham cottage seemed to invite unwanted invasions of tourists.

*Anon. “Mrs. Howell hopes to be left alone.” Observer [Bognor Regis], 15 October 1965, 24.

The owner of Blake’s Cottage in Felpham hopes tourists will go away.

Anon. “The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. By Allan Cunningham. Vol. II. Being No. X of the Family Library. London. John Murray. 1830. 12mo. Pp. 320.” Edinburgh Literary Journal 67 (1830): 112-15 <BBS 347>.

The review may have been written by Henry Glassford Bell, or by his good friend James Hogg, according to David Groves, “Blake, the Edinburgh Literary Journal, and James Hogg,” Blake 32 (1998): 14-16.

*Anon. “Roof of Rusted Gold.” ‘The Post’ [Bognor Regis], 20 April 1957, 5.

The thatching on Blake’s Felpham cottage is being replaced.

Anon. “Strange Pictures at the Secular Hall.” Free Press [Leicester], 20 October 1900.

This may have been the first occasion when Blake’s designs (photographed by Mr. A. J. Essex) were “projected on to the magic-lantern screen.”

Anon. “William Blake.” Free Press [Leicester], 13 October 1900.

About Gould’s lecture on “Blake’s career and achievements” at the Leicester Secular Hall, followed by pictures “on the lantern-sheet” from photographs by A. J. Essex.

Aoyama, Keiko. “Blake Studies in Japan: A Bibliography of Works on William Blake Published in Japan 1893-1993.” Shoshi Sakuin Tenbo: Journal of Japan Indexers Association 19 (1995): 19-27 <Blake (1996): 149>. B. Reprinted on 223-38 of Vol. I of Shoshi o tsukuru [How to Make Bibliographies]. Ed. Shun Unno, Mitsuhiro Oda,^[e] Kazuaki Kishida, and Shinichi Toda. (Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 1997) In Japanese.

§*Arbuthnot, May Hill. “William Blake 1757-1827.” Pp. 166-71 of her Children’s Books. (Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Palo begin page 131 | ↑ back to top Alto, Fair Lawn [N.J.]: Scott, Foresman and Company [1957]. B. §(?) C. Third Edition. (1964) D. §Fourth Edition. (1972).

About how to teach about children’s books; “Songs of Innocence is a landmark in English literature as well as in children’s literature” (66).

See also “Woodcuts and Engravings Before 1800” (55-56) and “William Blake 1757-1827” (55).

*Baker, Marcia. If Only You Imagine! The Wondrous World of William Blake. Illustrated by Todd Hermann. (London: Minerva Press, 1996) 8o, [58 pp.], ISBN: 1-85863-837-2. <Blake (1998)§>.

“Interactive” narratives for children of what Blake saw, derived from his poems and his biography, each concluding: “You can [see the same things], if you only imagine!”

A shorter version appeared in Journal of the Blake Society of St James (1995): 26-30 <Blake (1996)>.

Barrell, John. “A Blake Dictionary.” Chapter 3 (22-57, 353-54) of his The Political Theory of Painting From Reynolds To Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (1986) <BBS 360>.

Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 101-16, omitting the section on “‘Public.’”

Batten, Guinn. “Spectral Generation in The Four Zoas: ‘Indolence and Mourning Sit Hovring.’” Chapter 2 (72-118) of her The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1988)

“Blake has prepared us to understand that the poetry of Romantic melancholy recognizes that the humble body itself . . . reincarnates, in a radically Christian sense, the dead” (118).

*Bentley, G. E., Jr., ed. William Blake: The Critical Heritage. (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) The Critical Heritage Series. ISBN: 0 7100 8234 7. 8o, xix, 294 pp., 20 plates. <BB #A1181> B (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1995) ISBN: 0-415-13441-2.

B (1995) is a mere reprint of A (1975).

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 22, Number 3 (1988-89)

489 John B. Pierce. “The Shifting Characterization of Tharmas and Enion in Pages 3-7 of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas.” Pp. 93-102 <BB #403>. (It was reprinted as part of chapter 3 of his Flexible Design [1998].)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 27, Number 4 (1994) <BIQ (1995)>.

1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1993, Including a Report on the Sale of the Frank Rinder Collection.” Pp. 103-29 <Blake, (1995)>. (Review by David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 391: “highly authoritative.”)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 28, Number 1 (1994) <BIQ (1995)>.

1 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 1992-1993.” Pp. 4-34 <Blake, (1995)>. (Review by David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 391: “useful.”)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 28, Number 2 (1994 [i.e., 1995]) <BIQ (1995)>.

1 *Joseph Viscomi. “A Breach in a City the Morning after the Battle: Lost or Found?” Pp. 44-61 <Blake (1995)>. (Review by David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 392: a “fine essay,” “technically accomplished”).

6 David Simpson. “Which Newton for the British Library?” Pp. 77-78 <BIQ (1995)>. (Review by David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 393: “startlingly original and provocative.”)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 28, Number 4 (1995)

1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1994.” Pp. 120-41. (A “Corrigendum,” Blake 31 [1998]: 135, says that the Essick copies of Europe pl. 11, 17 are not from copy c.)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 29, Number 1 (1995 [i.e., 1996])

1 Lauren Henry. “Sunshine and Shady Groves: What Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ Learned from African Writers.” Pp. 4-11. (Review: David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 [1998]: 40 (“fascinating”).

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 29 (1996)

1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1995, Including a Survey of Blakes in Private Ownership.” Pp. 108-30. (A masterfully detailed catalogue, including as an “Appendix: New Information on Blake’s Engravings” [130].) <Blake (1997)> (Review: David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 [1998]: 397).

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 1995.” Pp. 131-68. <Blake (1997)> (Review: David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 [1998]: 397: “an essential supplement to the [Blake Books] Supplement”).

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 31, Number 3 (1997/98)

1 A. Harris Fairbanks. “Blake, Burke, and the Clanrickard Monument.” Pp. 76-81. (Blake may have seen the monument begin page 132 | ↑ back to top of Ann, Countess of Clanrickard [d. 1732], in Westminster Abbey with its motto “Un Roy, un Foy, un Loy” [shared with Edmund Burke, who came from the same family] and echoed it in Urizen pl. 4: “One King, one God, one Law.”)

2 G. E. Bentley, Jr. “Blake’s First Arrest, at Upnor Castle.” Pp. 82-84. (“The unworldliness of these young men, blithely making careful sketches . . . of military fortifications of the greatest naval base in the world in time of war, almost surpasses comprehension. At least it might appear so to naval intelligence, if that is not an oxymoron” [84].)

3 Vincent Carretta. “Blake’s Meheux?” P. 84. (The J. Meheux who designed “Robin Hood & Clorinda” engraved by Blake is probably the amateur artist John Meheux [1749?-1839].)

Reviews

4 Nelson Hilton. Review of Marvin Lansverk, The Wisdom of Many, The Vision of One (1994). Pp. 84-88. (“Students and lovers of Blake can be grateful to Marvin Lansverk for this awakening call to the rich fields of the poet’s sport with Wisdom and performative language” [88].)

5 Frank A. Vaughan. Review of Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (1996). Pp. 88-91. (“His warnings should be accepted as necessary and lucid guidelines, and as a challenge to read Blake by better evidentiary rules” [91].)

6 Jennifer Davis Michael, review of Speak Silence, ed. Mark Greenberg (1996). Pp. 92-94. (“It is refreshing to see such meticulous attention given to poems once dismissed as ‘rude’ and ‘clumsy’” [92]. For a “Correction,” see Blake 31 [1998]: 175.)

7 G. E. Bentley, Jr. Review of Peter Isaac, William Bulmer: The Fine Printer in Context 1757-1830 (1994). Pp. 94-97. (“An admirable biographical and commercial history of Bulmer” [95].)

8 Sheila A. Spector. Review of Kathryn S. Freeman, Blake’s Nostos (1997). Pp. 97-102. (“Despite her formidable interpretive abilities, Freeman never really establishes her own critical stance,” and “her reliance on Eastern mysticism is inconsistent and ahistorical” [101, 99].)

9 Sarah Joyce. Review of “South Bank Show Documentary on Blake. Directed by David Thomas. ITV (U.K.), 17 September 1995.” Pp. 102-03. (“A very appealing program, made with a great enthusiasm for Blake, and an impulse to celebrate as well as to inform” [102].)

Newsletter

10 Anon. “Twenty-First Century Blake: Call for Papers.” P. 103. (For the 1998 Modern Language Association meeting.)

11 Anon. “Blake and the Book: The Materiality of Books in the Life and Times of William Blake: Call for Papers, St. Mary’s University College, 18 April 1998.” P. 103.

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 31, Number 4 (1998)

1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1997.” Pp. 108-37. (A masterly survey, with a “Corrigendum” for “Blake in the Marketplace, 1994,” Blake 28 [1995]: 135, “Appendix 1: New Information on Blake’s Engravings” for his The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue [136] and William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations [136], and “Appendix 2: Current Ownership of the Preliminary Drawings for, and Proofs and Relief Etchings of, Blake’s Wood Engravings Illustrating Thornton’s Virgil” [136-37].)

