ARTICLE
William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2005
Blake Publications and Discoveries in 2005
The collections of books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings of Dr. A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., have been given to the library of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. The gift includes (1) writings by Blake, including Marriage (M), the “Riddle” manuscript, Songs (o) pl. 39, electrotypes, and pls. 22, 28, 30, 40, 44-46, 48a-b, plus modern editions and facsimiles; (2) Blake’s commercial engravings, such as Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), Thornton’s Virgil (1821), Job (1826), and Dante (1968), plus modern reproductions and facsimiles; (3) Blake scholarship and criticism (1806-2004), especially works with references to Blake before 1863;1↤ 1. The Bentley books associated with Blake before 1863 are listed (with other locations) in Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995), and “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake (1994 ff.). (4) the Cumberland manuscripts;2↤ 2. See G. E. Bentley, Jr., A Bibliography of George Cumberland (1754-1848): Comprehending His Published Books (1780-1829) and Articles (1769-1847) and His Unrecorded Works in Manuscript Including a Novel (?1800), a Play (?1800), a Biography (?1823), a Long Poem (1802-3), and Works on Art (?1788, ?1816, ?1820) (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1975). (5) books by John Flaxman, especially his classical designs;3↤ 3. See G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Early Engravings of Flaxman’s Classical Designs: A Bibliographical Study with a Note on the Duplicating of Engravings by Richard J. Wolfe (New York: New York Public Library, 1964). and (6) books before 1835, especially illustrated books and works Blake is known to have read or annotated (but of course not his copies). The collections are accompanied by a catalogue describing them in detail.
The unfinished group portrait, attributed without evidence to Thomas Phillips, including an allegation without evidence or plausibility that one of the figures represents William Blake, was offered with the collection of Roy Davids at Bonhams, 3 October 2005, lot 14 (reproduced, estimate £4,000-6,000). It was reproduced on the cover of Blake 26.4 (spring 1993).
Blake’s Writings
2005 was a slow year for Blake’s writings. His letter of 12 March 1804, Marriage (M), the “Riddle” ms., and loose plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience were given to public institutions. A new transcript of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was discovered as published by Jacques Raverat in 1910 in a run of 24 copies, and a facsimile of the Marriage with a translation into Portuguese was published in Brazil (2004). Milton was translated into Catalan (2004), and Songs of Innocence and of Experience was issued on a CD-ROM (2003). There were separate printings of “The Lamb” (as a Christmas card, 1952) and “The Tyger” (1931), and Amelia Munson’s collection of Blake’s poetry (1964) was reissued in a pretty little reprint (1999). Some of Blake’s works in illuminated printing were translated into Portuguese by Manuel Portela (2005), and there were trifling editions of poems from the Songs. And the William Blake Archive continues to grow.
The only drama about Blake’s own writings concerned Visions of the Daughters of Albion (N), which has never been described or perhaps even seen by a Blake scholar. It was acquired by Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney before 1921 and remained obscurely in her family for three-quarters of a century. Its mate, Urizen (E), was offered for sale by the Whitney family in 1999 and bought for a record price, but an assiduous search of the Whitney houses did not reveal the Visions. Then a mysterious stranger brought it in to Swann Galleries in New York to offer it for auction, apparently without the knowledge of the Whitney family. Legal wheels were set in motion, the book was withdrawn from sale, and it has now returned to the Whitney family, perhaps to resume its long, undisturbed, and peaceful sleep. It would be wonderfully agreeable if some scholarly prince could bring it back to life with the kiss of knowledge.
Some News Is Bad News
The extraordinarily valuable English Short Title Catalogue (formerly Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue) online records copies (though not microfilms) of (1) The Book of Thel (1789) in Southampton University Library; (2) Poetical Sketches (1783) in Mount Holyoke; (3) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) in University of Kent; and (4-5) Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in University of California (Davis) and Columbia University. However, none of these is recorded in Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995), and their sequels in “William Blake and His Circle” (Blake [1994 ff.]). They are all ghosts; the Southampton Thel proves to be the 1971 facsimile, the Mount Holyoke Poetical Sketches is the Griggs facsimile of 1890, the Kent Songs is the Blake Trust (1955) facsimile, and the California (Davis) and Columbia Visions are facsimiles of the Blake Trust (1959) and Muir (1884, copy no. 50).
