checklist
William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2000
With the Assistance of Keiko Aoyama for Japanese Publications
Nota Bene: The name of Keiko Aoyama was inadvertently omitted from the authorship of the previous issue (2000) of this checklist, an omission which GEB greatly regrets.
The annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning William Blake and his circle records publications for the current year (say, 2000) and those for previous years which are not recorded in Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995), and “William Blake and His Circle” (1994-2000). The organization of the checklist is as follows:
Division I: William Blake
Part I: | Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles of Blake’s Writings Section A: Original Editions and Reprints Section B: Collections and Selections |
Part II: | Reproductions of his Art |
Part III: | Commercial Book Engravings |
Part IV: | Catalogues and Bibliographies |
Part V: | Books Blake Owned |
Part VI: | Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies Note: Collections of essays on Blake and issues of periodicals devoted entirely to him are listed in one place, with cross-references to their authors. |
Division II: Blake’s Circle
This division is organized by individual (say, William Hayley or John Flaxman), with works by and about Blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. It includes Thomas Butts, Robert Hartley Cromek, George Cumberland, John Flaxman and his family, Henry Fuseli, Thomas and William Hayley, John Linnell and his family, Samuel Palmer, James Parker, George Richmond, Thomas Stothard, and John Varley. It does not include important contemporaries with whom Blake’s contact was negligible or non-existent such as John Constable and William Wordsworth and Edmund Burke; such major figures are dealt with more comprehensively elsewhere, and the light they throw upon Blake is very dim.
Reviews listed here are only for books which are substantially about Blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on Blake. These reviews are listed under the book reviewed; the authors of the reviews may be recovered from the index.
I take Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995), faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical authorities on Blake1↤ 1 Except for the states of the plates for Blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is R. N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991). and have noted significant differences from them.
I have made no systematic attempt to record manuscripts and typescripts, “audio books,”2↤ 2 For instance, William Blake: poems read by Nicol Williamson (Harper/Collins, ISBN: 1 56511 163 X) and William Blake: selected poems read by various readers (Penguin Audiobooks, ISBN 014086572), scathingly reviewed by Gilbert Francis, New Statesman, 4 Dec 1998, p. 63. chinaware, computer printouts, radio or television broadcasts, calendars, festivals and lecture series, furniture with inscriptions, microforms, music, notebooks (blank),3↤ 3 To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. (William Blake) ([No place:] Quotablejournals from Quotablecards, [?2000]) Square 8°, lined pages; no ISBN. pillows, poems, posters, published scores, recorded readings and singings, rubber stamps, T-shirts, tattoos, video recordings, or email related to Blake.4↤ 4 E.g., §Anon. “William Blake Helsinki City Art Museum Helsinki FI Finland,” Art News <Absolutearts.com> [April 2000] (on a proposed exhibition); Susan P. Reilly, “Blake’s Poetics of Sound in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Romanticism on the Net [electronic], Nov 1999; §Dalya Alberge, essay on the export license being denied for “God Blessing the Seventh Day,” Times [London] online, 25 Oct 2000; *Elinor Hodgson, “All that we see is vision,” http://worldbookdealers.com./home/nw/nw0000000213.asp (about the Tate Blake exhibition); and John Windle, “Introduction to Blake: A personal view from John Windle on the roots of his collection,” http://worldbookkdealers.articles/op/op0000000212.asp (8 Nov [2000]).
The status of electronic “publications” becomes increasingly vexing. Some such works seem to be merely electronic versions of physically stable works, such as Colliers Encyclopedia-CD ROM (1996), with essays by Charles P. Parkhurst, Jr., on Fuseli and Flaxman and by Geoffrey Keynes on Blake (1966) <BB #2040, which replaced that by Mark Schorer & Charles P. Parkhurst, Jr., BB #2673>. Some electronic publications, however, suggest no more knowledge than how to operate a computer, such as reviews invited for the listings of Amazon. Com, which are divided into those by (1) the author, (2) the publisher, and (3) other, perhaps disinterested, remarkers. I have not searched for electronic publications, and I report here only those I have happened upon which appear to bear some authority.
begin page 130 | ↑ back to topThe chief indices used were Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature for 1997 (1999), #7759-7813; Art Index 2000 (2000) (2 Blake entries); Biography Database (online); Book Review Digest March 1999-Feb 2000 (2000) (2); Book Review Index 1999 ([1999]) (3), and . . . 2000 ([2000]) (1); Books in Print 1999-2000 ([February] 2000); Books in Print Supplement 1999-2000 (2000); British Humanities Index 1998 ([1999]) (1), . . . 1999 ([2000]) (3), issues 1-3 (of 4) for 2000 (2000) (1); Canadian Book Review Annual 1998 (1999) (0), . . . 1999 (2000) (1); Antonia Forster, Index to Book Reviews In England 1775-1800 (London: British Library, 1997); Hand Press Books (online); Modern Language Association bibliography (online, December 2000); Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature 1998 (1999) (1), . . . 1999 (2000) (0), June-Sept 2000 (2000) (0); Religion Index (to March 2000); and RLIN (online).5↤ 5 RLIN stands for the “Research Libraries Group Union Catalogue,” with “3669 Records, unsorted” for Blake, with scores, perhaps hundreds of duplicates, a few works merely “on order,” B.A. and M.A. theses, and typescripts. In November 2000 it included at least one Blake work (Ackroyd, Peter, William Blake: Chambers of the Imagination; 304 pp., ISBN: 1-85437-314-5) dated “2001.” BB is included at least three times.
I am indebted for help of many kinds to A. A. Ansari, Dr. E. B. Bentley, Bryan Maggs, J. B. Mertz, Robert N. Essick, Ron Ewart, Alexander Gourlay, J. B. Nicolas-Hayes, Inc. (publishers), Isobel Grundy, Morton D. Paley, Princeton University Press, the Wormsley Library, and John Windle.
I should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and I undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print.
Research for “William Blake and His Circle” (2000) was carried out in Brighton, Dutch Boys Landing, Felpham, London, Ottawa, Oxford, San Marino, and Toronto.
Symbols
* Works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by Blake or depicting him. If there are more than 19 illustrations, the number is specified. If the illustrations include all those for a work by Blake, say Thel or his designs to L’Allegro, the work is identified.
§ Works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority.
Abbreviations
B B | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
B B S | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
Blake | Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly |
Blake Publications and Discoveries in 2000
About a quarter of the works about William Blake recorded here are in languages other than English: Catalan, Chinese, Finnish, French (6), German (5), Hungarian (3), Indonesian, Italian (7), Japanese (21), Korean, Persian, Spanish (4), and Swedish.
A number of books in non-English languages have scarcely migrated to Albion’s shores, and a distressingly large number of works in English have been reported elsewhere as if really published, but I have been unable to find them in Bodley, the British Library, the University of Toronto Library, Toronto Public Library, the Huntington Library, or elsewhere.
Blake’s Writings
Many, perhaps most, institutions like the Huntington now treat Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing as if they were collections of separate prints, not books, and have disbound and matted the plates individually. This has the great advantage of allowing all the plates to be exhibited at once, rather than only one or two at a time, as when they were bound, and it permits one to see easily the sewing or stab holes in the inner margin—even to perceive occasionally that the inner margins have deckled edges, indicating that they were the outside of the sheet. However, facing pages no longer face one another, and all sense of the sequence of a book is lost.
None of Blake’s writings in manuscript or in Illuminated Printing is known to have changed hands in the year 2000. The sale of Urizen (E) in 1999 for $2,500,000 provided enough excitement to allow us to coast for some time.
There were, however, several editions of Blake newly noted here which are notable either for their contents or for the languages in which they were published. There is an edition of Jerusalén in Catalan (1997) and collections of his poetry in Hungarian (Versek es Próféciak [1957]), in Russian (1982), and Persian (Viliyam Balayki [2000]). In addition, there is a much reduced reproduction of the 1877 facsimile of Jerusalem (D) with earnest annotations by Andrew Solomon (2000).
Two important editions of Blake’s writings appeared in 2000. The first of these is William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. David Fuller for the Longman Annotated Texts series (2000). This is a careful, responsible edition whose chief value is likely to prove to be the generous annotations. Its most original feature is the section justifying, with worrying plausibility, Fuller’s policy of “Modernizing Blake’s Text” (18-26), chiefly in punctuation. Purists may find the cogency of his arguments disturbing.
Even more useful is David Bindman’s assemblage of the reproductions of the recent Blake Trust editions in The Collected Illuminated Books (2000). This includes reproductions in full size and in glorious color of all 18 of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing, along with transcriptions of the poems. However, the exceedingly valuable editorial begin page 131 | ↑ back to top matter provided by the Blake Trust scholars as distinguished as Joseph Viscomi and Robert N. Essick have been abandoned entirely. The Collected Illuminated Books is likely to prove invaluable to all Blake students and irresistible to lovers of beautiful books.
Blake’s Art
Blake’s purely visual art always receives far less attention than his poems. A few of the volumes of reproductions may be dismissed fairly briskly: a debased but useful Dover edition of Blake’s illuminations to Gray, whose editor is so negligible that he has been left anonymous; half an issue of a Japanese weekly devoted to reproductions of his art (Shukan Bijutsokan); and a calendar with reproductions from the Tate Gallery Blakes.
By far the most useful new edition of Blake’s art is David Bindman’s tri-lingual reproduction of all 103 of Blake’s watercolors for The Divine Comedy: Die Göttliche Komödie; La Divine Comedia. The size is a generous quarto, but Blake’s watercolors and engravings still have had to be greatly reduced in size. The only other complete color reproduction of Blake’s Dante illustrations is so unwieldy, not to say expensive, that Bindman’s learned version is very welcome.
Blake’s Commercial Engravings
There were two real discoveries among Blake’s commercial engravings in 2000. This first is a copy of Hayley’s Ballads (1805) in which Blake’s engravings have been colored, very probably by Blake himself.
Colored copies of Blake’s commercial engravings are not rare. At any rate, there are probably scores of colored copies of Stedman’s Surinam (1796; 1806), and more than a score of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797). Indeed, perhaps some of them are being colored as you read this.
But copies colored by Blake himself are very uncommon. There is a set of Job engravings (1826) and a couple of Canterbury Pilgrims (1810) with Blake’s coloring, but very few more. The discovery of a book with engravings colored by Blake is an important event.
As usual in such matters, the identification of Blake as the colorist turns largely upon connoisseurship. But when connoisseurs as sophisticated and reliable as Robert Essick and David Bindman agree, the rest of us need not fret in uncertainty.
The second discovery is of an obscure anonymous novel never previously associated with either Blake or Stothard, which bears a plate clearly signed “Stothard d.” and “Blake sc.” (see illus. 1). It has been many years since a new text with a Blake engraving was found.6↤ 6 Christopher Heppner, “Another ‘New’ Blake Engraving: More about Blake and William Nicholson,” Blake 12 (1978-79): 193-97. The book is Maria: A Novel, apparently by Elizabeth Blower, the only ephemeral novel for which Blake is known to have made an engraving. As it happens, Blake’s print was previously known, though its host novel was not. And it was found only by serendipity, while looking at the novel’s impressive subscription list. How many other Blake prints are quietly waiting to be discovered in a flash of serendipity?
Catalogues
A surprising number of Blake catalogues are reported here for the first time, from 1798 (a reprint), 1927 (Woolwich), 1928 (Paris), 1959 (a reprint), 1977 (a reprint),7↤ 7 This is a reprint of Blake Books (1977), with a somewhat breathless attempt to list (in a postscript) and describe (in an introduction) the most important Blake publications recorded since Blake Books Supplement (1995). 1990 (Buffalo), and 1995 (Mexico City). However, the only substantial exhibitions were in Finland of the British Museum Print Room Blakes and the Tate Blake exhibition gathered from round the world.
The Helsinki catalogue is in Finnish and Swedish, neither of which can I read with confidence (my wife interpolates: “or at all”). It was apparently organized by David Bindman and Simon Balsom, and even a monoglot can discern that it is very generously illustrated. And the British Museum Print Room Blakes are very fine.
Far more important, of course, is the major international Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery. This was very fine indeed and a great credit to its organizer, Robin Hamlyn. Many of the works shown, such as Blake’s color prints and the very large drawings, can never be satisfactorily reproduced, and seeing the originals is an entirely different kind of experience from handling reproductions. In particular, the sequence of all 12 of the suite of Large Color Prints is awesome. And they are preceded by hundreds of prints from Songs of Innocence and of Experience and elsewhere. In particular, all hundred plates from the only colored copy of Jerusalem (E) could be seen at a glance, though of course to absorb them required hours. When disbound and hung separately like this, the leaves from the works in Illuminated Printing become a collection of separate pictures rather than a consecutive verbal narrative. The effect is wonderful—but, for literary scholars, somewhat distracting.
Books Owned
Aside from a few books owned by William Blake riff-raff from Bristol and Stockland and Aberdeen and Axbridge, the only discovery of a book from the poet’s library is John Quincy’s Pharmacopœia Officinis . . . A Complete English Dispensatory (1733). This is signed boldly “William Blake His Book” in a style similar to the signature in a begin page 132 | ↑ back to top copy of A Political History of the Years 1756 and 1757 (1757) which has a date (?of acquisition) of 29 May (1773 [see the reproduction in BBS 315]). Perhaps Quince’s book was used in the Blake family to find medicines for rheumatism and jaundice and ague.
Scholarship and Criticism
Among more than 200 books and articles on Blake in this checklist for 2000, it is scarcely possible to record here more than the books and the more striking essays. Necessarily much rewarding work must pass unmentioned.
Books
Probably the most substantial scholarship is in Michael Phillip’s William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminating Printing (2000). In it, Phillips attempts to record, with the aid of generous and excellent reproductions, “how the poems evolved and were made” (2). The impression is conveyed that all the evidence is here, from minute alterations in Blake’s Notebook to babies abandoned in the street (for “Holy Thursday” in Experience) and proprietary chapels built on the green in Lambeth (behind “The Garden of Love”).8↤ 8 However, Horwood’s great map of London and Westminster (1792-99) does not seem to record a green in Lambeth. There is evidence about a previously unidentified relative of Catherine Blake in Battersea and a good deal of argument tending to show that Blake’s works in color printing were passed through the press twice, once for the engraved outline and once for the added color. If this is the way the Blakes printed—and there is some disconcerting evidence from pin-holes and defective registration to support the argument—then the printing of the works in Color Printing must have been very slow and elaborate indeed. But the evidence for double printing has not persuaded Joseph Viscomi, Robert N. Essick—or me.
The purpose of K. E. Smith in his Analysis of William Blake’s Early Writings and Designs to 1790, including SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1999) is the evaluation of “Blake’s earliest works within their own terms and of seeing Songs of Innocence as culmination rather than prologue” (185-86). The results are surprisingly rewarding; by carefully eschewing the temptations of hindsight—the “Two Contrary States of the Human Soul” and Urizen—he is able to consider Blake’s writing as Blake himself must have seen it, first writing songs at random, in The Island in the Moon and elsewhere, and then selecting those that might make a coherent collection in Songs of Innocence. However latent the poems of Experience may be in those of Songs of Innocence, there is little evidence that Blake saw them lurking there until well after the poems had been etched, printed, colored, covered, and sold. Blake’s discoveries in his poetry become our own in Smith’s Analysis.
Kathleen Lumsden’s Knight of the Living Dead (2000), despite its pop title, promises to examine “Blake within the context of spiritualism” (16). This is a subject of very great interest, dealing with Blake’s visions of God and angels from early childhood, his drawings of visionary heads, his spiritual voices dictating to him—and Blake arguing with the voices—and Catherine speaking to Blake after his death. Blake lived in a world of spirits, a domain which he thought was the only real world.
But Lumsden’s rhetorical world is altogether more familiar. “Blake’s spiritualism . . . is the telos of his deconstruction of the aesthetic binaries of the natural and the conventional,” “his experiments in textuality . . . [are] experiments in spiritualism” (138, 162). We’ve been here before—and neither the Knight nor the Living Dead are often visible in her book.