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 1997.” Pp. 137-75. (With an “Appendix: Watermarks: A Cumulative Table” [171-73].)

Newsletter

3 Anon. “Blake Course at the Tate Gallery.” P. 175. (12 May-16 June.)

4 Anon. “Correction.” P. 175. (The title of Jennifer Davis Michael’s unpublished book is Cities Not Yet Embodied, not Cities Not Yet Entombed, as in Blake 31 [1997-98].)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 32, Number 1 (1998)

1 *Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley. “‘Dear Generous Cumberland’: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake.” Pp. 4-13. (Text, reproductions, and essay on Blake’s letter of 1 September 1800.)

2 David Groves. “Blake, the Edinburgh Literary Journal, and James Hogg.” Pp. 14-16. (A review of Cunningham’s life of Blake in the Edinburgh Literary Journal [1830] may be by its editor, Henry Glassford Bell, or by his good friend James Hogg.)

3 Michael Ferber. “The Orthodoxy of Blake Footnotes.” Pp. 16-19. (Protests against the needless speculations, often masquerading as well-known facts, in “recent student anthologies” [1979-95], particularly concerning irrelevant etymologies.)

Review

4 Nelson Hilton. Review of Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997). Pp. 20-25. (The book is “at times interesting and provocative” [20].)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 32, Number 2 (1998 [1999])

1 *Morton D. Paley. “‘To Defend the Bible in This Year 1798 Would Cost a Man His Life.’” Pp. 32-43. (“Why should Blake want to defend Thomas Paine [from Bishop Watson]. . . so unequivocally?” [32].)

Reviews

2 Sheila A. Spector. Review of Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (1997). Pp. 43-46.

3 David Worrall. Review of G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement: A Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake 1971-92 being a Continuation of Blake Books (1995). Pp. 46-48. (“Blake Books/Records/Supplements” begin page 133 | ↑ back to top are “such a Herculean set of labors, and such wonderful achievements” that they should be merged and published on CD-ROM [48].)

4 *Thomas Dillingham. Review of Finn Coren, The Blake Project: Spring (Bard Records, BACD-1) and The Blake Project: Spring: Appendix (Bard Records, BACD-2). Pp. 49-50. (In his settings of Blake’s poems to rock music, Finn’s “responses to Blake are . . . complex and interactive.”)

Newsletter

5 Anon. “The Blake Journal.” P. 51. (A statement of the editorial policy of what was previously named the Journal of the Blake Society of St James.)

6 Anon. “Pioneers of the Spirit—William Blake.” P. 51. (Description of a television program which “will air early next year” [presumably in 1999].)

7 Anon. “Cruikshank at Princeton.” (Description of an exhibition of George Cruikshank prints on the web.)

8 Anon. “Romantic Revelations.” P. 51. (A description of “the 6th International Residential Conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies” at Keele University in the summer of 1999.)

§Boime, Albert. “William Blake’s Graphic Imagery and the Industrial Revolution.” Art Magazine (June 1985): 107-19. B. *Reprinted as 414-61 of A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View. Ed. Bill Katz. (Metuchen [N.J.] & London: Scarecrow Press, 1994) The History of the Book, No. 1. C. An expanded version was printed as *“William Blake” (349-70, 505-08) in chapter 4: “The Industrial Revolution: Post-American Independence Phase” in his Art in an Age of Revolution 1750-1800. (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) A Social History of Art Volume I <BBS 420 for 1987 only>.

Bradford, Richard. “Blake and the Arbitrary Use of Language.” Pp. 111-18 of his A Linguistic History of English Poetry. (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1993) The Interface Series. <Blake (1997)§>.

Bruder, Helen P., William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997) <Blake (1998)>.

Review

1 Nelson Hilton, Blake 32 (1998): 20-25. (The book is “at times interesting and provocative” [20].)

§Bulckaer, D. “‘Apocalypse Now’: Blake and Millenialism.” Pp. 103-12 of Millenialism and Utopianism in Anglo-Saxon Countries—Millenarism et Utopie dans les Pays Anglo-Saxons. Ed. W. Rotge. ([ ]: Presse universitaire Mirail [1998]) Anglophonia 3; ISBN: 2-85896-351-0.

*Bungey, Marguerite. “William Blake: The Man who saw ‘Heaven’ in England’s green and pleasant land.” This England 18 (1985): 28-29.

§Burwick, Frederick. “Blake’s Laocoon and Job: On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry.” Pp. 125-55 of The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany. Ed. Frederick Burwick and Jurgen Klein. (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1996).

*C., G. “Blake’s Cottage, Felpham, Sussex.” Country Life, 4 August 1917, 119.

A letter to the editor remarking that Blake’s Cottage “has lately changed hands.”

§Chong, Cue-huan. “‘Bard’s Song’: Blake, Hayley, and the Milton Connection.” Milton Studies 7 (1997 [Korea]): 257-95.

Clark, S. H. “Blake’s Milton as Empiricist Epic: ‘Weaving the Woof of Locke.’” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1997): 457-82.

Blake’s references to Locke “may be seen as part of a more general reinstatement of an empiricist perspective in the poem . . . ultimately Lockean in origin” (458).

Cox, Philip. “Blake, Hayley and Milton: A Reassessment.” English Studies 75 (1994): 430-42 <Blake (1995)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 391-92 (Cox corrects Wittreich).

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

About “verbal warfare” in The French Revolution (48).

§Crafton, Lisa Plummer. “Blake’s ‘Swinish Multitude’: The Response to Burke in Blake’s The French Revolution.” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism 2 (1993): 1-12.

Crehan, Stewart. Blake in Context (1984) <BBS 444>.

“Producers and Devourers” is reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 60-79.

Cunningham, Allan. The Cabinet Gallery of Pictures (Vol. I, 1833; Vol. II, 1834) <BB #1431A>. B. (Both? volumes 1834). C. (London: George Virtue, [?1835]) <BB #1432B>.

De Luca, Vincent, Words of Eternity (1991) <BBS 450>.

Review

10 Andrew Lincoln, Literature & Theology 7 (1993): 408-09 (with Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction [1991]): De Luca “throws light on a surprisingly wide range of Blake’s poetic practises” (408).

§Demidova, O. R. “[Some Particular Features in the Stylistics of the K. Balmont’s and S. Marshak’s Translations of Blake’s Poem ‘The Tyger’].” [Analysis of Styles in Foreign Fiction and Scientific Literature] 5 (Leningrad, 1987): 126-33. In Russian.

Den Otter, A. G. “Displeasing Women: Blake’s Furies and the Ladies of Moral Virtue.” European Romantic Review 9 (1998): 35-58.

“Many of the patriarchal biases normally associated with men were indulged and presented by middle- and upperclass [eighteenth century] women themselves” (36).

*DiSalvo, Jackie, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson, ed. Blake, Politics, and History. (N.Y. & London: Garland Publishing, 1998) Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture Volume 17; Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Volume 1842. 8o, xxxii, 386 pp., 27 Blake plates; ISBN: 0-8153-1679-8.

It consists of

1 Jackie DiSalvo. “Introduction.” Pp. xiii-xxxiii. (A survey of Blake criticism: “So—is Blake dead” politically? [xiii].)

2 Christopher Z. Hobson. “The Myth of Blake’s ‘Orc Cycle.’” Pp. 5-36. (“The ‘Orc cycle’ is almost entirely a product of Frye’s imagination, not Blake’s,” a “liberal venture into conservative political theory” [6, 29].)

3 Stephen C. Behrendt. “Blake’s Bible of Hell: Prophecy as Political Program.” Pp. 37-52. (About the “political dimensions” of Urizen, Book of Ahania, and Book of Los; “William Blake’s works stand as powerful testimony to the proposition that all writing—indeed all art—is inherently political” [37].)

4 Eric V. Chandler. “The Anxiety of Production: Blake’s Shift from Collective Hope to Writing Self.” Pp. 53-79.

5 James E. Swearingen. “William Blake’s Figural Politics.” Pp. 80-94. (Reprinted from ELH 59 [1992]: 125-44 <BBS 652>.)

6 Jon Mee. “‘The Doom of Tyrants’: William Blake, Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, and the Millenarian Public Sphere.” Pp. 97-114. (Mee “develops a parallel between Blake’s brand of millenarian radicalism and the politics of Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee” who combined “intense religious feeling and violent republicanism” [97, 106].)

7 Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Blake’s Tiriel and the Regency Crisis: Lifting the Veil on a Royal Masonic Scandal.” Pp. 115-35. (She is persuaded that “Tiriel emerges as a dangerously accurate exposé of the clandestine intrigues of the King’s rebellious brothers and sons . . . which bordered on treason” [115].)

8 Joseph Wittreich. “Laboring Into Futurity: A Response.” Pp. 136-43. (In recent Blake criticism, “The Blake of popular culture is all but ignored,” and such ignorance “threatens to . . . displace him from the canon” [138].)

9 Joseph Hutton. “‘Lovers of Wild Rebellion’: The Image of Satan in British Art of the Revolutionary Era.” Pp. 150-68. (“Blake . . . did not so much revise the image of Satan in according with his revolutionary sympathies as shatter it out-right and reconstruct the pieces in a new way” [159].)