Blake’s Art
The Folio Society’s stupendous facsimile of the 537 watercolors for Young’s Night Thoughts is the most beautiful, the most aesthetically satisfying, the most unexpected, the biggest (25 pounds), and the most expensive new book (Canadian $2,180) on Blake in many years. Even its binding is sumptuous, in handcrafted Nigerian goatskin with buckram covers incorporating designs from Blake and a buckram-covered solander box.
begin page 5 | ↑ back to topIt is a true facsimile, in that it attempts a very close reproduction of an original named copy including size of image, color of printing and of tinting, size, color, and quality of paper, with no deliberate alteration as in page order or numbering or obscuring of paper defects or centering the image on the page. It is true-size, 42.0 × 32.5 cm.; the Modigliani Neve paper is appropriate and a joy to handle, with an agreeably three-dimensional texture,4↤ 4. In the original, leaves from the early editions of Night Thoughts were set in cut-out windows of “J WHATMAN 1794” paper from a half-century later, but here in the 2005 Folio Society facsimile the inset design leaves are reproduced on the same leaf of paper as the text leaves. the attempt to give the impression of the original is so faithful that the reproductions are bound in two volumes as Blake’s watercolors were with no new typeset title page and no intrinsic indication save the same one-page colophon in each volume that this is a modern reprint.5↤ 5. The title supplied here derives from the commentary volume by Robin Hamlyn. From the facsimile one can appreciate as never before save with the originals that the watercolors were often designed as two-page spreads, diptychs, with orange on verso echoing orange on facing recto or grey echoing grey. The fidelity is so minute that one can see the type show-through from the other side of the leaf. Indeed, on one leaf (Night VII, pp. 43-44), a clearly visible crease in the paper has been incorporated into Blake’s cloud outline, as Robin Hamlyn points out (xviii).6↤ 6. Hamlyn (Young, Night Thoughts . . . Commentary by Robin Hamlyn [2005] xviii) also identifies on Night VII, p. 55, “the marks left by two sides of a sheet of paper placed on a design on which the watercolour was still wet,” which I cannot see here.
It is a gorgeous book, a joy for both scholars and aesthetes.
No News Is Bad News
The drama of the 19 watercolors for Blair’s Grave was still playing in 2005. Whether one describes it as a tragedy (the set’s being broken up for crass commercial gain), a comedy (so many different claims being made about them by the vendor, or perhaps by the agent of the vendors), or a farce (how can one take seriously the presumption of moral and aesthetic integrity of the vendors?) may depend upon the inclination of individual members of the audience. The set of drawings may (as has been variously claimed, apparently on the authority of the vendor) belong to a US collector with a castle in Scotland who intends to make them public, to a London collector with vaulting financial ambitions, to a Swiss corporation—or to all of the above. However, the dismal fact is that they apparently remained throughout 2005 in a bank vault, inaccessible to scholars. But, to whet your appetite, at the time these words are written the dénouement is imminent and the last act of the drama about the set of drawings for Blair’s Grave as a tragedy/comedy/farce will shortly occur.
Blake’s Commercial Book Engravings
The most exciting discovery in 2005 about Blake’s commercial book engravings was a new printing in The Cabinet of the Arts (1799) of Blake’s engraving in the very rare Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793)—only three copies of Bellamy have been traced in public collections. (The last discovery of a new book with a Blake engraving was Elizabeth Blower’s Maria [1785], described in Blake [2001].) The presence of the Blake plate in The Cabinet of the Arts was discovered by Robert N. Essick by pure serendipity; he bought the previously unknown book for a risible sum for its engravings after Stothard, and only after he received it did he find the Blake print in it. But Blake’s print after C. R. Ryley entitled “F: REVOLUTION” in the Essick copy is not in the copy in the British Library or the two copies in the Yale Center for British Art.
It was very unusual for a print by Blake to be issued again in a work with a different title:
| First Printing | Second Printing |
| Kimpton, History of the Holy Bible (1781) | Josephus, Works ([?1785-86]) |
| Seally and Lyons, Geographical Dictionary ([?1784]) | Adams, New Royal Geographical Dictionary ([?1793]) and Adams, New Royal System of Universal Geography ([?1794]) |
| Darwin, Botanic Garden (1791) | Darwin, Poetical Works (1806) |
| Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793) | Cabinet of the Arts (1799) |
| Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline (1796) | Cumberland, Outlines from the Ancients (1829) |
| Shakspeare, Dramatic Works (1802) | Boydell’s Shakespeare ([?1803]) |
| Blair, The Grave (1808) | Mora, Meditaciones Poeticas (1826) |
A new advertisement for Stedman’s Narrative (1796) helps to establish exactly when it was published, and the copperplates of Job (1826) are described, largely in the dissertation of Mei-Ying Sung, with much more detail than was previously available. A curious survival of printing which should have been trimmed off indicates that at least one of Blake’s engravings for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1796) was printed on paper previously used for a typeset text.