Patrick Menneteau’s La Folie dans la poésie de William Blake (1999) also seems to promise novelties, but its discourse is fairly conventional: “La litérature, pour Blake, . . . est le champ d’une bataille spirituelle” (303). The subject is far more “la battaille” than “La Folie.”
Barbara Lachman’s Voices for Catherine Blake (2000) is a fictitious “autobiography” of Catherine Blake. It is told by various voices, mostly Catherine’s, but including the voice of one who seems to be a kind of talk-show interviewer. The facts are fairly closely based on Blake’s life—we know very little about Catherine separate from her husband. One of the chief novelties is Catherine’s work for the blind, a proper middle-class North American housewifely virtue somewhat surprising in the wife of an obscure London artisan in 1790.
Mark Dominik’s account of Black Suns & Moons in Works of Daniel Andreev, William Blake, & Stanislav Grof (2000) is surprisingly interesting even if, or perhaps because, one has never heard of Daniel Andreev or Stanislav Grof. Like Blake, Andreev wrote of new worlds with strange names like Shrastrs[e] and Witzraors. Though Andreev was writing in the isolation of a Stalinist prison camp, his work has an “intriguing literary parallel with Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which might lead us to conclude “that Blake and Andreev are giving us similar and mutually-supportive insights into another aspect of ‘reality’ far beyond anything we know from the material world” (9, 10, 13).
Similarly off-center is Michael Dibdin’s novel called Dark Spectre (1995) about a cult whose followers “believed that William Blake’s poetry was the Third Testament and Sam [the Leader] the second coming of Jesus Christ” (306). However, most of the novel is about the ritual murders which serve as the sect’s rite of initiation.
Ratomir Ristic’s Introducing William Blake (1996) is surprising in being published in Yugoslavia but printed in English. About 40% of the book is Blake’s poems, and slightly more is reprints of background prose, from 1931 (Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle) to 1995—plus a previously unprinted lecture by a Yugoslavian critic.
Essays
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly published 27 new essays on Blake, and the Blake Journal 17 more. Of these, perhaps the most substantial are “Blake in the Marketplace,” Robert Essick’s invaluable annual essay, and “Blake and His Circle.”
One of the most fundamental tools of Blake scholarship has become the online William Blake Archive conducted by Joseph Viscomi, Robert Essick, & Morris Eaves. The theoretical foundations of the undertaking are attacked by Andrew Cooper & Michael Simpson in Wordsworth Circle in 1999 and 2000.9↤ 9 See also Julia Bryan, “Blake Unbound,” Endeavours (Fall 1997) and Lisa Guernsey, “Searchable Archive Zooms In on William Blake’s Illuminated Books,” Chronicle of Higher Education Information Technology (17 Sept 1997). Their objections are summed up in their second essay entitled “Looks Good in Practice, But Does It Work in Theory?” The response from the keepers of the archive in Wordsworth Circle (1999) seems persuasive, but the issues are perplexing to those, like myself, who are electronically bemused.
Jeffrey Mertz records in Notes and Queries (2000) his discovery of a shrewd reference by Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1811) to the elongated “‘Procrustes’ men” in Blake’s drawings.
Equally fundamental is Joyce Townsend’s ground-breaking chemical and artistic “analysis of Blake’s tempera medium” which both confirms what Blake’s friends said about his materials and takes us much further forward in understanding the artistic techniques upon which he particularly prided himself.
Japanese Blake scholarship is coming of age. One of the most impressive recent Blake essays is Hikari Sato’s “Creative Contradiction in Proverbs of Hell: On the Media and Contents of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in Studies in English Literature [Japan] (1999). The essay argues that the “Proverbs of Hell” are fundamentally antinomian, not an assertion of an alternative sacred code. This alternative code “would be the worst nightmare in the sense that the discourse on anti-canonisation had canonised itself” (32, 30).
The Road Not Taken
In 2000, few essays were, like June K. Singer’s book, “not bound by the strictures of literary criticism, nor by adherence to historical fact” (Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious [2000] xi). My favorite is the devotion shown by all journalists to the long-exploded story of Blake and his wife basking in the nude in the tropical sunshine of London. Typical of such comments, though more impertinent than most, is Tim Marlow’s review of the Tate exhibition: “was he a nudist? . . . Even if the tale is untrue, it’s still significant” (tate [2000]). But it is significant only about the standards of journalism and our will to believe, not about William Blake.
Division I: William Blake
Part I
Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles
10↤ 10 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
All Religions are One
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
America
Copy H
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Book of Ahania
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Book of Los
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Book of Thel
Copy J
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Descriptive Catalogue (1809)
Edition
*“Catalogue Descriptif de Scenes, Inventions Historiques et Poétique Peintes par William Blake à l’Aquarelle, Restaurant l’ancienne Methode de la Peinture a Fresque; ainsi que des Dessins Presentes au Public [sic] et Offerts à l’achat sous contrat privé.” Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne [Paris], No. 56/57 (1996): 188-209. In French.
The translation by Christine Savinel includes the separate advertisement, “A Descriptive Catalogue,” and reproductions from surviving paintings exhibited in 1809.
begin page 134 | ↑ back to topEurope
Copy B
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Copy L
Binding: By 1999 the leaves were individually mounted and matted, and the former binding by Riviere was carefully preserved separately.
First Book of Urizen
Copy D
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Copy G
Reproduced, in reduced size and black and white, in Christian Frommert, Heros und Apokalypse (1996).
Plate 3
History: It was lent by the Keynes Family Trust to the Tate Exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001) as #286.
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise
Copy F
History: . . . Reproduced in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Ghost of Abel
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Jerusalem
Copy E
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Plate 1
History: It was lent by the Keynes Family Trust to the Tate Exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001) as #289.
Editions
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion [D], 1804 (London: Pearson, 1877]) <BB #76; BBS 88>.
The facsimile is mostly reproduced in Andrew Solomon, William Blake’s Great Task: The Purpose of Jerusalem (2000).
Jerusalem, ed. M. D. Paley (1991) <BBS 88>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
18 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with The Continental Prophecies, The Early Illuminated Books, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Urizen Books, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
*Andrew Solomon. William Blake’s Great Task: The Purpose of Jerusalem. (London: Palamabron Press, 2000) 4°, 248 pp.; ISBN: 095221128.
The work consists of
1 “Preface” (vii-viii)
2 “Introduction” (1-20)
3 A reproduction (22-121) of the Pearson facsimile (1877) of Jerusalem (D), though with the plates printed back to back, except for pls. 51 and 76 which are from the Blake Trust facsimile [1952]; the size is reduced from 16.2 × 22.3 cm to 6.4 × 11.7 cm
4 A transcription with adjusted punctuation and paraphrases in notes (222-39)
5 “Glossary” (240-46)
§Jerusalén, la Emanación del Gigante Albión. Introducción, Traducción, Notas y Glosario a cargo de Xavier Campos Vilanova. Prólogo de Francisco Fernández Fernández. ([Castellon de la Plata]: Universitat Jaume I D.L., 1997) Collecció Estudis de la Traducció 4. 447 pp. In Catalan.
Originally a dissertation at the Universitat de València <BBS 431>.
“Laocoön”
Copy B
History: It may be copy B which, according to the journal of C. J. Strange on 11 May 1859, Blake had “given him [Samuel Palmer] . . . saying at the same time ‘you will find my creed there.’” Nothing is known of copy B before 1928.
. . . It was reproduced in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Letters
1808 January 18 (A?)
History: (5) Sold at Sotheby’s (N.Y.), 14 December 1988, #58, to the dealer John Wilson for stock; (6) Sold at Sotheby’s (London), 14 December 1992, #16 (p. 1 illustrated) for £19,800; (7) Offered in Roy David’s exhibition (3-14 April 2000) and sale catalogue (March 2000) of The Artists as a Portrait, #10 (first and last pages reproduced) for £40,000 [sic].
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Copy F
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Copy L
History: Essick lent it to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #192a, in whose catalogue it is reproduced.
begin page 135 | ↑ back to topCopy M
History: Lent to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #192b, in whose catalogue it is reproduced.
Milton
Copy C
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Pl. 38
History: Essick lent it to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #278.
Notebook
P. 74: The full-face pencil portrait in the top row is identified (correctly) as Tom “Paine-like” by John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston, N.Y., Toronto, London: Little Brown and Company, 1995), photograph after 426;11↤ 11 For engravings of 1792-93 of Paine by William Sharp after George Romney and by A. Schule after C. Schule, see Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Tom Paine, Apostle of Freedom (N.Y., London: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1994) (at 274) and Keene (after 426). the subject was not identified at all by Keynes, Erdman, Bentley, &c.
If, as seems probable, Blake’s portrait was drawn from the life, it must have been made before 13 September 1792 when Paine left England. This is the only contemporary evidence that Blake was in direct contact with Paine.
The fact that the sketch is in Blake’s precious Notebook suggests that Paine was at Blake’s house in Lambeth rather than Blake in Paine’s lodging in Bromley, Kent (about 8 miles southeast of Lambeth, beyond Camberwell and Dulwich), where he was staying inconspicuously with the engraver William Sharp in the spring of 1792.12↤ 12 Keane, Tom Paine 342; Joseph Johnson had advised Paine to lie low because of the furor caused by his writings. Sharp was probably engraving Romney’s portrait of Paine at the time.
On Homers Poetry [&] On Virgil
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Song of Los
Copy A
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Copy C
History: It may have been copy C (first recorded in 1909) of which John Clark Strange wrote in his journal on 10 May 1859: “At [the dealer B.M.] Pickerings I procured Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience.” Alternatively this could be copies D, F, P, S, and BB.
Copy E
Binding: By 1999 the leaves were individually mounted and matted, and the former binding by Bedford was carefully preserved separately.
Copy G
History: Pls. 37-38, 42, 47, 50-51 were lent by the Keynes Family Trust to the Tate Exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001) as #152, 118b, 163, 198, 150, 147.
Copy P
History: . . . Sir Paul Getty lent it to the exhibition at Grasmere where it was described in Robert Woof, Stephen Hebron, with Pamela Woof, English Poetry 850-1850: The First Thousand Years with some Romantic Perspectives ([Grasmere]. The Wordsworth Trust, 2000).
Copy T1
Pls. 28-30, 46 (title page, “Introduction,” “Earth’s Answer,” and “London”) have tiny pin holes in the upper margin of the design which Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (2000) 98, believes were made by pins holding the leaf in place while the copperplate was being readied to print the leaf a second time in colors. He has seen no other such pin-holes in copy T1 or elsewhere in Blake’s work.
On the title page, the white-lead pigment on hands and faces had turned black (to black lead sulphide); at the National Gallery of Canada, “With the application of hydrogen peroxide it was converted to lead sulphate, a white compound.”13↤ 13 Phillips, William Blake 106 and pls. 52-54 (before and after photos).
Copy W
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Plate a (tailpiece)
History: (8) John Windle sold it in 1995 to (9) Justin Schiller who sold it at Christie’s (N.Y.), 4 May 1999, #1 (reproduced in color; estimate $20,000-$30,000) for $20,700 to (10) the print dealer Robin Garton, who returned it in May 1999 to Christie’s, who returned it to (11) Schiller, who returned it to (12) John Windle, who sold it in February 2000 to (13) an Anonymous U.S. Private Collection.14↤ 14 This history slightly supplements that in Blake (2000) on the basis of Robert Essick’s “Blake in the Marketplace, 2000,” Blake (2001).
begin page 136 | ↑ back to topEdition
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Andrew Lincoln (1991) <BBS 136>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
16 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Continental Prophecies, The Early Illuminated Books, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, The Urizen Books, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
There is No Natural Religion
Copy G
History: . . . Partly reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Copy H
History: . . . Partly reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Copy L
History: . . . Partly reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Tiriel
Drawings: All nine surviving drawings for Tiriel were lent to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), in whose catalogue they were reproduced. Of those still in private hands, “Blind Tiriel” (No. 23) was lent by R. N. Essick, “Tiriel Led by Hela” (No. 26) and “Hela Contemplating Tiriel Dead” (No. 28) by Anon., and “Tiriel Denouncing his Daughters” (No. 25) by the Keynes Family Trust.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Copy G
History: . . . Reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Section B: Collections and Selections15↤ 15 Here and below I usually ignore most mere reprints.
Reprints of Blake’s Poems Before 1863
1827
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1830
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1831
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1832
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1833
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1835
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1837
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1838
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1839
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
1841
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence) in Hone’s Every-Day Book
*The Complete Illuminated Books With an introduction by David Bindman With 393 plates, 366 in color. (London: Thames & Hudson in Association with The William Blake Trust, 2000) 4°, 480 pp. 393 plates; ISBN: 050051048.
1 John Commander. “Foreword.” 6.
2 David Bindman. “Introduction.” 7-11.
3 Reproductions of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing, each preceded by a bibliographical description. 17-405. (The reproductions from the Blake Trust series [1991-95],16↤ 16 Except for For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise which is taken from the 1968 Blake Trust volume. on very glossy paper, are of All Religions are One [A], There is No Natural Religion [G, I, L], Songs of Innocence and of Experience [W], The Book of Thel [J], Marriage of Heaven and Hell [F], For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise [F], Visions of the Daughters of Albion [G], America [H], Europe [B] plus pl. 3 [K], The Song of Los [A], The First Book of Urizen [D], The Book of Ahania [A], The Book of Los [A], Milton [C], Jerusalem [E], The Ghost of Abel [A], On Homers Poetry [A], and “Laocoön” [B].)
4 Transcripts of Blake’s Texts. 405-80.
Review
1 Anon. Globe and Mail [Toronto], 25 Nov 2000, D48-49.
*Ct.E Khe: Selected Verse. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982) 8°, 558 pp., no ISBN. In Russian.
[Introduction] (5-33).
The texts include Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, lyrics, Ballads (Pickering) Manuscript, Thel, Marriage, Visions, French Revolution, America, Europe, and excerpts from Milton (English facing Russian), with a “Kommentary” (497-555).
The Continental Prophecies, ed. D. W. Dörrbecker (1995) <Blake (1996)>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
9 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Early Illuminated begin page 137 | ↑ back to top Books, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Urizen Books, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, & Joseph Viscomi (1993) <Blake (1994)>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
12 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Continental Prophecies, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Urizen Books, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
The Gates of Paradise: For Children, For the Sexes, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1968) <BB #148>.
The plates of For the Sexes are reproduced in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
The Healing Power of Blake, ed. John Diamond (1999) <Blake (2000)>.
Review
2 Patricia Neill, Blake 34 (2000-01): 95 (The practical results were varied, but “if I put the book on my head, my posture straightens up quite nicely. For $14.95, that’s not a bad deal.”)
Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, ed. Robert N. Essick & Joseph Viscomi (1993) <Blake (1994)>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
13 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Continental Prophecies, The Early Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Urizen Books, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
*Several Questions Answered: Lyrics and Ballads from Manuscripts [by] William Blake “Born 28th Nov 1757 & has died several times since.” (Apollo, California: [no publisher], 1999) 12 iv, 42 pp, no ISBN.
Andrew Smith, “Introduction.”
The Urizen Books, ed. David Worrall (1995; paperback 1998) <Blake (1996, 1999)>.
The plates are reproduced in color in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (2000).
Review
6 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Continental Prophecies, The Early Illuminated Books, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart).
§*Versek és Próféciák [Poems and Prophecies]. Ed. Miklós Szenczi. (Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 1957). In Hungarian.
A generous selection, including lyrics, Thel, Visions, America, Europe, Urizen, Song of Los, Ghost of Abel, and substantial passages from Vala, Milton, and Jerusalem; the translators included Sándor Weöres.
§*Viliyam Balayki: bih rivayet; William Blake Rendered into Persian by duktar Mahdi Mishgini. (Kanada: [no publisher], 2000). 500 pp. In English and Persian.
*William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. David Fuller. (Harlow [England], London, N.Y., Reading [Massachusetts], Toronto, Don Mills [Ontario], Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Cape Town, Madrid, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Munich, Paris, Milan: Longman, 2000) Longman Annotated Texts 8°, xii, 376 pp.; ISBN: 0582307392 PPR; 0582 30740 6 CSD.