10 David Worrall. “The Mob and ‘Mrs. Q’: William Blake, William Benbow, and the Context of Regency Radicalism.” Pp. 169-84. (Fascinating details of the radical political context of Blake’s engraving of Mrs. Quentin, the mistress of the Prince of Wales.)

11 William Richey. “‘The Lion & Wolf shall cease’: Blake’s America as a Critique of Counter-Revolutionary Violence.” Pp. 196-211.

12 Michael Ferber. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Pp. 212-34.

13 Peter Otto. “Re-Framing the Moment of Creation: Blake’s Re-Visions of the Frontispiece and Title Page to Europe.” Pp. 235-46. (“Each revision thematises elements present in (or implied by) the frontispiece and title page but previously overlooked or treated as incidental” [234].)

14 G. A. Rosso. “Empire of the Sea: Blake’s ‘King Edward the Third’ and English Imperial Poetry.” Pp. 251-72. (In “King Edward the Third” from Poetical Sketches, Blake is parodying his “Shakespearean model to attack the empire panegyric tradition” in the context of “the imperial crisis of 1778-79” [251, 268].)

15 Anne Rubenstein and Camilla Townsend. “Revolted Negroes and the Devilish Principle: William Blake and Conflicting Visions of Boni’s Wars in Surinam, 1772-1796.” Pp. 273-98. (They attempt “to unravel the varying discourses from the Narrative, . . . to see precisely how they acted upon each other to change the nature of the argument as a whole, even against the will of the different speakers” [273].)

16 Catherine C. McClenahan. “Albion and the Sexual Machine: Blake, Gender and Politics, 1780-1795.” Pp. 301-24. (Blake “represents . . . imagination . . . as shaped by the sexual machine while it exposes this machinery in order to resist and change it” [304].)

17 Harriet Kramer Linkin. “Transfigured Maternity in Blake’s Songs of Innocence: Inverting the ‘Maternity Plot’ in ‘A Dream.’” Pp. 325-38. (“Blake’s representation of maternity in Songs of Innocence offers a more subtle and perhaps sympathetic recognition of a greater variety of maternal positions than contemporary cultural idealizations of the mother allow” [327].)

18 June Sturrock. “Maenads, Young Ladies, and the Lovely Daughters of Albion.” Pp. 339-49.

19 Anne K. Mellor. “Blake, Gender, and Imperial Ideology: A Response.” Pp. 350-53. (“Blake was deeply—if unselfconsciously—complicit in the racist and sexist ideologies of his culture” [351].)

*Dortort, Fred. The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake’s Jerusalem. Foreword by Donald Ault. (Barrytown [N.Y.]: Station Hill Arts, 1998) The Clinamen Studies Series. 8o, xxviii, 468 pp.; ISBN: 1-886449-49-X.

Donald Ault, “Foreword” (xv-xxviii): Dortort’s book, the “first full-length appropriation of the methods and terms I developed specifically for the study of The Four Zoas” in Narrative Unbound (1987), is “certainly one of the most unorthodox books ever written on Blake” (xvii, xv).

The book is an attempt to “resolve the riddle of the poem” by positing “two totally contradictory sets of meanings” in it, one of “radical English Christianity” and one which “exposed . . . [the former’s] potential contradictions and ultimately oppressive manifestations,” the conflicting attitudes perhaps originating in “an internal conflict . . . [in Blake’s own] personality” (11, 22, 38, 13).

“Event Catalogues” (explained on 85-86) constitute a summary of the texts of the four chapters page-by-page (85-91; 155-63; 256-71; 384-400).

Appendix A, “A Critical Review” gives critics’ views of Jerusalem (421-48).

*Drinkwater, John. “Solitary Genius: John Drinkwater’s Poem for Saturday: William Blake 1757-1827.” Evening Standard [19] 17.

Prints the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton.

§Edgar, Brian Windsor. “Pity and Anger in the Poetry of William Blake from ‘Poetical Sketches’ to ‘Milton.’” DAI 58 (1998).

§Elistratova, A. [William Blake (1757-1827)]. (Moscow: Znanye, 1957) In Russian.

Ellis, Edwin J. The Real Blake: A Portrait Biography. (London, 1907) <BB #1547> B. (N.Y.: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1907)

Erdman, David. Blake, Prophet Against Empire, Third Edition (1977) <BBS 463>.

“Infinite London” is reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 51-57.

*Essick, Robert N. “Representation, Anxiety, and the Bibliographic Sublime.” Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1998): 503-28.

The “bibliographic sublime” is the “response to semiotic uncertainty, when inscribed within the physical features of a book” (513). The essay ranges agreeably through Tristram Shandy, Pat the Bunny, and Marriage (511-13, 523-27). Marriage (L) pl. 25-27 (“A Song of Liberty”), “almost certainly printed as a small, independent pamphlet” (523-24), is reproduced entire.

*Esterhammer, Angela. Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (1994) <Blake (1995, 1996)>.

Review

2 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 396 (it contains “some of the sharpest readings of Blake I have seen in a long time”).

Evans, B. Ifor. “Thomas Gray and William Blake.” Chapter 7 (99-108) of his Tradition and Romanticism. (London, 1940) <BB #1584> B. Tradition and Romanticism: Studies in English Poetry from Chaucer to W.B. Yeats. (Hamden [Connecticut]: Archon Books, [c. 1964]).

§Fabre, Silvia Diaz. “Rewriting the Blakeian ‘Invisible Worm’ in the Work of Jennifer Johnston.” Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa Norteamericana^[e] 2 (1997 [Aires, Argentina]): 39-52.

Apparently about Johnston’s novel called The Invisible Worm.

§Flory, Wendy Stallard. “‘The Diving and Ducking Moralities’: Sendak’s Pierre, Blake, and the Vulnerabilities of the Artist.” Melville Society Extracts #111 (December 1997): 7-17.

Foote, G. W. “William Blake.” National Reformer, 14, 21, 28 February, 21 March 1875, 100-01, 114-15, 131-32, 181-82.

A biographical account, with sections on his visions (they “were but developed subjectivities objectively extruded” [131]) and his achievement (“He is a star of first magnitude in the constellations of poetry and art” [182]).

*Freed, Eugenie R. “A Portion of His Life”: William Blake’s Miltonic Vision of Woman ([?1994]) <Blake (1995)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 393-93 (“recaptures something of the holistic Blakean study we are in danger of losing”).

*Freed-Isserow, Eugenie. “‘Building the Stubborn Structure of the Language’: The Dynamic of Blake’s Poetic Art.” English Studies in Africa 41 (1998): 11-28.

It deals especially with the images of women weaving on Jerusalem pl. 59.

Freeman, Kathryn S., Blake’s Nostos (1997) <Blake (1998)>.

Review

1 Sheila A. Spector, Blake 31 (1998): 97-102 (“Despite her formidable interpretive abilities, Freeman never really establishes her own critical stance,” and “her reliance on Eastern mysticism is inconsistent and ahistorical” [101, 99]).

2 §Nineteenth Century Literature 52 (1997): 398+.

3 §Reference and Research Book News 12 (1997): 158.

*Fuhr, Bodil. “Engelsk mystik i trøndersk landskap: William Blake, engelsk mystiker, poet og billedkunstner fra 1700-tallet, blir frontfigur under Olavsfestdagene.” Aftenposten [Oslo], 18 July 1998. In Norwegian.

The Olaf-Festival at Trondheim cathedral will focus on William Blake, with lectures, exhibitions, and performance of music by Gunnar Jess based on Blake’s Songs.

Fuller, David. “William Blake.” Pp. 27-44 of Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Michael O’Neill. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

A sound and straightforward guide designed especially for undergraduates, with essays on “Texts and Facsimiles” (27-28), “Literary Scholarship and Criticism” (29-37), and “Art Scholarship and Criticism” (37-40).

*Gardner, Stanley. The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart: Songs of Innocence and of Experience in its times and circumstance Including facsimiles of two copies. (London: Cygnus Arts; Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998) 4o, xi, 256 pp., 107 illustrations; ISBN: 0-8386-3566-0 and 1-900541-35-1.

The biographical account (1-157) concentrates on 1757-94 and stresses local details, particularly those relating to charity toward children in the Parish of St. James, with frequent cross-references to his Blake’s Innocence and Experience Retraced (1986) <BBS 482>. The reproductions include Songs (I, b) (161-214), followed by a “Commentary” (216-47) on each plate dealing primarily with the designs.

*Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake . . . (1863). . . . C. Ed. with an Introduction by W. Graham Robertson and Numerous Reproductions from Blake’s Pictures Many Hitherto Unpublished . . . (1907) <BB #1680> . . . N. Ed. W. Graham Robertson. (Mineola [N.Y.]: Dover Publications, 1998).

The 1998 edition is “an unabridged republication” of the 1907 Bodley Head edition, except, perhaps, in the title page.

W. R. G. (1906), “Introduction” (v-xi); Anne Gilchrist (1863), “Preface to the First Edition” (xiii-xv); W. M. Rossetti, “Annotated Lists of William Blake’s Paintings, Drawings, and Engravings” (413-90) and “Supplementary List” (491-96) and the text of Descriptive Catalogue (457-526). There are 53 plates, many still marked “from the collection of Mr. W. Graham Robertson.”