Colored copies B and J of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) were reproduced for the first time in 2004, but only on CD-ROM.
And, with the aid of COPAC (see below), 327 new locations are identified for books bearing Blake’s commercial engravings.
This is a strikingly good harvest.
Blake Catalogues
Several new catalogues are worth recording. There is a new reprint (2003) of the Blake Trust Illustrations to the Bible (1957) with its scores of invaluable reproductions. The exhibition Cloud & Vision, of works inspired by Blake at the Museum of Garden History, on the other hand, was not well received; Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator called the exhibition “feeble” and “vulgar.”
John Windle’s Catalogue Forty: William Blake and His Circle: Books of Scholarship, Books of Beauty (2005) is wonderfully exciting, one of the most extensive, original, handsome, and meticulous catalogues of Blake materials which has appeared in the last hundred years. Some of the works in it are unique, many are comparatively rare, and some of the most remarkable, such as Blake’s engravings for Job, Blair’s Grave, and Young’s Night Thoughts, appear in multiple copies. Of course an increasing number of them are listed as “Price on application,” presumably meaning that the price is embarrassingly high—and negotiable. The catalogue is a joy to handle, a valuable work even for those not tempted or able to acquire its riches. Notice how often it is cited in the entries below.
For me, one of the most notable scholarly discoveries of the past year was COPAC, the British and Irish online union catalogue corresponding on a smaller scale to the North American National Union Catalog.
COPAC is a catalogue of the National Libraries of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the British Library, plus British and Irish academic research libraries7↤ 7. Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Essex, Glasgow, Imperial College, King’s College (London), Lampeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London, London School of Economics, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford (Bodleian and Taylorian), Reading, St. Andrews, School of Advanced Studies (not otherwise identified), School of Oriental and African Studies, Sheffield, Southampton, Trinity College (Dublin), University College (London), and Warwick. (including the independent college libraries of Cambridge and Oxford), plus numbers of specialized research libraries (all I have noticed in London) including, for Blake, the Institute of German Studies, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, the Warburg Institute, and Wellcome Library, but not of major art libraries (the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, Fitzwilliam Museum, or National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum), or the great public libraries (e.g., Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester). Doubtless it has been in existence for some time, but I only came across it very recently when a bookseller traced a book he was offering to only one library in COPAC. (I do not know what COPAC stands for; the online version does not seem to say.)
From COPAC I record the locations of contemporary copies of books with Blake’s writings or commercial engravings not given in Blake Books, Blake Books Supplement, and Blake (1994 ff.)—327 in all.
Books Owned by Blake the Poet
The copy of John Quincy’s English Dispensatory (1733) associated with William Blake was sold to an anonymous British collector by John Windle with some additional evidence not very persuasively associating the work with William Blake.
Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake
The edition of Paradise Lost edited by Richard Bentley (1732) bearing the initials “WB” has been demoted by Alexander Gourlay, Jason Snart, and GEB from Books Owned by William Blake of London (1757-1827) to Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake (1770-1827)—indeed there is no good reason to assume that this “WB” is a William Blake at all.
Scholarship and Criticism
The spate of writing about Blake continues unabated, as a comparison of works in this checklist for recent years indicates:
↤ 8. The books include reprints.
| Books,8 including | Editions & | Catalogues | Essays | Reviews | |
| 2003 | 50 | 17 | 8 | 205 | 47 |
| 2004 | 31 | 8 | 6 | 153 | 81 |
| 2005 | 43 | 9 | 6 | 139 | 79 |
| 2006 | 54 | 15 | 7 | 164 | 73 |
The languages recorded here for 2005 include Afrikaans (1), Catalan (1), Chinese (1), French (4), Galician9↤ 9. *“William Blake (1757-1827).” 33-37 in section 3, “O romanticismo na gran Bretaña” of Eduardo Álvarez González, Aurora Bermúdez Canosa, María Xesús Dono González, Carlos Gómez Blanco, Juana López Beiras, Antonio Pichel Lorenzo, Dorinda Rivera Pedredo, Elisa Santamarina Fernández, Pilar Vázquez Castro, O movemento romántico, Proxecto didáctico da AS-PG; Coordinación: Eduardo Álvarez González (Coruña [Spain]: Baía Edicións, 2003) Literatura universal contemporánea, I; ISBN: 8496128199. In Galician. A school text for “curso de Bacharelato,” with English and Galician texts of “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” and classroom questions, e.g., is this tiger “o animal dun zoo ou como unha criatura espericual?” (one of the four chief languages of Spain, which include also Basque, Catalan, and Spanish), German (4), Italian (6), Japanese (16), Korean (1), Portuguese (2, including the first recorded book on Blake published in Brazil), Russian (1), and Spanish (4), and there are works in English published not only in Japan but in Oslo, Prague and Lebanon.