“Introduction” consisting of “Versions of Blake” (1-11), “Poetry and Designs” (11-18), and a very interesting section on “Modernizing Blake’s Text” (18-26). Each poem is preceded by a description of the design and a critical summary.
Part II
Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Blake-Varley Sketchbook, Large <Blake (2000)>.
History: “Milton When Young” from the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook was lent anonymously to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #257.
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy: Die Göttliche Komödie: La Divine Comédie. Ed. David Bindman. Traduction en français: Nicholas Powell; Übersetzung ins deutsche: Inge Hanneforth. (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’image [2000]) Oblong 4°, 223 pp., 103 color reproductions; ISBN: 2909808939 (“Edition in english”); 2909808947 (“Deutsche ausgabe”); 29099808718 (“Édition en français”) [but GEB’s copy is in English, French, and German.]
“Introduction: William Blake’s Watercolours to the Divine Comedy,” “Einleitung: William Blakes Aquarelle fur Göttlichen Komödie,” “Introduction: Les Aquarelles de la Divine Comédie de William Blake” including (in three languages) “The History and Division of the Watercolours” begin page 138 | ↑ back to top and “Bibliographical Notes” (4-19, in three columns), plus all seven Dante engravings (greatly reduced in size) plus reduced color reproductions of all 103 watercolors, with trilingual descriptions of them.
Thomas Gray, Poems
*William Blake’s Water-Colour Designs for the Poems of Gray, Introduction and Commentary by Geoffrey Keynes, Kt. (London, 1972). The William Blake Trust <BB #385>.
The reproductions, greatly reduced in size, are reproduced in the Dover edition (2000) without the Keynes text.
*Blake’s Water-Colours for the Poems of Thomas Gray With Complete Texts. (Mineola [N.Y.]: Dover Publications, Inc., 2000) 4°, ix pp. of text, 116 reproductions; ISBN: 0486409449.
A reproduction of the Blake Trust edition of William Blake’s Water-Colour Designs for the Poems of Gray (1972) <BB #385>, reduced to an eighth the size (32 × 42 cm vs 9.2 × 16.4 cm) of the Blake Trust facsimile (a fact not mentioned here), omitting Keynes’s “Introduction” (1-6) and “Commentary” (9-28), and adding an anonymous “Publisher’s Note” (iii-iv).
Section B: Collections and Selections
Color Prints (Large)
All 12 Large Color Prints are reproduced in the catalogue of the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001).
*“Blake/Friedrich.” Shukan Bijutsukan, Shogakukan Wikuri Bukku [Weekly Museum, Shogakukan Weekly Book], No. 27 (15 Aug 2000). In Japanese.
An issue devoted to William Blake and Caspar David Friedrich. The Blake sections are:
1 *Anon. “Meisaku o Tanoshimu (1): Blake [Let’s enjoy fine works of art (1): Blake].” 1-9.
2 *Anon. “Close-up (1): Blake: Tegakibon no Miryoku [Fascinating Hand Copied Books].” 10-11.
3 *Anon. Blake Monogatari [A Blake Story].” 12-13.
4 *Anon. “Atorandam [At Random in Art].” 30.
5 *Anon. “Japan meets Blake/Friedrich.” 31.
6 *Anon. “Image Library.” 34. (A list of books, a movie, and museums related to Blake.)
7 Yasuo Deguchi. “Watashi to Blake [Blake and I].” 35.
*William Blake: 2001 Calendar. ([No place:] The Ink Group [2000]) Square quarto (c. 12″ × 12″), ISBN: 1876551674.
Reproductions from Blakes in the Tate Gallery.
Part III
Commercial Book Engravings
Anon. Maria: A Novel (London: T. Cadell, 1785)
See [Blower, Elizabeth], Maria: A Novel (London: T. Cadell, 1785).
The Royal Universal Family Bible (1781)
New Location: Wormsley Library (bound by Samuel Hazard of Bath)
Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)
§The Story of Stories: The Book of Job with an Introduction by Lawrence Montague Lande. (Montréal: [L. Lande], 1946) [10], 157 pp.
It includes reproductions of all Blake’s Job plates.
All 21 engravings are reproduced in Samuel Terrien, The Iconography of Job Through the Centuries (1996).
Blair, Robert, The Grave (1808, 1813, . . .)
A slip mounted in a copy of the 1808 large quarto is inscribed “Mr. Cromek begs Mr. Bromley’s acceptance of this Book. July 20. 1808”;17↤ 17 Maggs Bros Ltd Catalogue 1286, Private Press, Illustrated, Typographical and Fine Printed Books (2000), Lot 39; the copy bears ownership marks of Harold P. Mellor, R. A., and Douglas Cleverdon. the engraver “William Bromley, Hammersmith” had subscribed for the work. On 14 August 1808 Cromek had written similarly to George Cumberland implying that he was sending as a gift the copy for which the recipient had subscribed (BR 198).
Newly Recorded Title
[Blower, Elizabeth.] MARIA: A NOVEL. | IN TWO VOLUMES. | BY THE AUTHOR OF | GEORGE BATEMAN. | VOL. I[-II]. | - | LONDON: | PRINTED FOR T. CADELL, IN THE STRAND, | M.DCC.LXXXV [1785].
Locations: Bodley [250 g 196], Bristol, British Library (lacking the plate and subscription list), Brooklyn Public (with the bookplate of Charles James Fox), Harvard, National Library of Scotland, Princeton, Virginia.18↤ 18 According to the Eighteenth-Century Catalogue online, a copy is reproduced on microfiche in The Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, Connecticut: CT Research Publications, 1986), Reel 6996 No. 01.
Plate: There is only one plate, the frontispiece to Vol. 1, representing a woman in a forest embracing a bust (illus. 1). The print has no plate-mark or imprint; the design size (omitting signatures) is 8.1 × 12.9 cm. The plate is signed “Stothard d.,” “Blake sc.,” and is quite characteristic of the work of each man. Apparently the book has not heretofore been recorded as associated with either Blake or Stothard.19↤ 19 The chief authorities for Stothard prints are A. C. Coxhead, Thomas Stothard, R.A. (London: A.H. Bullen, 1906); Shelley M. Bennett, Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988); and R. N. Essick in his annual surveys of “Blake in the Marketplace” in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly.Coxhead (213) refers to Maria, A Tale (Wright, n.d. given) with an illustration which “depicts the hero and heroine planting two ‘trees,’” but this is clearly not E. B.’s Maria.
begin page 139 | ↑ back to topHowever, among “Book Illustrations Known Only through Separate Impressions,” Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), records (242-43), and reproduces (figure 110) the scene of “A Lady Embracing a Bust.” He records two copies of a first state before imprint (Huntington, Royal Academy), and two more after the inscriptions were added (American Blake Foundation, British Museum Print Room).
begin page 140 | ↑ back to topBlake had worked for Cadell before only when Cadell was a member of a congery (Ariosto, 1783). However, he had frequently copied Stothard’s designs: for Enfield (1780), Bonnycastle (1782), Kimpton (1782), Lady’s New and Polite Pocket Memorandum Book (1782), Novelist’s Magazine 8-9 (1782-83), Ritson (1782), John Scott (1782), Ariosto (1783), Chaucer (1783), “Fall of Rosamund” (1783), Wit’s Magazine (1784), “Zephyrus and Flora” (1784), and Fenning & Collyer (1784-85). This plate for Maria may therefore be the last one he engraved after Stothard.
The novel has no author’s name on the title page, but the dedication from St. James’s Place “To the Honourable Mrs Ward” is signed “E. B.” The author of Maria (1785) is identified in [John Watkins & Frederick Shoberl], A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1816) as Miss Eliza Blower who was “born at Worcester, 1763; daughter of a gentleman distinguished by his steady attachment to an unsuccessful candidate for her native city. Her literary exertions, which began at a very early age, were made with a view to benefit her family.” She may be related to Richard Blower who appears in the subscription list. At the age of 22 when the novel was published, she was only a little older than her heroine (19). She was also apparently an actress, in Ireland for five years and in London in 1787-88.20↤ 20 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Virginia Blain, Patience Clements, Isobel Grundy (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1990).
The “List of Subscribers” includes a surprising number of persons connected with the arts who were or might have been known to Blake at the time, including [Richard] Cosway [miniaturist], [Maria] Cosway [artist], John Flaxman [sculptor], William Hayley, Esq. [author and patron], J[ohn] Hawkins [patron of Blake], Ozias Humphry [painter], Jeremiah Meyer [miniaturist], “Mrs. Mathew | Miss Mathew | Mr. F. Mathew,” Sir Joshua Reynolds [painter], “Mr. [?George] Romney [artist], 6 copies,” R. B. Sheridan [dramatist and politician], 6 copies,” [Thomas] Stothard [book illustrator], and Josiah Wedgwood [pottery manufacturer].
The novel is sentimental and even Gothic to a degree. The author says that
my leading aim has been to pourtray, in the simple but impassioned colouring of nature, the operation of a mind unacquainted with the world—young, artless, sensible, and refined—under the impulse of a lively and insuperable attachment; and to inculcate the principle of Active Benevolence, by displaying its beneficial effects. [1: ii]
The heroine, Maria Mordaunt, is 19, and already for her “My books and my music are my chief, almost my only amusement, Sir.” (1: 5)
Her understanding was of the first rate; her disposition soft, delicate, and flexible; her eyes were blue and beautifully formed; her other features were soft, lively, and engaging. . . . [And she has] a figure that blended dignity with all the sprightly grace and easy negligence which poets ascribe to nymphs of sylvan race .... [1: 11-12]
The novel was widely reviewed in Critical Review 60 (Sept 1785): 233-34 (the young author “is by no means deficient in many of the requisites which should occupy her task”); English Review, 6 (1785): 232 (“In the execution it is not altogether defective . . . and few of the present run of novels deserve so much praise”); §European Magazine 8 (1785): 394; §Monthly Review 73 (1785): 392; and Town and Country Magazine 17 (Nov 1785): 658 (“above the common run of novels”).
Maria was reprinted once without a plate (Dublin: James Moore, 1787) and translated once (Maria: eine Geschichte in zwei Bander Aus dem Englishche ubersetzt [Berlin: J.F. Uner (n.d.)]).
The same author published
1 The Parsonage House: A Novel By a Young Lady In a Series of Letters In Three Volumes (Dublin: S. Colbert, 1781).
2 George Bateman: A Novel in Three Volumes (London: J. Dodsley, 1782).
3 Features from Life; or, A Summer Visit. By the Author of George Bateman and Maria (Dublin, 1788), translated as La Visite d’Eté (Paris, 1788).
None of these works has an illustration.
Bürger, Gottfried Augustus, Leonora, tr. J. T. Stanley
(1796)
There were also reviews in (1) §Critical Review, N.S. 17 (1796): 303-07, (2) §English Review 28 (1796): 80-84, (3) Monthly Magazine & British Register 3 (Jan 1797): 46, (4) Monthly Mirror 1 (1795-96): 293-95, and (5) Monthly Review, N.S. 20 (Aug 1796): 322-25.
Darwin, Erasmus, Botanic Garden (1791 ff.)
There were reviews of part 1 (1791) in (1) §Analytical Review 15 (1793): 287-93, (2) §Critical Review, N.S. 6 (1792): 162-71, (3) §English Review 20 (1792): 161-71, (4) and §Monthly Review, N.S. 11 (1793): 182-87; of the third edition (1795) in §English Review 17 (1796): 271-73.
Gay, John, Fables (1793)
New Location: Wormsley Library (bound in Etruscan calf perhaps by Edwards of Halifax).
[Gough, Richard], Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, 1 (1786)
pl. 10 “Portrait of Queen Phillippa from her Monument.”
A proof before letters was sold at Cheffins, Grain, & begin page 141 | ↑ back to top Comins (Cambridge, England), 28 Oct 1999, #98 (reproduced as pl. 10).
Hayley, William, Ballads (1805)
A copy inscribed on the Preface “Eliza Martha Cumberland | The gift of Geo. Cumberland | Culver Street | Bristol” and signed by her in a childish hand on the half-title “Miss E M Cumberland” was offered privately by John Windle in April 2000. Cumberland’s daughter was born in 1798.
A copy with contemporary coloring21↤ 21 Reproduced in G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001) illus. 97. is or may well be by Blake or his wife (according to David Bindman, Frances Carey, Robert N. Essick, and John Windle).
History: (1) It was acquired c. 1920 by Clarence Bement of Philadelphia whose bookplate it bears; (2) This may be the copy acquired by S. Foster Damon which, in the opinion of Sir Geoffrey Keynes and the owner, was colored by Blake <BB 571>; (3) Sold at Butterfield Auction House (Los Angeles) 26 September 2000, #9047, for $1,200 to the dealer John Windle, who sold it in 2000 to (4) Maurice Sendak.
The palette is significantly similar to that in the colored copy of the Canterbury Pilgrims (Fitzwilliam Museum). More significantly, it is similar to the tempera of the same subject.22↤ 22 The tempera is described and reproduced in Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981), #366, illus. 347. In both colored engraving and tempera, the mother has the same auburn hair and blue dress and cap (darker blue in the engraving) with white frills at the top. In each, the sky is shades of blue and the clouds pink (both more vivid in the engraving).
There are also some significant differences. The frightened little girl’s dress is pink in the engraving, muted yellow in the tempera, and her hair is auburn (like her mother’s) in the engraving, an indeterminate brown in the tempera; the bottom of the design is blue water in the engraving, while the same area in the tempera is an indeterminate brown; the ground by the upper tree is yellowish brown in the engraving, soft greenish brown in the tempera; the bank above the horse is a curious dull blue in the engraving and brown in the tempera; the clouds are pink in the engraving, vaguely white in the tempera.
These differences demonstrate that the colorer of the engraving was not simply copying the tempera—such servile copying would be very unlike Blake. But the manner, tact, and delicacy of the coloring, a good deal beyond what might be expected of a professional tinter, suggest that the hand which held the brush was that of William Blake.
Hayley, William, Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802) For reproduction and discussion of sketches on the verso of “The Last Trumpet” (c. 1785), see Martin Butlin, “A Blake Drawing Rediscovered and Dated,” Blake 34 (2000): 23-24.
Hayley, William, Essay on Sculpture (1800)
It was also reviewed in (1) §British Critic 16 (1800): 679-80, (2) §Critical Review, N.S. 31 (1801): 48-53, (3) §Monthly Mirror 10 (1800): 156-57, (4) §Monthly Review 36 (1801): 113-21, and (5) §New Annual Register 21 (1800).
Ritson, Joseph, ed., A Select Collection of English Songs
(1783)
It is also reviewed in (1) §New Annual Register 5 (1784): 271, and (2) §New Review 6 (1784): 79.
Scott, John, Poetical Works (1782, 1786, 1795)
The first edition was reviewed in (1) §British Magazine & Review 1 (1782): 123-26, (2) §Critical Review 64 (1782): 47-50, (3) §European Magazine 2 (1782): 193-97, (4) §Gentleman’s Magazine 52 (1782): 489, (5) §Monthly Review 73 (1782): 183-90, and (6) §New Annual Register 3 (1782): 249.
Stuart, James, & Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, Vol. III (1794)
New Locations: Ashmolean, Christ Church (Oxford), Trinity College (Oxford).
Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (1797)
New Location: Wormsley Library (bound in Etruscan calf by Edwards of Halifax).
Books Improbably Alleged to Have Blake Engravings Goldsmith, Oliver. The History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London: S. Rothwell, 1827), 2 vols., octavo <BBS 278§>.
When Essick reported the connection of this work with Blake in Blake (1992), he had not seen a copy; in Blake (2001) he records having seen photographs of the rather crude and simple anonymous plates and concludes that “In my opinion, . . . [they] are not by Blake.”
Part IV Catalogues and Bibliographies
1798?
A Catalogue of Prints Published by J. R. Smith (c. 1798) <BR #526>.
It is reproduced in Ellen G. D’Oench, “Copper into Gold”: Prints by John Raphael Smith 1751-1812 (1999).
11-15 October 1927
William Blake. Artist. Poet. Seer. (born 1757, died 1827). Centenary Exhibition at the Old Town Hall, Woolwich begin page 142 | ↑ back to top From Tuesday to Saturday 11-15 October 1927. List of Books, Engravings, Drawings, etc. contained in the Woolwich Library and Museum Collection and List of Loan Collections.