Glausser, Wayne. “Atomistic Simulacra in the Enlightenment and in Blake’s Post-Enlightenment.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991): 73-88 <BBS 485>.

“A few passages” from it are adapted in chapter 7 (“Printing”) of his Locke and Blake (1998).

Glausser, Wayne. Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century. (Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 1998) 8o, pp. xi, 201, ISBN: 0-8130-1570-7.

It is “a composite critical biography, organized by topics of cultural significance .... Each chapter begins with a biographical connection between Locke and Blake” (ix).

“A version of chapter 3” (“Two English Physicians”) was printed as “Locke and Blake as Physicians Delivering the Eighteenth-Century Body” in Reading the Social Body (1993); the first half of chapter 4 is reprinted from “Three Approaches to the Slave Trade,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1990): 197-216 (which is entirely about Locke); and chapter 7 “adapts a few passages” from his “Atomistic Simulacra in the Enlightenment and in Blake’s Post-Enlightenment,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991): 73-88 <BBS 485>.

Glausser, Wayne. “Locke and Blake as Physicians Delivering the Eighteenth-Century Body.” Chapter 11 (218-43) of Reading the Social Body. Ed. Catherine B. Burroughs and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993).

“I want to . . . complicate some of our conventional ideas about Locke, Blake, and the period” (218).

“A version” of it was printed as “Two English Physicians” in chapter 3 of his Locke and Blake (1998).

Greenberg, Mark L., ed. Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches (1996) <Blake (1997)>.

3 Susan J. Wolfson. “Sketching Verbal Form: Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” Pp. 27-70. (It is a version of “Blake’s Politics in Rhyme and Blank Verse,” 195-205 of Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine [1994], and another version was printed as chapter 2 [32-62, 249-55] of her Formal Changes: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism [1997].)

Review

1 Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake 31 (1998): 92-94 (“it is refreshing to see such meticulous attention given to poems once dismissed as ‘rude’ and clumsy’” [92].)

§Gridninsky. [sic] “[William Blake].” [Monthly Edition] 20 (1900): 238-42. In Russian.

Hadfield, Andrew. “William Blake, Edmund Spenser, and William Kent.” Notes and Queries 242 [N.S. 45] (1997): 207-10.

Blake may have known the edition of Spenser edited by Thomas Birch with 32 plates after William Kent (1751) as shown by the “possible parallels” in his own designs.

*Haresnape, Geoffrey. “William Blake and South Africa.” South African National Gallery/Suid Afrikaanse Nasionale Kunsmuseum^[e] Quarterly Bulletin (September 1980): 5-10.

It is especially about “The Little Black Boy,” Negroes, slavery, and state religion: “In South Africa today Blake is disquieting.”

§Harriston, J. R. “‘Empire is no more’: William Blake, Tom Paine, and the American Revolution.” Literature and History, 3 S, 7 (1998): 16-32.

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

Reviews

3 Irene Chayes, Wordsworth Circle 27 (1996): 200-01 (with begin page 137 | ↑ back to top The Continental Prophecies [1995]) (“There is . . . much to disagree with” and “much to be commended in the book as a whole” [201]).

4 David Fuller, Review of English Studies 47 (1997): 405-06. (“Heppner’s scholarship is excellent .... The book should stimulate more work on Blake’s illustrations on sounder interpretative bases” [406]).

5 Frank A. Vaughan, Blake 31 (1998): 88-91. (“His warnings should be accepted as necessary and lucid guidelines, and as a challenge to read Blake by better evidentiary rules” [91]).

6 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 401-02 (“careful and cautiously powerful” and “most witty”).

Higgins, Michael. Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton. (Toronto & N.Y.: Stoddart, 1998) Passim.

“The key to his spiritual biography is . . . William Blake”; “Thomas Merton is the William Blake of our time” (3, 4). Chapter 2 is “Tharmas: The Rebel” (67-118), chapter 3 “Urizen: The Marginal Critic” (119-92), chapter 4 “Luvah: The Lover” (193-232), and chapter 5 “Urthona: The Wise One” (233-74).

§Hogg, James. William Blake’s Recreation of Gnostic Myth: Resolving the Apparent Incongruities (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter [Wales]: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995) 155 pp.; ISBN: 0-7734-4188-3.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 400 (“a book about which it is difficult to be positive,” “all fairly ramshackle”).

Howard, John Sebastian. “Romantic Dialectics and the Politics of the Subject.” DAI 58 (1998): 3143A. Saint Louis Ph.D., 1997.

“Two types of romantic politics (of Los and Prometheus) in Blake and Shelley suggest a subjective consciousness built on anti-dialectical concepts and movements.”

Howell, Henry. “To the Editor.” Bognor Regis Post, 11 September 1937.

His design for “a small thatched entrance hood” for Blake’s Felpham Cottage has been rejected by the local Council.

*Hults, Linda C. “England: Barry, Stubbs, and Blake.” Pp. 358-79. The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

“Both as a poet and as a printmaker, Blake was a curious and grand anomaly” (375).

Huntington Library Quarterly 58 No. 3-4 (1996)

2 Viscomi, Joseph, “The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Pp. 281-344. (This is the first of a three-part essay; the second is “The Lessons of Swedenborg; or, The Origin of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Pp. 173-212 of Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion. Ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner [1998], and the third is “The Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage” to be published in Blake in the Nineties, ed. David Worrall and Steve Clark [1998].)

Jesse, Jennifer. “The Binding of Urizen: The Role of Reason in William Blake’s Religious Thought.” DAI 58 (1998): 2668A. Chicago Ph.D., 1997. 288 pp.

The thesis gives “a wide-angled view of where Blake stands,” concluding that “Blake is neither anti-rational nor antinomian in his religious thought.”

§Jose, Fr. C. P. “William Blake’s Interpretation of the Bible through his Poems & Paintings.” University of Calicut [India] Ph.D. (1991).

Jose, Chiramel P. “Blake Decoding The Book of Job.” Aligarh Journal of English Studies 19 (1997): 1-24.

“The present study confines itself to . . . a close analysis of all the . . . plates . . . [and] of how far and exactly Blake followed the Sacred Text” (3).

§Kamyishnikova, N. M. “[Blake’s Sublime Allegory.]” Referatyvnii [Abstract] Zhournal 3 (1975): 132-36. In Russian.

Perhaps an abstract of Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Blake’s Sublime Allegory (1973) <BB #1437>.

§Kaplan, Nancy. “Blake’s Problem and Ours: Some Reflections on the Image and the Word.” Readerly Writerly Texts 3 (1996): 115-33.

*Kawasaki, Noriko. Eden wa Kita ka: William Blake Ronshu: On the Location of Eden: Studies on William Blake. (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 1996) <Blake (1997): 142>.

Review

1 Toshihsa Kono, Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism 22 (1998): 83-85.

Kawasaki, Noriko. “Satan no Chokoku—Blake no Milton ni tsuite ([1]-9)] [Transcending Satan-Self in Blake’s Milton].” Gifu Shiritsu Joshi Tankidaigaku Kenkyu Kiyo [Bulletin of Gifu City Women’s Junior College], No. 39 (1989), 39-46 <BBS 532>; No. 40 (1990), 49-55; No. 41 (1991), 149-55; No. 42 (1992), 27-32; No. 43 (1993); No. 44 (1994), 15-20; No. 45 (1995), 9-16; No. 46 (1996), 25-42; No. 47 (1997), 29-34. In Japanese.

No. 3 is sub-titled “pity’ to ‘shizumu Hi’ [‘pity’ and ‘the setting Sun’],” and No. 9 is sub-titled “Milton’s Incarnation Descending to the Mundane World”; from No. 44 (1994), both journal and essay titles appear also in translation.

*Kelly, Therese M. “Romantic Ambivalences.” Chapter 5 (93-134) of her Reinventing Allegory. (Cambridge: University Press, 1997) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 22.

Especially about the Gray designs (96-107).

§Khang, Kyeong-huan. “Time and Eternity in Milton.” Milton Studies 7 (1997 [Korea]): 25-46.

Apparently about Blake’s Milton.

§Kim, Hee-sun. “The Paradoxical Task of Blake/Los in Jerusalem: System-Building and System-Breaking.” Journal of English Language and Literature 42 (1996 [Korea]): 761-76.

§Kim, Okyub. “Blake’s Art.” Journal of English Language and Literature, 43 (1997 [Korea]): 27-49.

Especially about the treatment of Los in Milton and Jerusalem.

Kobayashi, Keiko. “Oe Kenzaburo to Blake: Blake and Oe Kenzaburo (1[-3]).” Ritsumeikan Bungaku: Journal of cultural Science, Ritsumeikan University 506 (1988) 483-95; 517 (1990): 39-56 <BBS 539>; Ritsumeikan Bungaku: Miscellaneous Essays in Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Faculty of Letters of Ritsumeikan University 551 (1997): 381-402. In Japanese.

In the English translation, the novelist’s name is spelled “Ohe” in parts 1-2 and “Oe” in part 3.