Books
Aside from reprints, there were very few books about Blake. John Beer’s William Blake: A Literary Life is, despite its title, a sensitive critical work organized chronologically. It does not pretend to biographical originality.
begin page 7 | ↑ back to topJeremy Tambling’s Blake’s Night Thoughts is little more than a collection of “reason[s] for linking Blake and night” (11), scarcely related to Blake’s extraordinary illustrations of Night Thoughts by Edward Young. Far more satisfying is Robin Hamlyn’s substantial book accompanying the magnificent facsimile of the Night Thoughts watercolors, with its sane, workmanlike, but necessarily brief analysis of each of the 537 drawings.
Essays
The essays on Blake were much more fruitful. Essays, reviews, etc., on Blake were collected in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (18), the Blake Journal (14), in the exhibition catalogue called Cloud & Vision (14), in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (29), in Voyages of Conception, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (4), and in Shoichi Matsushima et al., Ekkyo suru Geijutsuka—Ima, Blake wo Yomu: William Blake: A Bordercrossing Artist—Reading His Works Now (5).
Doctoral dissertations on Blake were completed in Canada (1, in Alberta), Denmark (1), England (3, at Birmingham and Nottingham Trent), Spain (1, in Madrid), and the United States (2, in Indiana and Tennessee). Probably the most distinguished of these—or at any rate the only one I have seen—is Mei-Ying Sung’s “Technical and Material Studies of William Blake’s Engraved Illustrations of The Book of Job (1826),” which records very rewardingly the changes Blake’s copperplates went through as he developed his masterpiece. In particular, it details, with photographs, the corrections Blake made by hammering out mistakes from the back of the plates. It will be splendid to see the work in published form.
Some thirty years ago, Robert N. Essick acquired a mysterious portrait whose provenance, subject, and painter were scarcely known beyond speculation. It was immediately recognized as a powerful image, particularly in the intense, compelling eyes, and it has been widely reproduced as a portrait of William Blake, e.g., in Blake Books (1977). In all that time Essick has been brooding about how to demonstrate satisfactorily his conclusion that Blake is both the subject and the painter of the portrait. He has now achieved this triumphantly in his essay called “A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake” in Blake, and we can now confidently omit the query in his title. It is a self-portrait. The most convincing evidence is an asymmetry in Blake’s features; above his nose is a slight crease slanting slightly over his right eyebrow, quite clear in the life mask of 1823. In a mirror the crease would appear to slant over his left eyebrow, and so it appears in the self-portrait. How satisfying to have a venerable mystery so convincingly solved.
The most prolific discoverer of minute particulars about William Blake is Angus Whitehead, who has not yet submitted his dissertation on Blake.10↤ 10. See entries in Part VI under Blake and Whitehead, as well as reviews under Cox and Paley. He reports from George Richmond’s comment in a copy of Gilchrist’s biography (1863) that Richmond associated the Kitty of Poetical Sketches with Catherine Blake—and he assumes that Blake did also. Much of his most fruitful evidence comes from directories and rate books. From these, he is able to give a full context to Blake’s casual reference to “Mrs Enoch” in 1804, demonstrating that she was the wife of Blake’s landlord and that Blake would have been familiar with her baby. His very full and satisfying essay on Blake’s last residence, at 3 Fountain Court, leads into the most original essay of them all. In this he identifies Henry Banes not only as Blake’s brother-in-law (the husband of his wife’s sister, which was previously known) but as a vintner, as a fellow-resident at 3 Fountain Court, as Blake’s benefactor, and as the father of a niece and grandnephews of whom we had not known at all before. Further, Whitehead demonstrates that the radical artist and printer John Barrow, who published one of Blake’s engravings, was intimate with the family and resident in the same building. Such details allow us to form a far richer picture of Blake’s last years. It would be admirable if Whitehead would put these discoveries together into a book on Blake’s last years.