1928
§*Catalogue of a Collection Containing Manuscripts & Rare Editions of James Joyce; A Few Manuscripts of Walt Whitman; and Two Drawings by William Blake Belonging to Miss Sylvia Beach and Offered for Sale at Her Shop. (Paris: Shakespeare & Co [?1928]) 14 pp.
1959, 1998
Robert F. Metzdorf. The Tinker Library: A Bibliographical Record of the Books and Manuscripts collected by Chauncey Brewster Tinker. (New Haven, 1959) <BB #683> C. (Storrs-Mansfield, Ct: Maurizio Martino Publisher [c. 1998]).
The Martino publication is a photographic reprint in 150 copies.
1977
G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake Books . . . (1977).
For a reprint with added matter, see 2000.
1983
Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (1983).
For additions and corrections, see his “Blake in the Marketplace, 1999” Blake 33 (2000): 125.
1990
§William Blake: The Book of Job and Dante’s Inferno. (Buffalo: Fine Arts Academy, 1990) 19 pp., ISBN: 0914782789.
Apparently the brochure of an exhibition.
1991
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991)
For additions and corrections, see Blake 33 (Spring 2000): 125, for his “Blake in the Marketplace, 1999.”
14 July- 29 October 1995
§Rivera, Antonio. Bodas del Cielo y del Infierno: Exposición sala Antonieta Rivas Mercado Del 14 de julia al 29 de octubre [1995]. (Mexico, D.F.: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1995) 71 pp., ISBN: 9686600132. Bilingual in Spanish and English.
11 April- 25 June 2000
*William Blake 1757-1827. 11.4-25.6 2000. (Tennispalatsi: Helsingin kaupungrin tacdemuseo; Tennispalatset: Helsingfors stads konstmuseum [2000]) 4°, 188 pp., 55 plates; ISBN: 9518965447. In Finnish and Swedish.
1-2 Tuula Karjalainen, “Sipuhe” (6), “Företal” (7).
3 “Johdanto”[e] (8-15).
4 Catalogue of 183 lots from the British Museum Print Room in Finnish (15-126).
5 “Blaken Elämä ja Aikakausi” (126-29).
6 “Inledning” (132-34).
7 Catalogue in Swedish (137-83).
8 “Blake och Hans Tid” (outline of his life) (184-87).
9 November 2000-11 February 2001; 27 March-24 June
*William Blake. (London: Tate Publishing, 2000) 4°, 301 pp., 286 pls.; ISBN: 1854373145.
Catalogue of major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery (London 9 Nov. 2000-11 Feb. 2001) and, somewhat reduced, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (N.Y. 27 March-24 June 2001). The 288 reproductions, reduced or expanded in size somewhat capriciously, include a number of duplicates and “Laocoon” (A), all nine surviving drawings for Tiriel, all 12 Large Color Prints, and Marriage (L, M).
1 Anon. “Sponsor [Glaxo Wellcome]’s Foreword.” 6.
2 Stephen Deuchar. “Foreword.” 7. (“The present Tate Britain exhibition, though even larger in scale, does not seek to supersede the great 1978 [Tate] undertaking but to complement it . . . The project as a whole was conceived and inspired by Robin Hamlyn.”)
3 Robin Hamlyn & Christine Riding. “Acknowledgements.” 8.
4 Robin Hamlyn & Christine Riding. “Preface.” 9.
5 *Peter Ackroyd. “William Blake: The Man.” 11-13. (The essay is remarkable only for knighting “Sir William Hayley” [13].)
6 *Marilyn Butler. “Blake in his Time.” 15-25.
7 *Christine Riding, David Blayney Brown, Elizabeth Barker, Ian Warrell, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Martin Postle, Martin Myrone, Michael Phillips, Noa Cahaner McManus, Robin Hamlyn. “Catalogue.” 29-293.
Notices, Reviews &c.
1 Anon. “Tate Britain, Millbank.” Blake Journal 5 (2000): 97.
2 Anon. “Exhibition at the Tate.” Blake 34 (2000): 32.
3 William Blake. [Exhibition] 9 November 2000-11 February 2001 [at the] Tate Britain. ([London: Tate Britain, 2000]) 8° (a 16-page introduction to the exhibition).
4 *Blake Morrison. “The People’s Prophet: Wordsworth thought him mad; T. S. Eliot noted his ‘unpleasantness’; and Yeats chose to rewrite him. Yet almost two centuries after his death, William Blake seems utterly in tune with the age. On the eve of a major Blake retrospective, Blake Morrison explains why the ‘Cockney Nutcase’ has the last laugh over his critics.” Independent on Sunday [London], 15 Oct 2000, 18-22, 24 (a well-done herald of the Tate Blake exhibition).
5 Blake 1: the painter. *Words Matthew Collings. “Blake’s progress: Like today’s YBAs, William Blake felt compelled to shock and provoke. But that’s where the similarity ends. On the eve of his Tate Britain blockbuster, we celebrate a begin page 143 | ↑ back to top great painter and visionary.” Observer Magazine, 22 Oct 2000, 36-38 (Blake “produced works that obviously are nothing but deep”).
6 Blake 2: the poet. *Neil Spencer, “Into the mystic: Visions of Paradise to words of wisdom . . . an homage to the written work of William Blake.” Observer Magazine, 22 Oct 2000, 43-44. (“Why is Blake back? Because we sense in his texts and paintings, poems and prophecies, in his arduous but committed life, a glimpse of the fully human, of the transcendent entwined with earthly realities”).
As continuations (43-44) there are paragraphs by A Ian Sinclair, novelist (“We force the poet on to a Procrustean bed, squeezing and shaping him to fit our fantasies.”)
B Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate (“Living at a sharp angle to life he often told the truth by telling it slant.”)
C Tom Paulin, poet and critic (“Blake was important to me when I was growing up in Belfast in the 1960s.”)
D Billy Bragg, singer (“My song ‘Upfield’ was inspired partly by Blake.”)
E Sir John Taverner, composer (“We would indeed be poverty-stricken without Blake.”)
F Alan Moore, Graphic novelist (“From Hell, my book about Jack the Ripper . . . has lots of references to Blake; him seeing a spectre at his house in Hercules Road, for example.”)
7 *Maev Kennedy. “Vital relic of artist who stamped indelible mark on visual imagination.” Guardian [London], 6 Nov 2000, 10 (a herald for the Tate exhibition).
8 *Tom Lubbock.[e] “Heavenly Bodies: William Blake: The Naked Truth.” Independent, 7 Nov 2000, Tuesday Review 1. (“William Blake: was he a nudist? . . . Even if the tale is untrue, it’s still significant” [1].)
9 Tim Marlow. “A noble dissent.” tate 23 (2000): 3 (an editorial asserting that Blake’s works seem “both opaque and wonderfully clear.”)
10 *Kevin Jackson. “The A-Z of William Blake.” Independent, 7, 9, 14 . . . Nov 2000, Review 12 (B), 9 (D), 10 (H) . . .
11 *Mary Ambrose. “A Tyger at the Tate: One of History’s most influential poet-artists gets a vast show in London. Mary Ambrose asks whether this clarifies the works of William Blake or crushes viewers with information.” Globe and Mail [Toronto], 28 December 2000, R4.
12 §Charles Darwent, The Independent [London].
13 §Richard Dorment Daily Telegraph [London].
14 §Patti Smith (“New York’s priestess of punk”), tate: The Magazine (Nov 2000).
2000
G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings in Illuminated Printing, in Conventional Typography and in Manuscript and Reprints thereof, Reproductions of his Designs, Books with his Engravings, Catalogues, Books he owned, and Scholarly and Critical Works about him. New Preface and Post Script by G. E. Bentley, Jr. 2000 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1977) Facsimile of the Original 1977 Edition Published by Oxford University Press (Mansfield Centre, Ct 06532: Published by Arrangement with Oxford University Press by Martino Publishing, 2000) 8°, xxxvii, 1117 pp.; ISBN: 157898243X.
There are two additions to the 1977 publication: (1) “Preface (2000) Blake Discoveries and Publications 1975-1999: An Evaluation” (1-15) and (2) “Post Script 2000: Blake Discoveries and Publications 1975-1999: A Checklist” (1-37 [after the index]).
2000
*John Windle, Antiquarian Bookseller. Catalogue Thirty-One: William Blake. (San Francisco: John Windle, 2000) 4°, 48 pp., 237 entries; no ISBN.
An enterprising, rewarding catalogue with a number of great rarities.
2000
*Robert Woof, Stephen Hebron, with Pamela Woof. “William Blake 1757-1827.” 181-93 of English Poetry 850-1850: The First Thousand Years with some Romantic Perspectives. ([Grasmere] The Wordsworth Trust, 2000).
The Blake entries are the colored Canterbury Pilgrims (#14, Fitzwilliam), Songs (AA and P), with reproductions on the cover and #113-18.
Part V
Books Owned by William Blake of London (1757-1827)
Anon., A Political and Satirical History of the Years 1756 and 1757 ([?1757]) <BBS 313-14).
History: It was lent by Michael Phillips to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #105.
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Richard Bentley (1732) <BBS 313-14>.
History: It was lent by Michael Phillips to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #143.
Two pages are reproduced with a comment somewhat tenuously identified as Blake’s on the last two lines of Paradise Lost in Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (2000) 56-57.
I cannot enough admire the hardiness of Bentley, who would expunge these two last Lines, as proper and surely as beautiful as any in the whole Poem, and substitute cold expressions foreign to the Author’s [Judgement del] probable and natural meaning, viz. “that they left Paradise with regret,” if any one thinks otherwise I desire no better proof of the state of his feelings. WBbegin page 144 | ↑ back to top
New Entry
Quincy, John, Pharmacopœia (1733)
Pharmacopœia Officinalis & | Extemporanea. | - | A COMPLETE English Dispensatory, | In FOUR PARTS. | CONTAINING, | I. The Theory of PHARMACY, and the | several Processes therein. | II. A Description of the OFFICINAL SIMPLES, | with their Virtues and Preparations, Galenical | and Chymical. | III. The OFFICINAL COMPOSITIONS, according | to the last Alterations of the College: Together with | some Others of uncommon Efficacy, taken from the | most Celebrated Authors. | IV. EXTEMPORANEOUS PRESCRIPTIONS, distri- | buted into Classes suitable to their Intentions in Cure. | To which is added, | An Account of the COMMON ADULTERATIONS both of SIMPLES | and COMPOUNDS, with some Marks to detect them by. | By JOHN QUINCY, M.D. | - | [Gothic:] The Ninth Edition, much enlarged and corrected. | = | LONDON: | Printed for J. OSBORN and T. LONGMAN, at the Ship in | Paternoster-Row. M.DCC.XXXIII [1733].
Collection: John Windle in December 2000.
Description: Signed on the title page “William Blake his Book” (the first two words on either side of “A COMPLETE” and the last two flanking “In FOUR PARTS.” (My information about the book derives from a reproduction of the title page generously sent me in July 2000 by John Windle.)
The handwriting is not characteristic of the poet, in for instance Tiriel, Vala (where four hands by the poet have been identified), The Ballads (Pickering) Manuscript, and An Island in the Moon. However, it is significantly similar to the writing on the title page of Anon., A Political and Satirical History (?1757) (reproduced in Blake Books Supplement [1995] 315) which was apparently inscribed by the poet in 1773. I conclude uneasily that John Quincy’s English Dispensatory (1733) was also inscribed by the poet, as does R. N. Essick in Blake (2001), where the title page is reproduced.
History: (1) Acquired by the bookseller John Windle.
Raphael, Historia del Testamento Vecchio (1698) <BBS 322-23).
History: Michael Phillips lent it to the Tate Blake exhibition (9 Nov 2000-11 Feb 2001), #142.
Appendix Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake in the Years 1770-1827
New Entry
Barrett, William
THE | HISTORY | AND | ANTIQUITIES | OF THE | CITY OF BRISTOL; | COMPILED FROM | Original RECORDS, and authentic MANUSCRIPTS, | In public Offices or private Hands; | Illustrated with COPPER-PLATE PRINTS. | - | By WILLIAM BARRETT, SURGEON, F.S.A. | - | [Vignette] | = | BRISTOL: | Printed by WILLIAM PINE, in Wine-Street; | And sold by G. ROBINSON and Co. London; E. PALMER, J.B. BECKETT, T. MILLS, J. NORTON, W. BROWNE, | W. BULGIN, and J. LLOYD, Booksellers in Bristol; and by BULL and MEYLER, in Bath [1789].
The subscribers include “William Blake, Esq.” and “Rev. Wil[l]liam Blake, Vicar of Stockland.” One of these is presumably the William Blake who is listed at 16 Dove Street, Bristol, in Sketchley’s Bristol Directory (1775) (according to Biographical Database online).
New Entry
Mackay, Andrew
THE | THEORY AND PRACTICE | OF FINDING THE | LONGITUDE | AT SEA OR LAND: | TO WHICH ARE ADDED, | VARIOUS METHODS OF DETERMINING | THE LATITUDE OF A PLACE, | AND | VARIATION OF THE COMPASS; | WITH | NEW TABLES. | - | BY | ANDREW MACKAY, A.M. F.R.S.E. | - | IN TWO VOLUMES. | VOLUME I [-II]. | - | LONDON: | Printed by J. SEWELL, Cornhill; P. ELMSLY, Strand, and J. EVANS, | Paternoster-row. | - | MDCCXCIII [1793]
The list of subscribers includes “Mr William Blake, Aberdeen.”
New Entry
Man, Henry
THE | MISCELLANEOUS WORKS, | IN VERSE AND PROSE, | OF THE LATE | HENRY MAN. | = | IN TWO VOLUMES. | VOLUME I [II]. | = | LONDON: | PRINTED BY AND FOR JOHN NICHOLS AND SON, | RED LION PASSAGE, FLEET STREET; | SOLD ALSO BY F. AND C. RIVINGTON, | ST. PAUL’S CHURCH YARD. | 1802. <Bodley>.
The List of Subscribers includes the author’s cousin and Blake’s friend George Cumberland of “Axbridge, Somersetshire,” Cumberland’s brother Richard of Driffield, and “Blake, William, Esq. Lombard-street”; the poet lived in Lambeth (1790-1800) and Felpham (1800-03).
New Entry
§Sotheby, William
The Siege of Cuzco: A Tragedy in Five Acts [in verse]. (London, 1800) 8°, 112 pp.
A copy described in the eBay electronic auction (Sept. 2000) as “disbound as issued” is said to be “Boldly signed at the top” “Blake’s Library” and therefore associated with the poet. However, as William Sotheby also inscribed to William Blake copies of his Tragedies (1814) <BB #763> and of Virgil’s Georgics (1827), the gift inscription of the latter dated 1828, the recipient can scarcely be the poet, who died in 1827.
Part VI
Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies
Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (1995) <Blake (1996)>.
Reviews
57 §Helen Pike Bauer in Cross Currents 47 (1997): 114-17. 58 Aileen Ward, “Scrutinizing Blake,” Partisan Review 64 (1997): 473-81 (“the reader looking for a new understanding of Blake’s work, or of . . . [his] imagination . . . may well be disappointed,” but, despite inaccuracies and “slipshod” documentation, Ackroyd’s “lively and ambitious portrait should win new admiration with many readers” [478, 481]). 59 §Aston Nichols in Southern Humanities Review 31 (1997): 284-89.
Adams, Hazard. “Blake and Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 35-36 [a double issue] (1998): 683-93. <§Blake (2000)>.
About “the experimental shapes of Jerusalem and Finnegans Wake” (683).
§Anon. “A William Blake Drawing.” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 1 (1915): 216.
Anzai, Keiko. “Blake no Bijon to Jenda—‘Awaremi’ no Henso: Blake’s Vision and Gender: Aspects of ‘Pity’ (1[-3]).” Showagakuin Tankidaigaku Kiyo, Showagakuin Tankidaigaku: Bulletin of Showagakuin Junior College, Showagakuin Junior College, 33 (1996): 82-95; 35 (1998): 88-103; 36 (1999): 90-104. In Japanese.