*Kobayashi, Keiko. “William Blake no Romanshugi [William Blake’s Romanticism].” Chapter 8 (225-57) of Romanshugi no Hikaku Kenkyu [Comparative Studies of Romanticism]. Ed. Nagao Nishikawa, Hideharu Matsumiya, and Kiyoshi Suekawa. (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1989) In Japanese.

Kuwayama, Takako. “Blake no Shinwa ni okeru Eien to Ryushutsu: The Concept of Eternity and Emanations in Blake’s Prophetic Writings.” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism, 22 (1998): 11-19. In Japanese.

§Langford, Ryan Dale. “William Blake’s Minor Literature.” DAI 58 (1998). Georgia Ph.D.

Lansverk, Marvin, The Wisdom of Many, The Vision of One (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

Review

1 Nelson Hilton, Blake 31 (1998): 84-88 (“Students and lovers of Blake can be grateful to Marvin Lansverk for this awakening call to the rich fields of the poet’s sport with Wisdom and performative language” [88].)

*Larson, Turid. “En himmelsk dikter pao norsk: Geir Utaugs nærkamp med William Blake.” Arbeiderbladet, 10 April 1997, 24.

About Uthaug’s edition of the Songs.

Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (1995) <Blake (1997)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 399 (“a fine book,” “sure footed”).

*Linnell, David. Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell (1994) <Blake (1995)>.

Review

2 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 392 (“Fascinating” but “severely compromised by its lack of anything approaching a modern scholarly apparatus”).

*Lucas, John, ed., William Blake. (London & N.Y.: Longman, 1998) Longman Critical Readers 2101, Critical Readers Series. 8o, ix, 210 pp.; ISBN: 0-582-23711-4 and 0-582-23710-6 (paperback).

The collection consists of

1. 1 John Lucas. “Introduction.” Pp. 1-26. (A survey of trends in Blake criticism.)

2. 2 E. P. Thomson. “‘The Divine Image.’” Pp. 27-42. (Reprinted from his Witness Against the Beast [1993].)

3. 3 John [sic] Mee. “Dangerous Enthusiasm.” Pp. 43-49. (Reprinted from Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm [1992] 3-11.)

4. 4 *David Erdman. “Infinite London.” Pp. 51-57. (Reprinted from his Blake, Prophet Against Empire [third edition] [1977].)

5. 5 Stewart Crehan. “Producers and Devourers.” Pp. 60-79. (Reprinted from his Blake in Context [1984].)

6. 6 Susan Matthews. “Jerusalem and Nationalism.” Pp. 81-100. (Reprinted from Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale [1992]>.)

7. 7 John Barrell. “‘Original’, ‘Character’ and ‘Individual.’” Pp. 101-16. (Reprinted from his The Political Theory of Painting From Reynolds To Hazlitt [1986].)

8. 8 *Kathleen Raine. “A New Mode of Printing.” Pp. 117-29. (Reprinted from her William Blake [1971].)

9. 9 Brenda S. Webster. “Blake, Women, and Sexuality.” Pp. 130-47. (Reprinted from Critical Paths, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault [1987].)

10. 10 Gerda S. Norvig. “Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading In(to) Blake’s Book of Thel.” Pp. 148-66. (Reprinted from Studies in Romanticism 34 [1995].)

11. 11 Michael Simpson. “Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in ‘Songs of Experience.’” Pp. 167-88. (A “reader-response” examination of grammatical ambiguities in “The Fly” suggests the possibility that the fly does not die; the essay is reprinted from Style 30 [1996].)

12. 12 Matt Simpson. “Blake’s Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience.” Pp. 189-200. (Reprinted from Critical Survey 4 [1992].)

MacLean, Robert. “The Influence of Chaucer’s Dream-Vision Poetry upon William Blake: The Dream as Poem.” begin page 139 | ↑ back to top Ritsumeikan Bungaku: Miscellaneous Essays in Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Faculty of Letters of Ritsumeikan University 551 (1997): 100-31.

MacNish, Robert. The Philosophy of Sleep. (N.Y., 1834). Pp. 227-28. B. Second Edition. (Glasgow: W.R. M’Phun, 1834) Pp. 256-57. C. §(1836) D. (Glasgow & London, 1838) Pp. 258-60. E. (Glasgow, London, & Edinburgh, 1845) Pp. 296-98. F. (Glasgow & London, 1859) Pp. 152-53. <BB #2174, not recording the second edition of 1834>.

*Makdisi, Saree. “William Blake and the Universal Empire.” Chapter 7 (154-72) of her Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. (Cambridge: University Press, 1998) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 27.

For Blake, “the ‘Universal Empire’ had to be understood on a planetary scale” (172).

§Marshak, S. “[About the Poems of William Blake].” Severnye Zapiski 10 (1915): 73. In Russian.

Matthews, Susan. “Jerusalem and Nationalism.” Chapter 5 (79-100) of Beyond Romanticism: New approaches to texts and contexts 1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale [1992] <Blake (1994)>. B. Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 81-100.

Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) <BBS 571>.

“Dangerous Enthusiasm” (1-11) is reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 43-49.

*Mee, Jon. “The ‘insidious poison of secret Influence’: A New Historical Context for Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose.’” Studies in the Eighteenth Century 10 22 (1998): 111-22.

Blake’s poem may be addressed to George Rose, a secretary of the Treasury, who was successfully sued in 1791 for not paying a bill for, inter alia, “bludgeon men” at the 1788 Westminster election.

§Meller, Horst. “The Parricidal Imagination: Schiller, Blake, Fuseli and the Romantic Revolt against the Father.” Pp. 76-94 of The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany. Ed. Frederick Burwick and Jurgen Klein. (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1996).

Meyers, Victoria. “The Dialogue as Interpretive Focus in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 221-39.

Miller, Dan, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault, ed. Critical Paths (1987) <BBS 573-74>.

9 Brenda S. Webster. “Blake, Women, and Sexuality.” Pp. 204-24, 352-53. (Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas [1998], 130-47.)

*Mills, Vanessa. “Bygone Bognor: William Blake’s idyllic visit to Felpham, ended in trial for sedition: Famous poet escaped prison.” Bognor Regis Observer, 1 September 1994, 13.

Miyamachi, Seiichi. “Blake Kenkyu no Aratana Shiza — Dotoku Haiki Ronsha to Rantazu: A New Perspective on Blake Studies: Antinomians and Ranters.” Sapporo Gakuin Daigaku Jinbungakkai Kiyo: Journal of the Society of Humanities, the Society of Humanities, Sapporo Gakuin University 62 (1998): 237-47. In Japanese.

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

Review

16 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 394 (“a brave and important study”).

§Nekrasova, E. “[William Blake].” Iskusstvo 8 (1957): 58-59 <BB A2289>. B. “William Blake.” Sovremennaya Kultura (28 November 1957). In Russian.

Nemerov, Howard. “Two Ways of the Imagination: Blake & Wordsworth.” Carlton Miscellany 5 (1964): 189-41. <BB #2286> B. §Graduate Journal (Spring 1967) C. Pp. 103-23 of his Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972) D. §Pp. 140-60 of his New and Selected Essays. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1985) <Blake (1997)>.

Norvig, Gerda S. “Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading In(to) Blake’s Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995) <Blake 1996>. B. Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 148-66.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 400-01 (“challenging”; “Norvig’s approach is a strong one”).

*Nuttall, A. D. The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) xiii, 282 pp., ISBN: 0-19-818462-X.

The Blake sections consist of chapters

1 “Blake: The Son Versus the Father.” Pp. 4-21. (“The tendency of my argument is to suggest that, long before William Blake, Gnosticism implies an alternative Trinity in which the Son opposes the Father” [15].)

2 “Blake.” Pp. 192-272. (“The similarities, sometimes intricate, between his thought and that of the Gnostics whom (dare we say it) he could not possibly have read is [sic] quite inescapable”; “The more one reads, the clearer it becomes that . . . we are dealing with a philosophia perennis . . .” [200, 208].)

O’Flinn, Paul. “Studying a Blake Poem.” Chapter 2 (12-30) of his How to Study Romantic Poetry. (Basingstoke & London: begin page 140 | ↑ back to top Macmillan, 1988) Macmillan How to Study.

On “The Clod & the Pebble.”

O’Keefe, Richard R. Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean Reading. (Kent & London: Kent State University Press, 1995) 8o, viii, 228 pp; ISBN: 0-87338-518-7.

“The archetypal models have been chosen from Blake precisely because there is no direct influence in involved” (3) <Blake (1997)§>.

*Okuma, Akinobu. William Blake Kenkyu: “Yonju no Ningen” to Seiai, Gisei, Kyusai o megutte: [Sexuality, Brotherhood, Sacrifice, and Salvation: A Study of William Blake’s “Fourfold Man”]. (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1997) 434 pp.; ISBN: 4-88202-445-4 C0098. In Japanese.

The book consists of:

Introduction: “Blake no Shiso no Patan—‘Yonju no Ningen’ to Seiai, Gisei, Kyusai [Patterns of Blake’s Thought—‘Fourfold Man,’ Sexuality, Brotherhood, Sacrifice, and Salvation].” Pp. 9-29.