The Tools of Scholarship
There are the usual workhorses of scholarship, Robert N. Essick’s invaluable “Blake in the Marketplace” and this “William Blake and His Circle,” both in Blake. Critics and scholars regularly visit them, but the number who harness and ride them systematically must be very limited.
Roads Not Taken: The Nuts in the Fruitcake
Some writing on Blake cries out for protest: you can’t write about Blake like that. Well, of course you can, and students regularly do, but grown-ups shouldn’t, or at least they should be prepared for subsequent readers to protest. Richard Holmes says in the introduction to his edition of Gilchrist that Blake engraved the texts of Blair’s Grave and Young’s Night Thoughts, though Blake did not publish any engraving of Blair’s Grave at all, and the text of the edition of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) which he illustrated has the text set entirely in type. And Jeremy Tambling in his Blake’s Night Thoughts misnames Blake’s mother Catherine Armitage as “Harmitage” and his friend Thomas Stothard as “Stodhard,” and he confuses himself almost inextricably as to the differences in Blake’s works between “plate,” “page,” and leaf.
The annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning William Blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2005) and those for previous years which are not recorded in Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995), and “William Blake and His Circle” (1994-2005). Installments of “William Blake and His Circle” (1994 ff.) are continuations of Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement, with similar principles and conventions.
I take Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on Blake,11↤ 11. Except for the states of the plates for Blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991). Significant further details, especially about collations, are given in Roger R. Easson and Robert N. Essick, William Blake Book Illustrator: A Bibliography and Catalogue of the Commercial Engravings, Volume 1: Plates Designed and Engraved by Blake (Normal, Illinois: American Blake Foundation, 1972); Volume 2: Plates Designed or Engraved by Blake 1774-1796 (Memphis, Tennessee: American Blake Foundation, 1979); volume 3 never appeared. and have noted significant differences from them.
begin page 8 | ↑ back to topThe organization of Division I of the checklist is as in Blake Books:
Division I: William Blake
| Part I: | Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles of Blake’s Writings Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and Translations Section B: Collections and Selections |
| Part II: | Reproductions of His Drawings and Paintings Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors Section B: Collections and Selections |
| Part III: | Commercial Book Engravings |
| Part IV: | Catalogues and Bibliographies |
| Part V: | Books Owned by William Blake the Poet Appendix: Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake in the Years 1770-1827 |
| Part VI: | Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies Note: Collections of essays on Blake and issues of periodicals devoted entirely to him are listed under the titles; their authors may be recovered from the index. |
Division II: Blake’s Circle 12↤ 12. There is nothing in Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995) corresponding to 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 and his family, 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, Henry Crabb Robinson, Thomas Stothard, John Varley, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. 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 under the book reviewed, are only for works which are substantially about Blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on Blake. The authors of the reviews may be recovered from the index.
I have made no systematic attempt to record manuscripts and typescripts, “audio books” and magazines, CD-ROMs,13↤ 13. For instance, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, commentary by Stuart Curran (2003); see entry under Part I, Section A. chinaware, comic books, computer printouts, radio and television broadcasts, calendars, exhibitions without catalogues, festivals and lecture series, furniture with inscriptions, lectures on audio cassettes,14↤ 14. For instance, Jack Herbert, “William Blake: Poet, Painter, Visionary,”* “Blake’s Song of Liberty & America”*; Grevel Lindop, “Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgement”*; Kathleen Raine, “William Blake’s Fourfold Vision of London” (presumably related to her “The Spiritual Fourfold London,” Aligarh Critical Miscellany 5 [1992]: 181-98, and her William Blake’s Fourfold London [1993], “William Blake—Prophetic Voice of England,” “The Imagination According to William Blake”; Jonathan Wordsworth, “William Blake & the Romantic Imagination,” according to Temenos Academy Recorded Lectures: A Catalogue of Over Three Hundred Lectures on Audio Cassette, from Our Programmes 1992-2005—an asterisk indicates “with slides.” lipstick, microforms, mosaic pavements, music, pillows, poems, postage stamps, postcards, posters, published scores, recorded readings and singings, rubber stamps, stained-glass windows, stickers, T-shirts, tattoos, tiles, video recordings, or e-mail related to Blake.