A penetrating feminist approach to Blake and the gender problem, focusing on his picture of “Pity”; part 1 concentrates on The First Book of Urizen, parts 1-3 on The Four Zoas.
§* Bahktipada, Swami. The Bible Illustrated; Illustrations by William Blake & Francesca de Hollander; Introduction on Blake, Notes on the Paintings, and Bibliography by Krzysztof Cieszkowski (New Vrindanbar [West Virginia: Palace Pub., 1994) ISBN: 0932215335.
§Baulch, David M. “Reading Coleridge Reading Blake.” Coleridge Bulletin, N.S. 16 (2000): 5-14.
On Coleridge’s letter of February 1818 about Blake’s Songs (BR 251-53) and his term “anacalyptic.”
* Betz, Paul F. “Cover Illustration: William Blake’s ‘The Eagle,’ from Hayley’s Ballads, 1805.” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism 1 (Oct. 1992): 43.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 2 (Fall 1991)
533 Christopher Heppner. “The Good (In Spite of What You May Have Heard) Samaritan,” 64-69 <BBS 408>. (For a continuation of the discussion in John E. Grant, “On First Encountering Blake’s Good Samaritans,” see Blake 33 [1999-2000]: 68-95.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 3 (Winter 1999/2000 [April 2000])
1 * John E. Grant. “On First Encountering Blake’s Good Samaritans.” 68-95. (A densely allusive essay focusing on Young’s Night Thoughts watercolor #68 [engraved 1797 p. 37], chiefly on the wounded man’s gesture of rejection at the serpent-encrusted vessel offered by a Christ-like Samaritan and correcting Christopher Heppner, “The Good (In Spite of What You May Have Heard) Samaritan,” Blake 25 [1991]: 64-69 <BBS 408>, who argues that the gesture and vessel are benevolent.)
2 Anon. “Blake Sightings.” 95. (References to Blake in odd contexts.)
3 Anon. “Blake at Stephen’s College.” 95. (A small Blake show from the collection of Thomas Dillingham in Columbia, Missouri.)
4 Anon. “New Policy on Blake Submissions” and “Request to Subscribers.” 95.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 4 (Spring [July] 2000)
1 *Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1999.” 100-27, including Appendix 1: “New Information on Blake’s Engravings” (125) for Essick’s Separate Plates (1983) and Commercial Book Illustrations (1991); Appendix 2: “A Census of [8] Complete Copies of [Hayley’s] Designs to a Series of Ballads, 1802” (125-27).
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 1999.” 135-167. (It includes particularly a detailed description of Urizen [E] [141-43] and “The Posthumous Distribution of Poetical Sketches” [143-44, concluding that “perhaps [Samuel] Palmer acquired all those left at her [Catherine Blake’s] death” in 1831].)
The plates on 97, 128-34 from Urizen (E) pls. 1, 5, 9, 12, 18, 26 illustrate both essays.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Summer [October] 2000)
1 Claire Colebrook. “Blake and Feminism: Romanticism and the Question of the Other.” 4-13. (“Blake offers a way of understanding the relation of difference positively” [4].)
2 David Worrall. “William Bryan, Another Anti-Swedenborgian Visionary Engraver of 1789.” 14-22. (A letter 13 December 1789 from William Bryan, copper-plate printer, engraver, and bookseller, serves “to indicate how extensively their [Blake’s and Bryan’s] lives overlapped” [20].)
Minute Particulars
3 * Martin Butlin. “A Blake Drawing Rediscovered and Redated.” 23-24. (“The Last Trumpet” [c. 1785] [Butlin #617], newly rediscovered, has on the verso sketches probably related to Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads [1802].)
begin page 146 | ↑ back to top4 Hans-Ulrich Möhring.[e] “Whose Head?” 24. (In “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” the phrase “at their head” refers to “little Infants” rather than to Brittania and Jerusalem as in Erdman.)
Reviews
5 Carl Woodring. Review of Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999). 24-26. (“A trim book with a compact argument”; “every student of Blake, Coleridge, . . . and the Romantic period in England should avoid delay in studying this book” [24, 26].)
6 Nicholas M. Williams. Review of Blake, Politics, and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, & Christopher Z. Hobson (1998). 26-29.
7 Anne Birien. Review of François Piquet, Blake and the Sacred (1996). 29-32. (Despite the title of Piquet’s book here, the review summarizes the French text; there is apparently no edition translated into English.)
Newsletter
8 Anon. “Conference at Essex.” 32. (“Friendly Enemies: Blake and the Enlightenment,” University of Essex, 24-26 August 2000.)
9 Anon. “Exhibition at the Tate.” 32. (9 November 2000-11 February 2001.)
10 Anon. “Symposium at York.” 32. (“Interest is invited in a symposium on William Blake and the 1790s at the . . . University of York, 10-11 December” 2000.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 2 (Fall [November] 2000)
1 Kazuya Okada. “Orc under a Veil Revealed: Family Relationships and their Symbols in Europe and The Book of Urizen.” 36-45. (Identifications of Urizen as Jupiter, Los as Vulcan, Enitharm on as Venus, and Orc as Cupid.)
2 Hatsuko Niimi. “The Book of Ahania: A Metatext.” 46-54. (“Blake is describing in Ahania a language situation in which pre-language chaos and oral speech are forcibly suppressed by the written” [52-53].)
Reviews
3 Mary Lynn Johnson. Review of Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (1998). 54-61. (Though “‘Blake’s is not even in the index,” Siskin’s book may serve as “a contrasting backdrop for the kind of work Blake did” [54, 60].)
4 Alexander Gourlay. Review of Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999). 61. (Whittaker’s book is “inconsequential,” “little more than an index of what is already known, and even as such it will not be very helpful.”)
Newsletter
5 Anon. “Blake Exhibition at Tate Britain.” 62-63. (“Almost verbatim” quotations from the Tate’s “press releases.”)
6 Nelson Hilton. “Rodney M. Baine 1913-2000.”64. (An obituary, adapted from the Daily News/Banner-Herald, 27 June 2000.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 3 (Winter 2000/01 [9 February 2001])
1 *Agnes Peter. “The Reception of Blake in Hungary.” 68-81. (“The real breakthrough . . . in the history of Blake’s reception in Hungary came when his name was first mentioned as one of the great artists whom Béla Kondor [1931-72] considered to be one of his masters.” Most of Kondor’s 13 rather scratchy etchings [12 made in 1961-62], including “Blake Dines with Prophets,” “represent Kondor’s own reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” [70, 75]. The essay is mostly about Kondor.)
2 Michael Ferber. “Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as a Hymn.” 82-94. (A fascinating essay on the origin, history, and sponsors of Parry’s setting [1916], with illustrations of its perversion, when Blake’s text was either comically altered [“Zion” substituted for “England”] or replaced entirely; it includes a “Discography” [89].)
Reviews
3 Patricia Neill. Review of John Diamond, The Healing Power of Blake (1999), 95. (The practical results were varied, but “if I put the book on my head, my posture straightens up quite nicely. For $14.95, that’s not a bad deal.”)
4 Anon. “Jah Wobble and Band Honor William Blake 29 August 2000, British Library Auditorium.” 95. (An evening of “dub-driven soundscapes.”)
5 Anon. “The Blake Society at St. James’s ‘Programme 2000’.” 95.
Blake & Criticism (1982) <BBS 375>
5 Morton D. Paley. “Milton and the Form of History.” 63-76<BBS 375>. Reprinted in Aligarh Journal of English Studies, 10 (1985): 66-80 <BBS 375>. Rewritten as 75-85 of his Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999).
The Blake Journal
No 5 ([September] 2000)
The Blake Journal is a continuation of The Journal of the Blake Society at St James’s.
1 Anon. “The Blake Society at St James’s.” 4. (A statement of the history and purposes of The Blake Society and The Blake Journal.)
2 Michael Grenfell & Andrew Solomon, Editors. “Editorial.” 5-6. (About the past and future of the journal.)
3 *G. E. Bentley, Jr. “The Peripatetic Painter and the Stroke of Genius: James Ferguson (1790-1871) as a Patron of William Blake.” 7-22. (Ferguson “is the first collector in the North of England who is known to have bought Blake’s works” [18].)
4 W. H. Stevenson. “William Blake’s Ladder.” 23-32. (“There are echoes in the poetry of a [deep] rift between William and Catherine,” particularly in the erotic drawings in Vala and the text of Jerusalem [25, 23].)
begin page 147 | ↑ back to top5 Michael Grenfell. “Bookworks by Linda A. Landers: Review.” 33-34. (A description of her “series of handcrafted books; designed, printed and bound by the artist herself,” some of them about Blake.)
6 Linda Anne Landers. “On Cecil Collins.” 35-39. (Collins’s work “reminds me in a way of Blake’s view of the world” [36].)
7 *Michael Grenfell. “Blake and Gnosticism.” 40-53. (“Blake was first and foremost a gnostic,” and “much of his work can best be understood when viewed from a gnostic standpoint” [44].)
8 “What do You think? 1. The Crystal Cabinet.”
A Adrian Peeler. 54.
B John Woolford. 54-55. (The poem “is best understood as an allegory of childbirth” (54].)
C Andrew Solomon. 55.
D Andrea McLean. 56. (A design based on “The Crystal Cabinet.”)
“2. The Golden Net.” 57. (A solicitation of “Comments on this poem.”)
9 *Andrew Solomon. “To Rise from Generation Free: A View of Blake’s Jerusalem.” 58-68.
10 Galina Yackovleva. “Blake in Russia.” 69-70. (A very brief “attempt to outline the history of translating Blake’s poetry and the Blake studies in Russia.”)
11 Franca Bellarsi. “William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Imagination as a Mirror of Vacuity.” 71-86. (An argument “from within a Buddhist framework of analysis” that Blake was a major influence on Ginsberg even in his last years and that his unpublished William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1974-93) is both Blakean and Buddhist [71, 81].)
Reviews
12 Andrew Lincoln. Review of K. E. Smith, An Analysis of William Blake’s Early Writing and Designs to 1790 Including Songs of Innocence. 87-90. (An “informative and carefully argued study” [87].)
13 Sunao Vagabond. Review of Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Myths of Britain. 90-94. (He awards it “a hundred out of a hundred!” [94].)
14 Michael Grenfell. “Blake on CD! The Blake Project: Finn Coren.” 94-95. (“The music is energetic and sophisticated” [95].)
15 Andrew Solomon. “Music inspired by William Blake composed and accompanied on CD by Francis James Brown and spoken by Mary Gifford Brown.” 96. (“A very agreeable CD.”)
Information
16 Anon. “Tate Britain, Millbank.” 97. (Announcements of a Blake exhibition [9 November 2000-11 February 2001] and of “Events” such as lectures and performances associated with it.)
17 Anon. Blake “Conferences” and “Courses.” 98.
Bloom, Harold. “Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” PMLA 73 (1958): 501-04 <BB #1229>. . . . C. Reprinted in Ratomir Ristic, Introducing William Blake (1996).
Bloom, Harold. “William Blake.” 1-119 of The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961) <BB #1232>.
It is excerpted in Ratomir Ristic, Introducing William Blake (1996).
§*Bracewell, Michael. “Touched by the Spirit of Blake.” tate 23 (Winter 2000): 26-33.
On Patti Smith’s view of Blake.
Broglio, R. “Becoming-zoa.” Visible Language 33 (1999): 128-49.
“The Zoas [i.e., Four Zoas] is part of Blake’s working through the problems of publication” (129); he is concerned with “‘vector’ relationships,” especially in Vala 99-100.
Broglio, Ronald S. “Romantic Transformation: Visions of Difference in Blake and Wordsworth.” DAI 60 (2000): 3372A. Florida Ph.D., 1999.
“The instability of the [Four] Zoas defies and critiques the political, economic, and industrial machinery of publication during the turn of the century.”
§Bryan, Julia. “Blake Unbound.” Endeavours [University of North Carolina] (Fall 1997).
About the electronic William Blake Archive at the University of Virginia.
Campbell, Grant. “Starry Wheels and Watch-Fiends: Clocks and Time Pieces in William Blake’s Milton.” Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Travaux choisis de la Société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle 17 (1998): 165-74.
“The remarkable horological inventions of John Harrison, Thomas Mudge, and others, and the remarkable poetical inventions of Blake arise from a common conceptual source” (165).
§Campos Villanova, Xavier. “La traducciòn Semántica de Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), poema de William Blake (1757-1827).” Universitat de València [Spain] Ph.D., 1988 <BBS 431>.
Apparently published in Jerusalén, la Emanación del Gigante Albión (1997).
§Casa, Marie. “Scienza industriale e passione poetica: il Sublime Blake (1757-1827) di fronte all’interna corte del bello utilitarista piacevole dove regna Burke 1729-1787.” Quaderni di Lingua e Letterature 44 (1997): 71-75. In Italian.
begin page 148 | ↑ back to top§Chauvin, Daniele. “Apocalypse romantique: William Blake et Victor Hugo.” Questione Romantica: Rivista Interedisciplinare di Studi Romantici 2 (1996): 89-100. In French.
Clark, Lorraine, Blake, Kierkegaard and the Spectre of Dialectic (1991) <BBS 438>.
Review
9 §Journal of Religion 74 (1994): 144-45.
Cohn, Jesse S. “Blake’s THE MENTAL TRAVELLER.” Explicator 58 (2000): 130-33.
The poem is “a description of a cyclical world.”
§Colebrook, C. M. “John Milton, William Blake and the History of Individualism.” Edinburgh Ph.D., 1992.
Connolly, Tristanne Joy. “Reading Bodies in William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem.’” DAI 60 (2000): 4438A. Cambridge Ph.D., 1999.
She “examines images of the human body in Blake’s designs and verse.”
§Connolly, Tristanne. “William Blake and the Spectre of Anatomy.” In The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics. Ed. Sharon Ruston. (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999).
§*Cook, Jon. “Blake’s London.” tate 23 (Winter 2000).
On “London” and “Mayday in London” from The Wit’s Magazine.
Cooper, Andrew, & Michael Simpson. “Looks Good in Practice, But Does it Work in Theory? Rebooting the Blake Archive.” Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000): 63-68.
A continuation of the debate in Wordsworth Circle (1999) (q.v.); though Cooper & Simpson are “avid users of the Archive,” they think Eaves, Essick, Viscomi, & Kirschenbaum seem “myopic” (63).
§Corti, Claudia. “Blake e Hume: schiave delle passioni?” Mnema: Per Line Falzon Santucci, ed. Paola Pugliatti (Messina: Armando Siciliano, 1997) 165-70. In Italian.
Cronin, Richard. “William Blake and Revolutionary Poetry.” Chapter 2 (48-60, 203-04) of his The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. (Basingstoke: Macmillan; N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Chiefly about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
§Davies, Damian Walford “‘In the Path of Blake’: Dylan Thomas’s Altarwise by Owl-Light, Sonnet I.” Romanticism 3 (1997): 91-110.
Dibdin, Michael. Dark Spectre. (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1995) B. §(1998).
A novel about a cult whose followers “believed that William Blake’s poetry was the Third Testament and Sam [the leader] the second coming of Jesus Christ” (306) and about the ritual murders which served as their rite of initiation.
DiSalvo, Jackie, G. A. Rosso, & Christopher Z. Hobson, ed. Blake, Politics, and History, (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
Review
1 Nicholas M. Williams, Blake 34 (2000): 26-29.
Dominik, Mark. Black Suns & Moons in Works of Daniel Andreev, William Blake, & Stanislav Grof. (Beaverton, Oregon: [no publisher], 2000) 8°, 14 pp., no ISBN.
While in a Soviet prison camp, Daniel Andreev (d. 1959) wrote a strange, trans-material, multi-dimensional work called Roza Mira (published as a samizdat [“in the 1970s”], in book form in [1991], and translated as The Rose of the World by Jordan Roberts [1997]); Dominik finds “a intriguing literary parallel between Andreev’s chapter on ‘Shrastrs and Witzraors’ and a section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793),” each with “an inverted world with a red sky, lit by a black-but-shining orb.” If we follow Stanislav[e] Grof. LSD Psychotherapy (1994), we might conclude “that Blake and Andreev are giving us similar and mutually-supportive insights into another aspect of ‘reality’ far beyond anything we know from the material world” (9, 10, 13).