Chapter 1: “Shinwa no Katarite o megutte [On Speakers in Blake’s Myth].” Pp. 31-60.

Chapter 2: “Bunkon—Blake Shinwa no Kosei Genri [Soul Divided in Four—Principle of Composing Blake’s Myth].” Pp. 61-89.

Chapter 3: “Reikon no Unmei—Blake Shinwa no Sekai to Takei [Destiny of Human Souls—A World and System in Blake’s Myth].” Pp. 91-120.

Chapter 4: “Ryosei Guyu—Seiai to Yuai [Hermaphrodite—Sexuality and Brotherhood].” Pp. 121-73.

Chapter 5: “Keimo Shiso to Blake [Blake and Enlightenment].” Pp. 175-200.

Chapter 6: “Orc Densetsu to Yottsu no Zoa no Gui [The Orc Cycle and Allegory in The Four Zoas].” Pp. 201-62.

Chapter 7: “Gisei o koete—Jinruigakuteki Sozoryoku to Tairitsu no Ronri [Beyond Sacrifice—Anthropological Imagination and the Logic of Contraries].” Pp. 263-308.

Chapter 8: “‘Shirei’ to Guigateki Shuho [‘The Poetic Genius’ and Allegorical Method].” Pp. 309-71.

Chapter 9: “Kyusai—Blake no Jiku [Salvation—Blake’s Time and Space].” Pp. 373-408.

Reviews

1 Mitsuru Watanabe, Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu, Igirisu Romanha Gakkai: Essays in English Romanticism, Japan Association of English Romanticism, 22 (1998): 100-03.

2 Masashi Suzuki, Eibungaku Kenkyu, Nihon Eibungakkai: Studies in English Literature, the English Literary Society of Japan 75 (1998): 94-98.

§Olson, D. W., and M. S. Olson. “William Blake and August’s Fiery Meteors.” Sky and Telescope 78 (1989): 192-99.

It is presumably related to Donald W. Olson and Marilynn S. Olson, “William Blake and August’s Fiery Meteors,” Astronomical Computing (1989): 192-94 <BBS 593-94>.

*Olson, Roberta J., and Jay M. Pasachoff. “The Comets and Meteors of Blake and His Circle and the Great Comet of 1811.” Pp. 109-30 of their Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science. Epilogue by Colin Pillinger. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Deals especially with Linnell’s meticulous drawings of the 1811 comet.

*Olson, Roberta J., and Jay M. Pasachoff. “The Comets and Meteors of William Blake.” Pp. 80-95 of their Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science. Epilogue by Colin Pillinger. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Note also “Telescopes and Blake’s and Sandby’s Contemporaries: William and Caroline Herschel” (96-101) and “The Comets and Meteors of Later Visionaries” Samuel Palmer, Francis Danby, and John Martin (163-66).

Ooka, Shohei. “Blake o yomu Tominaga Taro [Taro Tominaga Who Reads Blake].” Bungei [Literature] 19 (1980): 344-48 <BBS 594>. B. Reprinted on 361-67 of Vol. 17 of his Ooka Shohei Zenshu [Complete Writings of Shohei Ooka]. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1995) In Japanese.

Otto, Peter. Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction (1991) <BBS 596>.

Review

3 Andrew Lincoln, Literature & Theology 8 (1993): 408-09 (with De Luca, Words of Eternity [1991]): Otto “brings a new sophistication” to the study of Blake, but readers will find “that it places them in the grip of a system they will be glad to deconstruct” (408). (Blake (1996)§>

*Outram, Richard. Notes on William Blake’s “The Tyger:” A Paper Read . . . at The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto 4 February 1997. ([Toronto:] Printed at the Gauntlet Press, December 1997) 4o, iv, 27 pp.; no ISBN.

“In the hope of sharing an enthusiasm and perhaps starting a few hares,” Outram offers “a number of what might be termed ‘the field-notes of a poem watcher,’ from childhood to the present” (1), including wonderfully original speculations on the influence of Montaigne, heraldry, and bestiaries on “The Tyger.”

Paley, Morton D. “Apocalypse and Millennium.” Chapter 47 (470-85) of A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) Esp. 470-75.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake and Anti-Newtonian Thought: The Problem with Prescriptive Though.” Beyond the Two Cultures, ed. Joseph W. Slade and Judith Yaross Lee (1990) 141-60 <BBS 602>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 38-57, 200-02.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake and Newton: Argument as Art, Argument as Science.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 10 (1981): 205-26 <BBS 602>.)

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 19-37, 197-200.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake and the Ideology of the Natural.” Eighteenth-Century Life, N.S. 18 (1994): 91-119 <Blake (1996)>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 139-68, 221-28.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 [1997]: 393 (“repays careful reading”).

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake, Freemasonry, and the Builder’s Task.” Mosaic 17 (1984): 35-57 <BBS 602>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 58-84, 202-04.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake on Charters, Weights, and Measures as Forms of Social Control.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (1989): 37-59 <BBS 602>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 105-25, 212-16.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Blake, Priestley, and the ‘Gnostic Moment.’” Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (1990) 139-66 <BBS 603>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 85-04, 204-12.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “The Din of the City in Blake’s Prophetic Books.” ELH 64 (1997): 99-130 <Blake (1998)>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 169-91, 228-40.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Power Tropes: ‘The Tyger’ as Enacted Critique of Newtonian Metonymic Logic and Natural Theology.” New Orleans Review 28 (1991): 27-35 <Blake (1995)>.

Reprinted in his William Blake in a Newtonian World (1998) 126-38, 216-21.

*Peterfreund, Stuart. William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature As Art and Science. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, Volume 2. 8o, xv, 255 pp., ISBN: 0-8061-3042-3.

A collection of essays consisting of

1. 1 “Preface.” Pp. xi-xv. (Summaries of what follows.)

2. 2 “Introduction: Blake and the Case for Situated Knowledge.” Pp. 3-18, 193-97.

3. 3 Chapter 1: “Blake and Newton: Argument as Art, Argument as Science.” Pp. 19-37, 197-200. (Reprinted from Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 10 [1981]: 205-26.)

4. 4 Chapter 2: “Blake and Anti-Newtonian Thought: The Problem with Prescriptive Thought.” Pp. 38-57, 200-02. (Reprinted from Beyond the Two Cultures, ed. Joseph W. Slade and Judith Yaross Lee [1990], 141-60.)

5. 5 *Chapter 3: “Blake, Freemasonry, and the Builder’s Task.” Pp. 58-84, 202-04. (Reprinted from Mosaic 17 [1984]: 35-57.)

6. 6 Chapter 4: “Blake, Priestley, and the ‘Gnostic Moment.’” Pp. 85-104, 204-12. (Reprinted from Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund [1990], 139-66.)

7. 7 Chapter 5: “Blake on Charters, Weights, and Measures as Forms of Social Control.” Pp. 105-25, 212-16. (Reprinted from Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 [1989]: 37-59.)

8. 8 Chapter 6: “Power Tropes: ‘The Tyger’ as Enacted Critique of Newtonian Metonymic Logic and Natural Theology.” Pp. 126-38, 216-21. (Reprinted from New Orleans Review 18 [1991]: 27-35.)

9. 9 Chapter 7: “Blake and the Ideology of the Natural.” Pp. 139-68, 221-28. (Reprinted from Eighteenth-Century Life N.S. 18 [1994]: 91-119.)

10. 10 Chapter 8: “The Din of the City in Blake’s Prophetic Books.” Pp. 169-91, 228-40. (Reprinted from ELH 64 [1997]: 99-130.)

*Pfau, Thomas. “Introduction. Reading beyond Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism.” Pp. 1-37 of Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion. Ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998).

He is concerned (11-18) with “the ambiguous temporal logic prevailing in Blake’s early prophecies” (11).

*Phillips, Michael. “Blake and the Terror 1792-93.” Library 6 S, 16 (1994): 263-97 <BIQ (1995)>.

Review

2 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 395-96 (“first-rate historical research,” “One of the year’s best excursions into contextual recovery”).

*Pieiller, Evelyne. “William Blake: Satan, prince du monde.” magazine littéraire 356 (1997): 50-51.

A general account of Blake.

*Pieper, Eleanore Frauke. “Imitation Is Criticism”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti und William Blake. (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, N.Y., Paris, Wien: Peter Lang, 1997) Europäische Hochschulshriften: Publications Universitaires Européennes: European University Studies Reihe XIV: Angelsächischer Sprache und Literature: Langue et littérature anglo-saxonnes: Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature Vol. 330. 8o, 428 pp., ISBN: 3-631-31899-5. In German.

According to the English “Summary” (421-28), Rossetti’s appropriation of the Victorians’ misunderstanding of Blake was used “as a powerful symbol of the Victorian artist’s own feelings of alienation” (428).

Pierce, John B. “Blake’s Writing of Vala or The Four Zoas: A Study of Textual Development” (Toronto Ph.D., 1986) <BB #605>.

The dissertation matured as his Flexible Design 1998).

Pierce, John B. “The Changing Mythic Structure of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas: A Study of the Manuscript, Pages 43-84,” PQ 68 (1989): 485-50 <BB #605>.