§Doyle, D. “These the visions of eternity: the ‘nature’ poetry of William Blake.” Orion 16 (1997): 38-41.
§*Drake, Dee. Searing Apparent Surfaces: Infernal Females in Four Early Works of William Blake. (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2000) Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis:[e] Stockholm Studies in English 90. 178 pp; ISBN: 9122018565.
A Stockholm thesis (2000).
§Draper, William Henry. Courage! or, The Days of Our Fathers, a Record and Remembrance of the Spirit of Great Britain a Hundred Years Ago from the Works of Sydney Smith, William Blake . . . [et al.] Recalled in 1915. (Leeds: Jackson, 1915) 8 pp.
Elfenbein, Andrew. “Cowper, Blake, and the Figure of The Invader.” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism 1 (Oct. 1992): 10-19.
Both “Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’ . . . and Cowper’s ‘On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’” use the phrase “veild the pole,” “and the historical context of the composition of the Songs suggests that Blake knew Cowper’s poem” (10, 12).
Endo, Toru. “Blake no Genten—‘Itamu’ Shintai no Hakken [The Starting Point of Blake—Discovering ‘Pain’ of Body].” begin page 149 | ↑ back to top 41-51 of Eibungaku no Genfukei—Kiten ni tatsu Sakkatachi [Original Landscapes in English and American Literature—Writers Standing on their Starting Points]. Ed. Shinsei Gengo Bunka Kenkyukai [New Study Group of Language and Culture]. (Tokyo: Otowashobo Tsurumi Shoten, 1999) ISBN: 455302137. In Japanese.
Blake’s descriptions of characters howling in pain and depictions of tortured bodies are attempts to induce readers to take part not through reason but through their bodily senses.
Essick, R. N., A Troubled Paradise (1999) <Blake (2000)>.
Review
1 [Nicholas Barker] comment in Book Collector 49 (2000): 274-75 (“Essick writes sensitively and with deep appreciation”).
§Fergusion, J. “‘The voices of children’: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Use of English 51 (2000): 207-18.
The Songs are useful in the classroom.
§Frintino, Antonio, ed. William Blake e la mitopoiesi: Atti del Convegno in onore di Marcello Pagnini, Pistoia, 2 dicembre 1995. (Pistoia: Brigata del Leoncino, 1997) 71 pp. In Italian.
§Frommert, Christian. “Heros und Apokalypse: zum Erhabenen in Werke John Heinrich Füsslis und William Blake.” Thesis at Rheinisch-Westfällische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 1993. In German.
It was slightly revised and published under this title in 1996 <Blake (1998)>.
*Frommert, Christian. “William Blake’s ‘Book of Urizen’.” Chapter 3.3 (168-290) of his Heros und Apokalypse: Zum Erhabenen in Werken Johann Heinrich Füsslis und William Blakes. (Aachen: Verlag der Augustus Buchhandlung, 1996) 209 pp. ISBN: 3860735624. In German. <Blake §(1997)>.
The color facsimile of Urizen [G], ed. Kay Parkhurst Easson & Roger R. Easson (1978), is reproduced in reduced size and black and white.
The book is a thesis of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 1993.
Frye, Northrop, ed. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963) <BB #1643>.
William J. Keith, “The Complexities of Blake’s ‘Sunflower’: An Archetypal Speculation” (56-64) and Harold Bloom, “States of Being: The Four Zoas” are excerpted in Ratomir Ristic, Introducing William Blake (1996).
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Introduction to Experience.” Huntington Library Quarterly 21 (1957): 57-67 <BB #1644>. . . . F. Excerpted in Ratomir Ristic, Introducing William Blake (1996).
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 (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
Reviews
2 §Jason Whittaker, BARS Bulletin and Review, No. 17 (March 2000): 22-24 (with Jerusalem, The Continental Prophecies, The Early Illuminated Books, Milton A Poem and the Final Illuminated Books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Urizen Books).
3 §Peter Davies, Times Literary Supplement, 14 Aug 1998, 26 (“does well” but with “limitations”).
4 §B. E. McCarthy, Choice 37 (1999): 1064.
Gilbert, Francis. “Audio Books: Gilbert Francis wonders how William Blake would respond to tomes on tape.” New Statesman, 4 Dec 1998, 63.
“If Blake were alive today, he’d definitely be beavering away at making audio books of his poems.” William Blake: poems read by Nicol Williamson (Harper/Collins, ISBN: 156511163X) “is freaky, plummy and wretchedly inadequate,” and William Blake: selected poems read by various readers (Penguin Audiobooks, ISBN 014086572) all have “the same dour, unenlightened actor-readers, dreadful music and tasteless biographical commentary.”
Ginsberg, Allen. “William Blake.” 275-84 of his Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. (N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).
It consists of “Liner Notes to Blake Record: To Young Or Old Listeners” [1982] (275-79) <BBS 418>, and “Your Reason and Blake’s System” [1988] (279-84) <BBS 485>.
§Greenberg, Mark L. “Romantic Technology: Books, Printing, and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 154-76 of Literature and Technology, ed. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992).
Presumably it is related to his “Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Technology and Artistic Form,” Annals of Scholarship 4 (1986): 69-82 <BBS 494>.
§Greenberg, Sarah. “Blake’s Progress.” tate 23 (2000): 27-35.
A chronological commentary.
*Grigson, Geoffrey. “William Blake (1757-1827).” Chapter 8 (101-15) of his Poets in Their Pride. ([1964]) B. (N.Y.: Basic Books [?1976]).
A biographical summary stressing the places he lived in London; “His secret was to put wonder . . . into his poems” (105).
begin page 150 | ↑ back to top§Guernsey, Lisa. “Searchable Archive Zooms In on William Blake’s Illuminated Books.” Chronicle of Higher Education Information Technology (17 Sept 1997).
About the electronic William Blake Archive at the University of Virginia.
*Hall, Manly P. “The Mysticism of William Blake.” 242-72 of his Sages and Seers: Nostradamus, Seer of France; Francis Bacon, The Concealed Poet; The Mythical Figures of Jakob Boehme; The Shepherd of Children’s Minds—Johann Amos Comenius; The Comte de St.-Germain; Mysticism of William Blake; Thomas Taylor, The English Platonist; Gandhi—A Tribute. (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society, Inc; Second Printing [?1979]).
A survey, without notes.
§Harrison, J.R. William Blake and the American Revolution. ([No place: no publisher], 1994). Bradford University Department of Social and Economic Studies Departmental Working Papers, No. 94/9.
Hart, Jonathan. “Reconstructing Blake.” Chapter 2 (25-55) of his Northrop Frye: The theoretical imagination. (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1994). Critics of the Twentieth Century.
Hart, Jonathan. “A Visionary Criticism.” Chapter 8 (243-65) of his Northrop Frye: The theoretical imagination. (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1994). Critics of the Twentieth Century.
§Hicks, James Whitney. “Enthusiasm and Melancholy in William Blake (1757-1827).” Yale M.D., 1991. 44 leaves.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (1964) <BB #1853>.
Excerpts appear in Ratomir Ristic, Introducing William Blake (1996).
§Hitchings, H. “Doors of Perception.” Art Newspaper 10 (1999): 58.
Hobbs, T. D. “‘Born with a different face’: Reflections on William Blake and Biblical Prophecy.” Communio Viatorum [Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University, Prague] 39 (1997): 5-34.
§Hone, William. “The Last Chimney Sweeper.” The EveryDay Book, I (1 May 1825).
B. §Vol. II, columns 615-626 of THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK; | OR, | [Gothic:] Everlasting Calendar | OF | POPULAR AMUSEMENTS, | SPORTS, PASTIMES, CEREMONIES, | MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND EVENTS, INCIDENT TO | EACH OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS, | IN PAST AND PRESENT TIMES; | FORMING A COMPLETE | HISTORY OF THE YEAR, MONTHS, & SEASONS, | AND A | PERPETUAL KEY TO THE ALMANACK; | INCLUDING | ACCOUNTS OF THE WEATHER, RULES FOR HEALTH AND CONDUCT, REMARKABLE | AND IMPORTANT ANECDOTES, FACTS, AND NOTICES, IN CHRONOLOGY, | ANTIQUITIES, TOPOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, NATURAL HISTORY, ART, SCIENCE, | AND GENERAL LITERATURE; DERIVED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES, | AND VALUABLE ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS, WITH POETICAL ELUCIDATIONS, | FOR DAILY USE AND DIVERSION. | - | BY WILLIAM HONE. | IN TWO VOLUMES. | WITH THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ENGRAVINGS. | VOLUME I[-II]. | = | LONDON: | PUBLISHED FOR WILLIAM HONE | 1827.
C. Vol. II, columns 615-26 of his THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK | AND | TABLE BOOK; | OR, | [Gothic:] Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, | SPORTS, PASTIMES, CEREMONIES, MANNERS, | CUSTOMS, AND EVENTS. | INCIDENT TO | Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, | IN PAST AND PRESENT TIMES, | FORMING A | COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE YEAR, MONTHS, AND SEASONS, | AND A | PERPETUAL KEY TO THE ALMANAC; | INCLUDING | ACCOUNTS OF THE WEATHER, RULES FOR HEALTH AND CONDUCT, REMARKABLE | AND IMPORTANT ANECDOTES, FACTS, AND NOTICES, IN CHRONOLOGY, ANTI- | QUITIES, TOPOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, NATURAL HISTORY, ART, SCIENCE, AND | GENERAL LITERATURE; DERIVED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES, AND | VALUABLE ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS, WITH POETICAL ELUCIDATIONS, | For Daily Use and Diversion. | - | BY WILLIAM HONE. | - | [12 lines of verse from] | Herrick. |- | WITH FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX ENGRAVINGS. | - | IN THREE VOLUMES. | VOL. I[-III]. | LONDON: PUBLISHED, BY ASSIGNMENT, FOR THOMAS TEGG, 73, CHEAPSIDE; | AND SOLD BY RICHARD GRIFFIN AND CO., GLASGOW, | AND JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN. | 1830. <Toronto> <Blake (1998)>.
D. §1831- E. §1832. F. §1833-1835. G. §1835. H. §1837. I. §1838. J. §1839. K. §1841. L. §1866. M. §1868. N. §1882. O. §1888. P. §1888-1889.
Q. Vol. II, columns 615-26 of THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK; | OR, | [Gothic:] Everlasting Calendar | . . . | BY WILLIAM HONE. | With An Introduction By | Leslie Shepard | . . . | 1827. (Detroit: Republished by Gale Research Company, 1967).
The information added here to that in Blake (1998) concerns the printing of Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Innocence in Hone’s Every-Day Book; or, Everlasting Calendar in 1825 and 1827; in Blake (1998) this was merely an hypothesis.
The 1967 facsimile adds Shepard’s name to the reproduction of the 1827 title page.
begin page 151 | ↑ back to topHutchings, Kevin Douglas. “Imagining Nature: Blake’s vision of materiality.” DAI 60 (2000): 3374-3375A. Mc Master Ph.D., 1998.
Imaizumi, Yoko. “Romanshugi Bungaku no Bunka Kenkyu—Blake no Baai [Cultural Studies in Romantic Literature—in a Case of Blake].” 131-46 of Bungaku no Bunka Kenkyu [Cultural Studies in Literature]. Ed. Kyoichi Kawaguchi. (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Shuppan, 1995) ISBN 4327481254 C3098. In Japanese.
An explanation of Jerome McGann’s New Historical account of Blake as one of the most important Romantic poets, comparing his approach to Blake with Frye’s structuralism, Bloom’s deconstruction, and Erdman’s historicism.
*Jackson, Timothy P. “Is Isaac Kierkegaard’s Neighbor? Fear and Trembling in Light of William Blake and Works of Love.” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 17 (1997): 97-119.
A comparison of Johannis de Silentio, Fear and Trembling, Blake, and Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. The Blake section is “Poeticizing Mercy: Blake on the Command as Primordial Religion” (101-12).
Jacobs, Jack William. “William Blake’s performative prophecy.” DAI 60 (2000): 2504A. Auburn Ph.D., 1999.
The Journal of the Blake Society at St James’s
The periodical is continued in 2000 as The Blake Journal.
Kaufman, Robert. “Everybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty.” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 131-55.
The essay focuses “content-wise” on the poet Laura “Moriarty’s relationships to Blake and formal matters.”
Kawasaki, Noriko. “Satan no Chokoku—Blake no Milton ni tsuite: Transcending Satan-Self in Blake’s Milton (11).” Gifu Shiritsu Joshi Tankidaigaku Kiyo: Bulletin of Gifu City Women’s College 49 (1999): 41-46. In Japanese, with an English abstract on 41.
Parts 1-10 appeared in the issues for 1989-98.
Kennedy, Thomas C. “From Anne Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Philological Quarterly 77 (1998): 359-76.
“The relationship between Blake’s text and Barbauld’s seems to be something like a mirror image or inversion” (361).
§Kenton, Elizabeth. “The Prince of Darkness . . . is a Lord Chancellor: William Blake as Critic of Francis Bacon.” North Carolina (Chapel Hill) Ph.D., 1992. 185 ll.
§Kim, Okyub. “Blake ue yesulgauan [Blake’s Art].” Journal of English Language and Literature [Seoul] 43 (1997): 27-49. In Korean. <§Blake (1999)>.
*Kono, Rikyu. “Blake no totte no Goshikku Geijutsu—Girisha Bunka to Goshikku Bunka no Tairitsu no naka kara umareru shin no Geijutsu: W. Blake and Gothic Art— True Art springs from the Contrary: Greek Art and Gothic Art.” Sapporo Otani Tankidaigaku Kiyo: Bulletin of Sapporo Otani Junior College 31 (2000): 15-44. In Japanese.
§Kumashiro, Soho. Bureiku Kenkyu: hito to shi to e. (Tokyo: Hokuseidoshoten, 1976) 266 pp. In Japanese.
*Lachman, Barbara. Voices for Catherine Blake: A Gathering. (Lexington [Virginia]: Scholar Antiqua Press, 2000) 4°, 132 pp.; ISBN: 097032880X.
Interviews with Blake’s wife and letters from her imagination.
*Lande, Laurence. “William Blake and the Prophetic Tradition.” 77-93 of his Adventures in Collecting: Books and Blake and Buber. (Montreal: McLennan Library of McGill University, 1975) 122 pp., 8 pls., 100 copies.
§Langstaff, David Knox. “William Blake.” Choate Literary Review 29 (1942): 60-74.
§Lewis, K. “Conversation in the Spirit: A Comparative Study of the Writings of William Blake and Jacob Boehme.” Manchester Ph.D., 1993.
*Lincoln, Andrew. “Alluring the Heart to Virtue: Blake’s Europe.” Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 621-39.
A consideration of “some contemporary ideas about the promotion of Christian doctrine and values” as they illuminate Europe and “ideas of sin and shame as the bases of the historical success of European Christianity as a regulatory institution” (620).
Lincoln, Andrew, Spiritual History (1995) <Blake (1997)>.
Review
6 Philip Cox, Review of English Studies, N.S. 49 (1998): 92-93 (“a major contribution.”)
Linnell, Olive. “William Blake and John Linnell.” Bulletin of Psychic Times [London] (1944): 5.
About Blake’s relationship with John Linnell and the 1918 Linnell sale, by the daughter of Linnell’s son James T. Linnell.
Locatelli, Carla. “William Blake: Non arm onia ma entropia degli opposti.” 7-28 of her Le Poetiche[e] Romantiche Inglesi: Studi Pratiche del Testo Poetica. (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1981). In Italian.
begin page 152 | ↑ back to topIt is especially about “The Ecchoing Green” (9-16), “The Clod and The Pebble” (16-21), and the “Introduction” to Innocence (21-24) and to Experience (25-28).
Lucas, John, ed. William Blake (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
Review
1 Andrew Lincoln, Review of English Studies, N.S. 51 (2000): 143-46 (with Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake [1998] and Henry Summerfield, A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers [1998]) (the Lucas volume is useful though it has little art criticism).
Lundeen, Kathleen. Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology. (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000) 8°, 188 pp., 35 plates; ISBN: 1575910411.
“Blake’s spiritualism is the telos of his deconstruction of the aesthetic binaries of the natural and the conventional . . .”; “his experiments in textuality . . . [are] experiments in spiritualism” (138, 162).
“Urizen’s Quaking World,” Colby Library Quarterly 25 (1989): 12-17 and “Words on Wings: Blake’s Textual Spiritualism,” Word & Image 10 (1994): 343-65 “have been revised and expanded for the book.”
Lundeen, Kathleen. “Urizen’s Quaking World,” Colby Library Quarterly 25 (1989): 12-17 <BBS 555>.
The essay was revised and expanded in her Knight of the Living Dead (2000).
Lundeen, Kathleen. “Words on Wings: Blake’s Textual Spiritualism,” Word & Image 10 (1994): 343-65 <Blake (1996)>.
The essay was revised and expanded in her Knight of the Living Dead (2000).
Lussier, Mark S. “Blake’s Deep Ecology.” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 393-408 <Blake (1997)>. B. “Blake’s Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness.” Chapter 1 (47-63, 186-87) of his Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd; N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press Inc, 2000) Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories.
The 2000 version is a “significantly different” text (ix).
§Lussier, Mark S. “Eternal Dictates: the ‘other’ of Blakean Inspiration.” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Age 2 (1995): 99-112.
§Lussier, Mark S. “‘Vortext’ as Philosopher’s Stone: Blake’s Textual Mirrors and the Transmutation of Audience.” New Orleans Review 13 (1996): 41-50.
§Lutri, Corrado. William Blake. Ed. Giovanni Rossino. ([Verona:] Edizioni “Discretio” [1967]) 249 pp. In Italian.
*Manson, J. B. “William Blake.” Chapter 2 (32-41) of his Hours in The Tate Gallery with an Introduction by Charles Aitken. With 16 Illustrations. (London: Duckworth, 1926).
McCaslin, Susan. Letters to William Blake. 1st prize 3rd Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest. (Salt Spring Island, B.C.: (m)Other Tongue Press, 1997) ISBN: 1896949002.
Fifteen poem-letters printed sideways, i.e., parallel with the gutter, in 100 copies.
McCord, Howard. Propaedeutic to a Celebration of Blake. ([Bowling Green (Ohio): The Author, 1973?]) 5 leaves mimeographed.
McKusick, James C.[e] “The End of Nature: Environmental Apocalypse in William Blake and Mary Shelley.” Chapter 4 (95-111, 239-42, esp. 95-106) of his Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
An intelligent and original essay.
§Menneteau, Patrick. “Enjeux interpretations du poème de William Blake Infant Sorrow.” Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles (1996): 63-74. In French.
*Menneteau, Patrick. La folie dans la poésie de William Blake: Reflet des enjeux gnoséologiques de la critique littéraire. (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur; Genève: Edition Slatkine, 1999) Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulon, Babeliana 1 8°, 347 pp., ISBN: 2745301586.
“La littérature, pour Blake, . . . est le lieu d’une confrontation voulue d’idées, le champ d’une bataille spirituelle” (303).
Mertz, J. B. “A Contemporary Reference to William Blake in the Notebooks of Francis Douce.” Notes and Queries 155 [N.S. 47] (2000): 306-08.
About 1811 Douce wrote:
Blake’s figures are as if, like Procrustes’ men, they had been stretched on a bed of iron; as if one person had laid hold on the head and another on the legs, & pulled them longer. Nor are some of the figures by Stothard, Flaxman & Fuseli exempt from this fault.
§Mertz, Jeffrey Barclay. “Constructing the Bible of Hell: Blake’s Mythopoesis in its Political and Cultural Context.” Oxford M. Phil., 1995.
§Michael, Jennifer Davis. “The Corporeal City in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29 (2000): 105-22.
Miyake, Hiroshi. “Plotinus to Blake—Thomas Taylor o kaishite: Plotinus and Blake—Through Thomas Taylor.” Hokuriku Shukyo Bunka, Horikuriku Shukyo Bunka begin page 153 | ↑ back to top Gakkai: Religion and Culture, Hokuriku Society for Religious and Cultural Studies, Kanazawa University 12 (2000): 113-33. In Japanese.
Miyake, Horoshi. “William Blake Kenkyu—Tengoku to Jigoku no Kekkon ni okeru Sozoryoku ni yoru ‘Risei’ no Keimou: William Blake and Imagination—The Englightenment of Reason in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Hokuriku Shukyo Bunka, Hokuriku Shukyo Bunka Gakkai: Religion and Culture, Hokuriku Society for Religious and Cultural Studies, Kanazawa University 9 (1997): 49-68. In Japanese <Blake §(1998)>.
Morey, Frederick L. “Theodicy; An analysis with illustrations, many from William Blake.” Higginson Journal Dealing with Col. T.W. Higginson . . . [published by the Emily Dickenson Society] 35 (1983).
Appendix B: “Positions with Illustrations (many [31] by William Blake) reprinted by permission from Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Antiquity” (22-54).
Moskal, Jeanne, Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (1994).
Review
19 §Religion and Literature 28 (1996): 129-34 (with E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast).
§Mugijatna, Drs. Puisi-puisi Symbols dalan Songs of Experience Karya William Blake laporan penilitian perseorangan dalam bidang sastra (Surakarta [Java, Indonesia]: Fakultas Sastra Universitas[e] Sebelas Maret [1996]) 42 ll.
A research report, in Indonesian?
Mulvihill, James. “‘Demonic Objectification and Total Isolation’: Blake and the Culture Industry.” Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 597-620.
An essay on Urizen based on Adorno & Horkheimer.
Nakayama, Fumi. “‘Myuzu’ ka ‘Shisai’ ka—Blake no Koki Yogensho: ‘Muses’ or ‘Poetic Genius’?—Blake’s Later Prophetic Books.” Hiroshima Jogakuin Daigaku Daigakuin Gengo Bunka Ronso, Hiroshima Jogakuin Daigaku Daigakuin Gengo Bunka Kenkyuka: Journal of Language and Culture, The Graduate School of Language and Culture, Hiroshima Jogakuin University 3 (2000): 17-31. In Japanese.
Niikura, Toshikazu. “William Blake to Gendai: William Blake and Modern Times.” Kirisutokyo Bungaku Kenkyu, Nihon Kirisutokyo Bungakkai: The Review of Studies in Christianity and Literature 17 (2000): 1-6. In Japanese.
About Blake’s influence on Allan Ginsberg.
Norvig, Gerda, Dark Figures in the Desired Landscape (1993) <Blake (1994)>.
Review
6 §Literature and Theology 9 (1995): 455-56.
Nöth, Winfried. “Cognition, iconicity, and Blake’s fearful symmetry.” 647-55 of Interdigitation: Essays for Irmengard Rauch. Ed. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbart, & Lihua Zhang. (N.Y., Washington/Baltimore, Boston, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna, Paris: Peter Lang, 1999).
Part 6: “Blake’s fearful symmetry” (652-53) tells us that “The Tyger” has “a high degree of translative symmetry.”
Ogden, James. “Isaac D’Israeli on Blake.” Aligarh Critical Miscellany 9 (1998 [received 31 January 2001]): 143-45.
It gives “a fully emended text” (based entirely on hypothesis) of the letter from D’Israeli to Dibdin of 24 July 1835 (see Blake Records 243-44).
*Okazaki, Mami. “Blake no Apokaripusu: Blakean Apocalypse.” Eibeibungaku Gogaku Kenkyukai Ronshu, Eibeibungaku Gogaku Kenkyukai: The EAS Review, The English and American Literature and Linguistics Society 8 (1999): 33-50. In Japanese.
Okuda, Kihachiro. “William Blake Saku ‘Yameru Bara’: On William Blake’s Poem ‘The Sick Rose.’” Nara Kyoiku Daigaku Kiyo, Jinbun Shakaikagaku, Nara Kyoiku Daigaku: Bulletin of Nara University of Education, Cultural and Social Science 48 (1999): 83-90. In Japanese, with an English abstract on 90.
Paice, Rosamund. “Blake and a ‘Curious Hypothesis.’” Notes & Queries 265 [N.S. 47] (2000): 308-22.
About books which claim, often in satire or hyperbole, that Napoleon did not exist, e.g., Jean-Baptiste Pérès,[e] Comme Quoi Napoléon n’a Jamais Existé (1827); scarcely relevant to Blake.
Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999) <Blake (2000)>.
75-85 are rewritten from “Milton and the Form of History,” Aligarh Journal of English Studies 10 (1985): 66-80 <BBS 375>.
Review
1 Carl Woodring, Blake 34 (2000): 24-26. (“A trim book with a compact argument”; “every student of Blake, Coleridge, . . . and the Romantic period in England should avoid delay in studying this book” [24, 26].)
*Phillips, Michael. “William Blake in Lambeth: Michael Phillips, guest curator of the major exhibition of Blake opening this month at Tate Britain, explores the lifestyle and work of the artist who lived in Lambeth—and the anti-Jacobin terror of the early 1790s that threatened his radical activities.” History Today 50 (2000): 18-25.
begin page 154 | ↑ back to top§*Phillips, Michael. William Blake: The Creation of the Songs From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. (London: British Library, 2000) B. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 4°, xi, 180 pp., 73 full-page plates + 36 figures (28 not by Blake); ISBN: 0691057206 (cased), 0691057214 (paperback).
A generously illustrated factual study in which “My concern is to record in the detail of the manuscript drafts how the poems evolved and were made” (2). He insists in particular that each color-print of the Songs was printed twice (e.g., 95, 98, 103-04).
Pierce, John B. Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
Review
2 James Cavan Kalther, Canadian Book Review Annual 1999 (2000): 3296 (“important and ground-breaking”).
Pierce, John B. “Rewriting Milton: Orality and Writing in Blake’s Milton.” Studies in Romanticism 39 (2000): 449-70.
“Blake rewrites Milton as a multifaceted state of discourse . . . multiple in its meanings” (470).
Piquet, François, Blake et le Sacré (1996). <Blake (§1996, 1997>.
Review
1 Anne Birien, Blake 34 (2000): 29-32. (Despite the title here [Blake and the Sacred], the review summarizes the French text; there is apparently no edition translated into English.)
Plummer, Lisa Crafton. “Blake’s Swinish Multitude: The Response to Burke in Blake’s The French Revolution.” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism 2 (1993): 1-12.
“Blake’s work resonates with the words and ideas of Burke” (2).
*Praz, Mario. “William Blake.” 49-89 of his Poeti Inglesi dell’ Ottocento. Con 18 Xilografie di Parigi. (Firenze: R. Bemporad e F°, [?1925]) Libri Necessari[e] In Italian.
61-89 are texts by Blake.
Priestman, Martin. “And did those feet? Blake in the 1790s.” Chapter 3 (80-121, 268-74) of his Romantic Atheism: Poetry and free thought, 1780-1830. (Cambridge: University Press, 1999) Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 37.
“In his most radical period, from about 1790 to 1795, he did challenge orthodox Christianity” (82).
§Raine, Kathleen. “The Spiritual Fourfold London.” Aligarh Critical Miscellany 5 (1992): 181-98. <Blake (1994)>. B. Apparently reprinted (silently) as William Blake’s Fourfold London. (London: Temenos Academy, 1993) Temenos Academy Papers No. 3 8°, 21 pp., no ISBN.
“I am here to speak for my Master, William Blake, England’s supreme poet of the city” (B, 5).
§Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) ISBN: 0312220642.
Presumably it is based on his 1991 Oxford M. Litt. thesis, “William Blake: The Comic Aspect of Vision.”
Reitz, Bernhard. “Dangerous Enthusiasm: The Appropriation of William Blake in Adrian Mitchell’s Tyger.” 50-63 of Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama. Ed. Martin Middeke & Werner Huber. (Rochester [N.Y.] & Woodbridge [Suffolk]: Camden House, 1999) Studies in English and American Literature.
*Ristic, Ratomir. Introducing William Blake. (Nis: Filozofsko fakulteta u Nisu [Yugoslavia], 1996) English Literature Series iv, 192 pp.
Part 1 is Blake’s poems; part 2 is “Critical Texts on Romanticism, Blake and His Poems” (77-158) and part 3 is “Poems for Further Reading” (159-90).
The works reprinted in part 2 are excerpts from
1 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1931) (77-88).
2 Northrop Frye, “on the Romantic Myth” [no source identified] (89-90).
3 M. H. Abrams, Norton Anthology of English Literature (90-91).
4 Colin Falk, “Two Faces of Romanticism,” Myth, Truth, and Literature, 2nd Edition (1995) (91-92).
5 Northrop Frye, “Blake’s Introduction to Experience” (93-101) from Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays [ed. Northrop Frye (1965)].
6 William Keith, “The Complexities of Blake’s ‘Sunflower,’” Ibid. (102-06).
7-8 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “on The Sick Rose” and “on The Tyger” from his An Introduction to Blake (106-07, 107-13).
9 H. Combes, “on A Poison Tree,” Literature and Criticism (1953) (113-16).
10 M. L. Rosenthal & A. J. M. Smith, “on London,” Introduction to Literature, ed. Locke, Gibson, Arms (1963) (116-17).
11 Harold Bloom, “Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” [no source identified; PMLA (1958)] (117-24).
12 Lawrence Lipking, “on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” The Life of the Poet (125-39).
13 M. H. Abrams, “Blake’s Mature Myth,” Norton Anthology of English Literature (139-42).
14 Harold Bloom, “on The Four Zoas,” Blake: A Collection of Essays [ed. Northrop Frye] (1965) (143-45).
-
15 *Ljiljana Bogoeva-Sedlar, “on Blake,” “Lecture delivered on March 25th 1996” (147-58) (admiring).
Rosen, Steven J. “Canettian Crowd Symbols in Blake’s and Wordsworth’s Nature Poetry.” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism 1 (1992): 20-28.
“The crowd psychology of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and begin page 155 | ↑ back to top Power (1960) provides a new perspective on these well-known poems”; “For Blake, then, innocence . . . wants to be a crowd” (20, 22).
Saito, Takako. “Blake no Shiki no Odo—Wakaki Shijin no Dentosei to Eikokusei o megutte: The Seasonal Poems of William Blake with Special Reference to His Traditional Character and Englishness.” Gakujutsu Kenkyu, Eigo Eibungaku Hen, Waseda Daigaku Kyoikugakubu, Waseda Daigaku Kyoikukai: Gakujutsu Kenkyu (Academic Studies), English Language and Literature, The School of Education, Waseda University 48 (1999): 105-18. In Japanese.
Sato, Hikari. “Creative Contradiction in Proverbs of Hell: On the Media and Contents of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Studies in English Literature, English Literary Society of Japan, English Number 2000 (2000): 17-35.
A learned, sophisticated, and perceptive argument that “the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ dissolve the authority of the ‘sacred codes’ and encourage us to understand the world through our own perception”; to take “‘Proverbs of Hell’ . . . as al-+ternative ‘sacred codes’ . . . would be the worst nightmare in the sense that the discourse on anti-canonisation had canonised itself” (32, 30).
§Scharbach, Deborah. Index to A Catalogue of the Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the McGill University Libraries. (Montreal: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Libraries, 1990) 20 pp.
For A Catalogue of the Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection (1983), see BBS 320-21.
§Schwartz, John Henry. The Book of Job Translated in Rhyme with William Blake’s Illustrations. (Peoria [Illinois], Schwartz, 1974) 32 pp.
§*Secundus. “Jób képek.” Múlt és Jõvõ [Past and Future] (1917) 63. In Hungarian.
Reproduces 15 of Blake’s Job plates with a commentary.
§Sedgwick, Anne Douglas [afterwards De Selincourt]. William Blake. (London: Duckworth; N.Y.: Scribner [1911]) 298 pp.
§*Selma, Jose Vicente. William Blake. (Valencia: [no publisher], 1982) Quervo: cuadernos de cultura, Monografías[e] No. 3. 58 pp. In Spanish.
§*Serra, Cristóbal. Pequeño Diccionario de Blake: Caracteres Simbólicas. (Palma de Mallorca: J. J. de Olañeta,[e] 1992) 86 pp., 30 plates. In Spanish.