The essay is reprinted in chapter 4 of his Flexible Design (1998).

*Pierce, John B. Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas. (Montreal, Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998) 8o, xxviii, 206 pp., 9 plates; ISBN: 0-7735-1682-4.

“In Vala, Blake’s shifting of narrative strategies gives the poem a flexible design, one whose outline . . . gains its flexibility through conscious adaptations of sequential disruptions as a fundamental element in narrative experiment. . . . the poem is revised to enact its own meaning through emergent forms” (xxii, xxvi.)

Appendix A: “The Copperplate Text of Vala” (151-65, 188-91) is a fresh transcription of pp. 7-42. Chapter 4 (“Completing The Four Zoas”) is reprinted from “The Changing Mythic Structure of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas: A Study of the Manuscript, Pages 43-84,” PQ 68 (1989): 485-508, and part of chapter 3 (“Recasting the Copperplate”) appeared as “The Shifting Characterization of Tharmas and Enion in Pages 3-7 of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas,” Blake 22 (1988-89): 93-102. The book plainly grew out of his dissertation on “Blake’s Writing of Vala or The Four Zoas: A Study of Textual Development” (Toronto, 1986).

*Piper, David. “Blake.” Pp. 123-26 of his Painting in England 1500-1870 (London: Privately Published by the Book Society, 1960). B. “Blake.” Pp. 123-29 of his Painting in England 1550-1800: An Introduction. (Cambridge, 1965) <BB #2409, not reporting the 1960 edition>.

*Piquet, François. Blake et le Sacré. (Lyon: Didier Erudition, 1996) Etudes Anglaises 98. 8o, 452 pp., 23 plates; ISBN: 2-86460-270-9 <Blake (1996)§>. In French.

“Ce travail s’est donné pour objectif de dégager le mythe personnel de Blake à partir de la problématique du sacré” (417).

§Porée, Marc. “‘Ruinous Fragments of Life’, ou le livre d’Urizen A á Z (ou presque).” QUERTY 6 (1996): 97-106. In French.

Punter, David. “Legends of the Animated Body: Blake’s Albion and the Body and Soul of the Nation.” Romanticism 1 (1995): 161-76. <Blake (1997)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 401 (“a rich and widely ranging argument,” “bold and original”).

*Punter, David. Songs of Innocence and of Experience Notes. (Longman: York Pres, 1998) York Notes. 8o, 96 pp. (84-94 bear merely the word “Notes”); ISBN: 0-582-32932-92.

“Introduction: How to Study a Poem” (7-9); poem-by-poem commentary (10-45); “Critical Approaches” (50-64); “Textual Analysis” of “The Chimney Sweeper” (from Innocence), “The Tyger,” and “London” (50-84), “Background” (65-70), and “Critical History” (71-83).

Purslove, Glyn. “Alexander Gilchrist (25 April 1828-30 November 1861).” Pp. 108-16 of Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume One Hundred Forty-Four: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Biographers. Ed. Steven Serafin. (Detroit, Washington, London: Gale Reearch, 1994).

Primarily an appreciation and criticism of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863).

Raine, Kathleen. William Blake (1971) <BB #2499>.

“A New Mode of Printing” is reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 117-29.

*Reinhart, Charles. “William Blake (28 November 1757-12 August 1827).” Pp. 16-58, with 51 plates, in Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume Ninety-Three: British Romantic Poets, 1789-1832 first series. Ed. John R. Greenfield. (Detroit, N.Y., London: Gale Research, 1990).

The work was mistakenly listed in Blake (1995) under “Reinart.” For other Blake biographies in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, see Alan Richardson (British Children’s Writers, 1800-1880) and Ruth Robbins (The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820).

Richardson, Alan. “Blake, Children’s Literature, and Colonialism.” Part 4 of chapter 3 (“Children’s literature and the work of culture,” 109-66, 298-300) in his Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. (Cambridge: University Press, 1994) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 8.

In “The Little Black Boy,” the child tries to “challenge a crippling ideology through creative subversion . . . a rare lesson in radical dissent” (166).

*Richardson, Alan. “William Blake (28 November 1757-12 August 1827).” Pp. 21-29 of Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume One Hundred and Sixty-Three: British Children’s Writers, 1800-1880. Ed. Meena Khorana. (Detroit, Washington, London: Gale Research, 1996).

Especially about children’s books, of course.

For other Blake biographies in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, see Charles Reinhart (British Romantic Poets, 1789-1832 first series) and Ruth Robbins (The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820).

Richardson, Alan. “Wordsworth, Blake, and Catechistic Method,” Part [2] (64-77, 286) of chapter 2 (“School time,” 44-108) in his Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. (Cambridge: University Press, 1994) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 8.

In “The Lamb,” the child’s “answer to his own question” would have “shock[ed] most eighteenth century parents” (74, 76).

Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic (1996) <Blake 1998>.

Reviews

2 Ahmad, Siraj, Wordsworth Circle 28 (1997): 211-12 (with Edward J. Ahearn, Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age [1996]).

3 §Reference and Research Book News 12 (1997): 131+.

*Robbins, Ruth. “William Blake ([worked in] London: 1784-1827.” Pp. 26-32 of Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume One Hundred Fifty-Four: The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820. Ed. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver. (Detroit, Washington, London: Gale Research, 1995)

An account of Blake’s work in the book trade.

For other Blake biographies in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, see Charles Reinhart (British Romantic Poets, 1789-1832 first series) and Alan Richardson (British Children’s Writers, 1800-1880).

§*Roob, Alexander. Das hermetische Museum: Alchemie und Mystik. (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen^[e] Verlag, 1996) ISBN: 3-8228-8803-6. Pp. 69, 119, 161, 163-64, 174, 182, 192, 201-02, 213-14, 229-31, 259, 296-97, 429, 433, 437, 461, 482, 491, 523, 531, 553, 577, 626, 632-33, 649, 652, 663, 692-93, 696-97 <Blake (1997)>B. *The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism. [Tr. Shaun Whiteside.] (Köln, Lisboa, London, N.Y., Paris, Tokyo: Taschen, 1997) Pp. 8, 21-23, 55, 67, *69, 99, 118-*19, 126, *163-*64, 166, *174, *182, *192, *201-*02, *213, *229-*31, 253, *296-*97, 338, 341, 417, *429, *433, *437, 460-*61, *482-83, *489, *491, *523, 530-*31, 550-*53, 570, *577, 616, *626, *632-34, 646, *649, *652-53, *662, *692-*93, 696-*97.

The volume consists of annotated illustrations from alchemical texts, many from The First Book of Urizen. “Blake developed the character of Los from various Paracelsian concepts” (483).

Rothery, Agnes. “Mad Poets in the Spring.” Virginia Quarterly Review 3 (1927): 250-63. <BB #2583> B. §“Four^[e] Poets and Four Gardens.” Pp. 151-66 of her Joyful Gardener. (Dodd, 1949) <Blake (1997)> C. New and Revised Edition. (London, N.Y., Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town: Andrew Melrose Ltd, 1951) 157-74.

Blake’s plants and animals are visionary (1951, 164-68).

Rowland, William G. “Religious Vocation and Blake’s Obscurity.” Chapter 3 (63-88, 199-201) of his Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

“Blake in some ways courted oblivion” (75).

*Ryan, Robert. “Blake’s Orthodoxy.” Chapter 2 (43-79, 243-48) of his The Romantic Reformation: Religious politics in English Literature, 1789-1824. (Cambridge: University Press, 1997).

He seems to think that Blake was orthodox according to the religious standards of his time.

§Samorodov, B. “[The 225th Anniversary of Blake’s Birthday].” Pamyatnie Khizhnie Dati [Commemoration of Literary Dates], 1982 (Moscow, 1982): 137-40. In Russian.

§Samorodov, B. “[William Blake, Poet and Printer: to the 225th Anniversary of his Birthday].” [Polygraphia] 7 (Moscow, 1982): 36-37. In Russian.

§*Sanesi, Roberto. Blake & Newton: appunti per una lezione. (Castel Maggiore: Book Editori, 1993) Collezione di Poetica, Critica, Estetica: Minute. 8o, 55 pp. In Italian.

Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “William Blake and the Promiscuous Baboons: A Cagliostroan Séance Gone Awry.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1995): 185-200 <Blake (1996)>.

Review

I David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 76 for 1995 (1998): 398-99 (“richly researched” and “extremely important”).

§Sedyich, Elina Vladimirovna. “[Contact in Poetry as a Mode of Expression: On the Example of the Blake’s Poetic Cycles ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’].” St. Petersburg Ph.D., 1997, 206 pages. In Russian.

Senaha, Eijun. “Autoeroticism and Blake: O Rose Art Thou Sick!?” Chapter 1 (11-28) of Sex, Drugs, and Madness in Poetry from William Blake to Christina Rossetti: Women’s Pain, Women’s Pleasure (1996) <Blake (1998>. B. Hokkaido Daigaku Bungakubu Kiyo: The Annual Report of Cultural Science, The Faculty of Letters of Hokkaido University 46-1 (1997): 85-109.