*Singer, June K. The Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake. (N.Y.: G.P. Putnam’s Sons for the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, 1970). B. (N.Y., Evanston, San Francisco, London, 1973) <BB #2707>. C. *Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious: The Conflict between Reason and Imagination. Introduction by M. Esther Harding. (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2000). The Jung on the Hudson Book Series 8°, xxi, 272 pp., ISBN: 0892540516.
M. Esther Harding, “Introduction” is xi-xvi in A, xv-xx in C. The black-and-white reproductions include pls. 1-24 of Marriage (C) (lacking pls. 25-27). Singer’s new “Preface” in C (ix-xiv) says that in writing her thesis on the Marriage (39-176 here) for her analyst’s diploma at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and revising it into The Unholy Bible, “I was not bound by the strictures of literary criticism, nor by adherence to historical fact” (xi).
The edition of 2000 is a photographic reprint of that of 1970 with minor adjustments such as running heads and the addition of headpieces to the chapters.
*Sitterson, Joseph C., Jr. “Introduction to the Songs of Experience: The Infection of Time.” Chapter 1 (12-33, 155-60) of his Romantic Poems, Poets and Narrators. (Kent & London: Kent State University Press, 2000).
An analysis, incorporating lots of criticism by others.
*Smith, K[enneth] E[dward]. An Analysis of William Blake’s Early Writings and Designs to 1790, including Songs of Innocence. (Lewiston [N.Y.], Queenston [Ontario], & Lampeter [Wales]: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999). Studies in British Literature Volume 42 xxi, 273 pp.; ISBN:0773479228 and 07734917X <Blake §(2000)>.
Stewart Crehan, “Foreword” (xv-xvii).
The author speaks of “our specific aims—of evaluating Blake’s earliest works within their own terms and of seeing Songs of Innocence as culmination rather than prologue” (185-86).
Review
1 Andrew Lincoln, Blake Journal, 5 (2000), 87-90. (An “informative and carefully argued study” [87].)
Sonstroem, Eric Andrew. “Romantic cosmology as crowd control: The rhetorical containment of population in Wordsworth, Blake, Austen, Maturin, Malthus, and Paley.” DAI 61 (2000): 625A. Indiana Ph.D., 1999.
Chapter 3 “reads Blake’s The Four Zoas as an exploration of how specific cosmologies compete rhetorically for control of geometrically increasing population.”
§Spriggs, Laura Maureen Leinanialoha. “The Presence of the Character Ahania in the Works of William Blake.” Oxford M. Phil., 1991.
Summerfield, Henry, A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
begin page 156 | ↑ back to topReview
2 Andrew Lincoln, Review of English Studies, N.S. 51 (2000): 143-46 (with John Lucas, ed., William Blake [1998] and Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake [1998]). (Summerfield gives “admirably concise summaries” [145].)
§Szenczi, Miklós. “Blake tanitása a képzeletrõl.” Tanulmányok (Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1989). In Hungarian.
§Szerb, Antal. “William Blake.” Gondolatok a könyvtárban, 3rd edition (Budapest: Magvetõ, 1981). In Hungarian.
A reprint of his essay (1928) celebrating the centenary of Blake’s death <BB #2806>.
Tanaka, Takao. “Preston Blake Korekushon: The Preston Blake Collection.” Shikoku Daigaku Kiyo, Ser. A, Jinbun Shakaikagaku Hen, Shikoku Daigaku: Bulletin of Shikoku University, Ser. A [Humanities and Social Sciences], Shikoku University 13 (2000): 137-41. In Japanese, with an English abstract on 137.
Tanikuni, Akihiko. “Thel no Taikyaku ga imisurumono—Blake no Thel no Sho ni tsuite no Ichi Kosatsu: What ‘Thel’s Retreat’ Implies—A Study on The Book of Thel.” Tokuyama Daigaku Sogo Keizai Kenkyujo Kiyo, Tokuyama Daigaku Sogo Keizai Kenkyujo: Bulletin of the Institute for The Study of Economics, Tokuyama University 22 (2000): 153-58. In Japanese.
§Taylor, Richard. “A Sense of the Dramatic Form, Characterization, Tone and Intention in William Blake’s King Edward III.” Ab Hath Al-Yarmouk [Literature and Linguistics] 15 (1997): 41-62.
*Terrien, Samuel. “Blake: Le mal du Siècle.” Chapter 14 (194-228, 289-91) of his The Iconography of Job Through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
A standard plate-by-plate explication, with reproductions of all the Job designs save the title page.
§Thomas, Helen Sarah. “The Gender of Revolution: The Female and the Feminine in [the] Art and Poetry of William Blake.” Oxford M. Phil., 1991.
*Thomas, Dr. Helen. “William Blake: Spiritualism and Abolitionism.” 114-24 of “Romanticism and abolitionism: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.” Chapter 3 (82-124) in her Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. (Cambridge & N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 38.
The Blake section has very little to do with slavery.
Thompson, E. P., Witness Against the Beast (1993) <Blake (1996)>.
Reviews
23 §Christianity and Literature 44 (1995): 232-34.
24 §Religion and Literature 28 (1996): 129-34 (with Moskal, Forgiveness).
*Townsend, Joyce. “William Blake (1757-1827), Moses Judgment at the Golden Calf c. 1799-1800.” Chapter 8 (66-69) of Paint and Purpose: A study of technique in British Art. Ed. Stephen Hackney, Rica Jones, & Joyce Townsend. (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999).
An “analysis of Blake’s tempera medium,” with useful photographs of tiny details, which “confirmed the accuracy of recall of the artists who described Blake’s technique to Gilchrist” (66, 69).
§Trigilio,[e] Tony. “Strange Prophecies New”: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsburg. (Madison [N.J.]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000).
§Turner, K. C. Possible Worlds: A Discussion of Blake with Thirteen Year Olds ([Warwick:] Institute of Education, University of Warwick, 1979). Monographs, Institute of Education, University of Warwick 2. 27 pp.
*Underwood, Eric. “Blake and His Circle.” Chapter 13 (141-49) of his A Short History of English Painting. (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1933).
Blake’s circle includes Fuseli, Stothard, George Richmond, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert.
Vaughan, William. “The Prophet.” 72-83 of chapter 3 (The heroicera) of his Romantic Art. (N.Y. & Toronto: Thames & Hudson, 1978). Also passim <BBS 668> B. “Le Prophète.” 73-82 of Chapitre 3 in his L’Art Romantique. Tr. Florence Lèvy-Paolini. (Paris: Thames & Hudson, 1994).
§Welburn, A. “The Gnostic Imagination of William Blake: A Comparative and Typological Investigation into the Unity and Structure of Blake’s Mythology.” Cambridge Ph.D., 1980.
Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999) <Blake (2000)>.
Reviews
2 Sunao Vagabond, Blake Journal 5 (2000): 90-94. (He awards it “a hundred out of a hundred!” [94].)
3 Alexander Gourlay in Blake 34 (2000): 61 (Whittaker’s book is “inconsequential,” “little more than an index of what is already known, and even as such it will not be very helpful”).
begin page 157 | ↑ back to topWilkinson, James John Garth. The Human Body and its Connexion with Man. Illustrated by the Principal Organs. (London, 1851) P. 376 (“The Divine Image” from Innocence). <BB #2971> B. §Second Edition (1860).
*Williams, Nicholas M. “Eating Blake, or An Essay on Taste: The Case of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.” Cultural Critique 42 (1999): 137-62.
A ponderous essay on High Art vs. mass art, concerning Red Dragon (Toronto, N.Y., London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1987), in which the psychotic murderer eats Blake’s watercolor of “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.”
Williams, Nicholas M., Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (1998) <Blake (1999)>.
Review
2 Andrew Lincoln, Review of English Studies, N.S. 51 (2000): 143-46 (with William Blake, ed. John Lucas [1998] and Henry Summerfield, A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers [1998]) (“Blake seems more complex than even Williams allows” [146].)
§Wilson, Lewis. “Process and Imagination: The Romantic Absolute in William Blake and D.H. Lawrence.” Emory Ph.D., 1977. 377 ll.
*Wordsworth Circle, 30 No. 3 (Summer 1999):
2 Andrew Cooper & Michael Simpson. “The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake’s Eternal Hacking.” 125-31. (The essay is highly critical of the welcome page of the Blake Archive, suggesting “why Bill Gates and Will Blake may not be lawfully joined together” [125]; for a response, see Eaves, Essick, Viscomi, & Kirschenbaum below; for an unrepentant rejoinder, see Cooper & Simpson, “Looks Good in Practice, But Does it Work in Theory? Rebooting the Blake Archive,” Wordsworth Circle 31 [2000]: 63-68.) 4 Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, & Matthew J. Kirshenbaum. “Standards, Methods, and Objectives in the William Blake Archive: A Response.” 135-44. (A response to Johnson and to Cooper & Simpson, above; for a rejoinder, see Cooper & Simpson, “Looks Good in Practice, But Does it Work in Theory? Rebooting the Blake Archive,” Wordsworth Circle 31 [2000]: 63-68.)
§Wright, Iovanna Lloyd. Urizen: A Dance Drama in Two Acts Adapted by Iovanna Lloyd Wright from the Poem “Urizen” by William Blake. Taliesin[e] Festival of Music and Dance [Scottsdale, Arizona] 1963.
*Wright, Julia M. “The Medium, the Message and the Line in Blake’s Laocoön.” Mosaic 31 (2000): 101-24.
About “correlations between Blake’s works and the Laocoön debate” (107).
Yamazaki, Yusuke. “Blake no ‘contrary’: Emanation to Zoa no Chowa: Blake’s idea of ‘contrary’: The balance of Emanations and Zoas.” Nagasaki Wesleyan Tankidaigaku Kiyo: Bulletin of Nagasaki Wesleyan Junior College 23 (2000): 33-44. In Japanese.
Yamazaki, Yusuke. “Blake no Kami: The Everlasting Gospel ni okeru ‘contrary’ no Sugata: Blake’s idea of God: Showing the two contrary images of God in The Everlasting Gospel.” Nagasaki Wesleyan Tankidaigaku Kiyo: Bulletin of Nagasaki Wesleyan Junior College 23 (2000): 45-55. In Japanese.
§Yang, Hsi-ling. Li chih meng. (Peiching: Jenmin ch’u pan she: Ching hisiao Hsinhua suttien, 1988) 200 pp. In Chinese.
Perhaps this is related to Jinru Yang’s reproduction of Blake’s Songs (Changsha, 1988).
Division II
Blake’s Circle
Cumberland, George (1754-1848)
Blake’s Friend, Correspondent, and Collaborator Cumberland wrote that his novel called The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar (1798) “was never published or a single copy sold to any one,”23↤ 23 MS note in the Bodley copy of The Captive. and only six copies have been traced today. Curiously, however, an anonymous review appeared in The European Magazine 35 (March 1799): 183-84: ↤ 24 [Simon Berington], The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca (1737 ff.); see “The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar and The Memoirs of Signor Gaudento di Lucca,” xxvii-xxxvi of George Cumberland, The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. (1991).
From the time of Sir Thomas More’s Utopai, many works of a similar kind to the present, describing the laws, manners, and customs of countries supposed to be found in the interior of America, or as with the present case and the Adventures of Gaudentio de Lucca,24 have been given to the public, and received with various success, according to the abilities of the inventors. They have sometimes afforded the means of venting oblique satire on the practices of particular countries, and sometimes have been levelled at individuals. The present performance is introduced to the world with very little art, and seems intended to propagate the licentiousness of French principle, in morals, in religion, and in politics. The Sophians, the people here held up for [word illeg: emulation?], appear to have been well read in Mandeville, of the beginning of this century, with the French philosophers of the present day. The work in truth affords nothing new. It is made up of idle reveries and impracticable systems, calculated only to render the ignorant dissatisfied with the present order begin page 158 | ↑ back to top of things, and to raise doubts in the minds of the humble and ingenuous as to their future destination. Such works are intitled to no commendation, either for the subjects or the manner of treating them.
It is at least possible that Blake was responding to this hostile review when he wrote to Cumberland on 1 September 1800: “Your Vision of the Happy Sophis I have devourd. O most delicious book[,] how canst thou Expect any thing but Envy in Londons accursed walls.”
Fuseli, John Henry (1741-1825)
Artist, Friend of Blake
Brenneman, David A. “Self-Promotion and the Sublime: Fuseli’s Dido on the Funeral Pyre.” Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1999 [copyright 2000]): 68-87.
About the duelling Didos of Fuseli and Reynolds at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1784: “Fuseli both orchestrated the critical response to his painting and greatly amplified his reputation by playing his work off that of a well-established rival” (74).
*Frommert, Christian. “Johann Heinrich Füsslis ‘Milton-Gallery’ und ein Apptraum” 100-67 of his chapter 3.2 (100-67) of his Heros und Apokalypse: Zum Erhabenen in Werken Johann Heinrich Füsslis und William Blakes. (Aachen: Verlag der Augustus Buchhandlung, 1996) 209 pp. ISBN: 3860735624. In German. <Blake §(1997)>.
A thesis of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 1993.
Heath, James (1757-1834)
Engraver
Heath, Charles (1785-1848)
Engraver
Heath, Frederick (1810-78)
Engraver
Heath, Alfred (1812-96)
Engraver
John Heath. John Heath’s Catalogue of Illustrated Books and Prints engraved by the Heath Family 1779-1878. ([Bath: John Heath, 1999]) 4°, 80 pp. (plus 1 leaf of “Additions to Book Catalogue”); no ISBN.
The “Introduction” (1) explains that “The catalogue lists the books and separate prints held in John Heath’s collection, which has been formed over 30 years. The engravers involved were James Heath A.R.A., his son Charles, and Charles’ sons, Alfred and Frederick.”
Murray, John (1745-93)
Bookseller, Blake’s Employer
Zachs, William. The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade. With a Checklist of his Publications. A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 4°; ISBN: 019726194.
The account of Lavater’s Physiognomy (83 ff.) includes a List of Payments to its engravers including Blake, reproduced on pl. 23.
Palmer, Samuel (1806-81)
Artist, Blake’s Disciple
§Sanesi, Roberto. “La trasparenza dell’om bra: Su una poesia di Samuel Palmer.” Culture: Annali dell’Istituto di Lingue della Faculta di Scienze Politiche dell’Universita degli Studi di Milano (1989): 7-10. In Italian.
It deals, inter alia, with Palmer’s relationship with Blake.
Smith, John Raphael (1752-1812)
Engraver, Father of Blake’s Patroness Eliza Aders
Ellen G. D’Oench, “Copper into Gold”: Prints by John Raphael Smith 1751-1812 (New Haven & London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1999).
It includes a “Chronological Checklist of [399] Prints by J.R. Smith” (185-241) and a reproduction, without title page, of A Catalogue of Prints Published by J.R. Smith (c. 1798) <BB #526>, which includes Blake’s engravings after Morland of the “Industrious Cottager” and “Idle Laundress.”
Stedman, John Gabriel (1744-97)
Soldier of Fortune, Friend of Blake
*Thomas, Dr. Helen. “John Stedman’s Redemption and the Dynamics of Miscegenation.” 125-33 of chapter 4 (125-53, 297-303): “Cross-Cultural Contact: John Stedman, Thomas Jefferson and the slaves” in her Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. (Cambridge & N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 38.
Taylor, Thomas (1758-1825)
Platonist, Blake’s Acquaintance
Hall, Manly P. “Thomas Taylor, The English Platonist.” 273-98 of his Sages and Seers: Nostradamus, Seer of France; Francis Bacon, The Concealed Poet; The Mythical Figures of Jakob Boehme; The Shepherd of Children’s Minds—Johann Amos Comenius; The Comte de St.-Germain; Mysticism of William Blake; Thomas Taylor, The English Platonist; Gandhi—A Tribute. (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society, Inc.; Second Printing [?1979]).
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794-1852)
Dilettante, Forger, Patron of Blake
Motion, Andrew. Wainewright the Poisoner. (London: faber and faber, 2000).
A fictional confession “dedicated to rescuing Wainewright from obscurity, and to bringing him back to life as a plausible and dynamic force” (xviii); the most rewarding parts are the extensive factual endnotes.