§Shilinya, Brigita Karlovna. [William Blake and English Pre-Romanticism: Handbook for Optional Courses.] (Riga: P. Stuhkas Latvijas Valsts Univ. [Latvian State University], begin page 144 | ↑ back to top 1982) 56 pp. In Latvian and English. (The author’s name is Jilina in Latvian.)

Simpson, Matt. “Blake’s Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience.” Critical Survey 4 (1992): 20-27 <Blake (1997)>. B.

Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 189-200.

Simpson, Michael. “Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in ‘Songs of Experience.’” Style 30 (1996): 224-46 <Blake (1998)§>. B. Reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 167-88.

“Reader-response criticism” and “affective stylistics” suggest “a dual audience” coping with “the versatile grammar of the poem and the self-monitoring reading persona” (1996, 220, 238).

*Smith, Jessica Todd. “Hogarth, Blake, and The Beggars’ Opera.’” Pp. 80-84 of “Among Whores and Thieves”: William Hogarth and The Beggars’ Opera. Ed. David Bindman and Scott Wilcox. (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art; The Lewis Walpole Library, 1997).

Accompanying an exhibition of 1 February-6 April 1997.

Sontag, Frederick. Truth and Imagination: The Universes Within. (Lanham [Maryland], N.Y., Oxford: University Presses of America, 1998) 8o, xv, 92 pp., ISBN: 0-7618-0921-X.

The “PREFACE: Blake on the Origin of Creativity and Understanding” (ix-xiii) invites us to “see if they [Blake’s key concepts] help us to reveal the Modern World’s Achilles heel” (ix-x), but Blake serves as little more than the source of quotations.

§Sorenson, Peter. “Freemasonry and ‘Greek Mysteries’ in William Blake’s Tiriel.” Classical and Modern Literature 15 (1995): 153-75.

Steinkjer, Mode. “William Blake på cd.” Arbeiderbaldet, 10 April 1997, 24. In Norwegian.

About Finn Coren’s CD of Blake.

Stewart, David. “The Context of Blakean Contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Essays in Literature 21 (1994): 43-53 <Blake (1995)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 393 (Boehme is behind Blake’s attack on Swedenborg).

§Sukharev (Murishkin) S. “[Two “Tygers’, Mastery of Translation].” Collected Articles 2 (Moscow, 1977): 296-317. In Russian.

*Summerfield, Henry. A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers with notes on interpretive criticism 1910-1984. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998) 8o, 874 pp., ISBN: 0-86140-408-4.

“The primary purpose of this book is to provide [guidance] for the serious reader of poetry, for the student, and for the scholar who is not a Blake specialist” (11).

Part 1, “The Books of William Blake: An Introduction” (27-320) gives “an account of Blake’s beliefs, concepts and development and an exposition of those of his productions that can reasonably be classified as books” (11).

Part 2, “Notes on Criticism” (321-836) poem-by-poem and sometimes line-by-line, a kind of variorum edition without the texts of the poems.

Swearingen, James E. “William Blake’s Figural Politics.” ELH 59 [1992]: 125-44 <BBS 652>. B. Reprinted in 80-94 of Blake, Politics, and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson (N.Y. & London: Garland Publishing, 1998).

§*Tandecki, Daniela. Tigerbrand: das unbequeme Genie William Blake. (Frankfurt am Main: O. Lembeck, 1997) 310 pp.; ISBN: 3-87476324-2. In German.

§Thompson, E. P. “Anti-Hegemony: the Legacy of William Blake,” New Left Review 201 (1993): 26-33.

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

“‘The Divine Image’” is reprinted in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (1998) 27-42.

Thompson, Marc Alan. “Romantic Representation and the Rhetoric of Unfinished Design.” DAI 58 (1998): 4285A. Cincinnati Ph.D., 1997. 225 pp.

Examines, inter alia, The French Revolution and The Four Zoas.

Toriumi, Hisayoshi. “Hebe to Romanha no Sonen (2)—Blake no Baai [Serpent and Romantic Concepts (2)—In the Case of Blake].” Wayo Joshi Daigaku Eibungakkaishi: Language and Literature, Wayo Women’s University, 32 (1998): 31-46. In Japanese.

*Upstone, Robert. “Fantasy and Imagination.” Pp. 152-56 of his Sketchbooks of the Romantics. (Secaucus,^[e] N.J.: The Wellfleet Press, 1991). 27 Blake plates.

A book about romantic artists generally, not much related to their sketchbooks.

van Lieshout, Jules, Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry (1994) <Blake (1996)>.

Review

1 David Worrall, Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 394-95 (a “novel and refreshing way of thinking about Blake’s text”).

§Vasilieva, T. N. “[Blake and English Poetry of the XVIIIth Century, Literary Process and Creative Individuality].” Kishinev (1990) 115-25.

§Verhoest, Eric, and Jean-Luc Cambier. Blake et Mortimer (1996). 120 pp. ISBN: 2-87097-045-5l. In French.

It contains “Blake et Mortimer, histoire d’un retour.”

§Vesely, S. A. “The Daughters of 18th-century Science: A Rationalist and Materialist Context for William Blake’s Female Figures.” Colby Quarterly 34 (1998): 5-24.

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

Vine “examines the critical energies in Visions’ account of the body, sexuality and slavery, and maps the struggle of 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 (1993) <Blake (1995)>

Reviews

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

25 Paul Cantor, Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1998): 557-70 (with The Early Illuminated Books and MILTON A POEM and the Final Illuminated Books) (“On the whole I am convinced by the case Viscomi makes” [559]).

26 §Sewanee Review 105 (1997): 38+

27 §Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1997, 18.

*Viscomi, Joseph. “The Lessons of Swedenborg; or, The Origin of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Pp. 173-212 of Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion. Ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998).

An examination of “the primary Swedenborgian texts and themes that Blake” deals with in Marriage pl. 21-24, “an autonomous text preceding the composition of . . . the Marriage” (174).

Weaver, Susan Ann. “Dialectical Formulations and Covert Language in Coleridge, Blake, and [Mary] Robinson.” DAI 58 (1998): 4285A. Texas A&M Ph.D., 1997. 330 pp.

“William Blake also used dialectical formulations and covert language to conceal his radical political inclinations.”

*Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. (Cambridge: University Press, 1998) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 28. 8o, xviii, 250 pp. ISBN: 0-521-62050-3.

A theory-charged “series of readings of Blake’s texts” in order “to portray a Blake whose program for social change was always situated in an historical context” (xiv).

§*Wilson, Simon. “William Blake and his Followers.” Pp. 65-73 of his Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion. (London: Tate Publishing, 1990) B. §Second Edition. (1991) C. §(1993) D. §(1994) E. §(1995) F. §(1996) G. (1997) H. Translated into Japanese (1996).

Wolfreys, Julian. “Blake’s London: London’s Blake: an Introduction to the Spirit of London or, on the way to Apocalypse.” Pp. 32-58, 213-19 of his Writing London: the trace of the urban text from Blake to Dickens. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

About “the ways in which William Blake writes himself into his vision of London”; “Blake is London: London is Blake” (31, 34).

Wolfson, Susan J. “Blake’s Politics in Rhyme and Blank Verse.” Pp. 195-205 of “‘Romantic Ideology’ and the Values of Aesthetic Form,” 188-218 of Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994). B. “Sketching Verbal Form: Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” Pp. 27-70 of Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches, ed. Mark L. Greenberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996) <Blake (1998)>. C. Chapter 2 (32-62, 249-55) of her Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

B and C are said to be different versions of A.

Worrall, David. The Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1994 (1997): 391-96.

Careful evaluations of many works on Blake.

Worrall, David. Year’s Work in English Studies 75 for 1995 (1998): 396-402.

Admirable surveys of publications about Blake in 1995.

§Yakovleva, G. V. “[Blake’s Polemics with Reynolds, Literary Traditions in Foreign Literature of the XIX-XX Centuries].” Perm’ (1983): 11-19. In Russian.

§Yakovleva, G. V. “[‘Prophecies of Innocence’ in the Context of W. Blake’s Philosophy].” Pp. 24-25 of [First All-Union Conference of the Specialists in the Studies of English Literature]. (Moscow, 1991) In Russian.

Yasuda, Masayoshi. “Blake no Sozo no Kannen no Keisei—Shoki Yogensho ni okeru: The Formation of W. Blake’[s] Idea of Creation in the Earlier Prophetic Books.” Takushima Bunri Daigaku Kenkyu Kiyo: Research Bulletin of Takushima Bunri University 55 (1998): 1-10. In Japanese, with an English abstract on 10.

Yeats, W. B. “Academy Portraits, XXXII.—William Blake,” Academy 51 (1897): 634-35 . . . <BB #3047, BBS 691> R. §Blake e l’immaginazione. Tr. L. Gallesi. (1992) 8o, 70 pp., ISBN: 88-85387-683. In Italian.

§Zhirmunsky, V. M. “[William Blake].” Pp. 175-87 of his [The History of Western European Literatures]. (Leningrad, 1981) In Russian.

§Zimmerman, Sarah M. “Charlotte Smith’s Lessons.” Pp. 121-28 of Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen C. Berendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin.^[e] (N.Y.: Modern Language Association, 1997).

Blake and Wordsworth are compared with Charlotte Smith.