The status of electronic “publications” becomes increasingly vexing. Some such works seem to be merely electronic versions of physically stable works, and some suggest no more knowledge than how to operate a computer, such as reviews invited for the listings of the book sale firm of Amazon.com, which are divided into those by (1) the author, (2) the publisher, and (3) other, perhaps disinterested, remarkers.15↤ 15. For instance, Blake is in the “Self-Publishing Hall of Fame” online, and there is a web site called “Home-Essays” with more than 30 essays on Blake for “All Grade Levels”; volunteers can submit essays (6 March 2006). I have not searched for electronic publications, and I report here only those I have happened upon which appear to bear some authority.16↤ 16. E.g., G. E. Bentley, Jr., “Blake and the Xenoglots: Strange-Speaking Critics and Scholars of Blake,” online (Blake bonus content 2004).[e] Of course many periodicals are now issued online as well as in hard copies.
In transliterations from Chinese and Japanese, foreign proper names are given as they are represented in our script (e.g., “William” and “Blake”) rather than as they would be pronounced in Chinese and Japanese (“Iriamu” and “Bureiku”).
The chief indices used in compiling this 2005 checklist were Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature 79 (2005) #8675-8717; Books in Print 2005-2006 ([Sept.] 2005) titles, subjects, authors; Book Review Index (2005); “Citation Information by [Japanese] Institute of Informatics”; Japanese National Diet Library Online Catalogue; COPAC (union online catalogue of British and Irish national and university research libraries); 2003 MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles in the Modern Languages and Literatures (2004 [received 26 Jan. 2005]) 1: #4058-4126 and online (last viewed 22 Feb. 2006); Noah Heringman, “Recent Studies begin page 9 | ↑ back to top in the Nineteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005): 961-1037; and The Year’s Work in English Studies 83 (2005): 593-603.
It is not always easy to ascertain from these fairly rough indices the relevance of a work to the poet-painter William Blake. Two of those which I have ignored, perhaps erroneously, as irrelevant are Ariel Dorfman, Blake’s Therapy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004) 192 pp., ISBN: 1583220704 and 1583224793; and Etrulia R. Lee, Blake the Duck (Fort Washington [Maryland]: Chamike, 1994) 24 pp., ISBN: 1884876099.
I am indebted for help of many kinds to Dr. E. B. Bentley, Mr. Martin Butlin, Professor Robert N. Essick (especially for showing me the final typescript of his “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” for Blake and his Cabinet of the Arts [1799]), Dr. Francisco Gimeno Suances, Ms. Sarah Jones at Blake (for extraordinarily meticulous editing), Mr. Jeff Mertz (our man at the Bodleian), Museum of Garden History, Palgrave Macmillan (publishers), Mr. Paul Miner, Professor Joseph Viscomi, Mr. Angus Whitehead, and Mr. 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, 2005” was carried out in the Huntington Library, the Bibliotheca La Solana, the University of Toronto Library, and the Toronto Public Library.
Symbols
* Works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by Blake or depicting him. If there are more than 19 illustrations, the number is specified. If the illustrations include all those for a work by Blake, say Thel or his illustrations to L’Allegro, the work is identified.
§ Works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority.
Abbreviations
| BB | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
| BBS | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
| Blake | Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly |
| BR (2) | G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004) |
| Butlin | Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) |
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles,17↤ 17. 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, or centering the image on the page. Reprints, and Translations
| Anonymous | Europe pl. 1 (see “Order” of the Songs) |
| Morgan (J. Pierpont) | Letter (12 March 1804) |
| Library | |
| Victoria University | Illuminated Works: Marriage (M), Songs (o) pl. 39, electrotypes, and pls. 22, 28, 30, 40, 44-46, 48a-b |
| Library in the University of Toronto | Manuscript: “Riddle” manuscript |
| EDMEADS & PINE | 1802 | Self-portrait (?1802) Essick Collection |
Private Owners and Public Institutions Which Have Disposed of Original Blakes since the Records Were Made for Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995)
Bentley, Dr. A. E. K. L. B. and G. E.
Mary E. Malone
The Book of Ahania (1795)
Pls. 1 and 5, 2 and 6, and 3 and 4 are etched back-to-back, and pls. (2, 6), (3, 4) each have one rounded corner, according to Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) 287. Therefore the five plates of The Book of Los (1795) plus Europe pl. 3 cannot be on the versos of The Book of Ahania, as in BB 113, 145.
The Book of Los (1795)
If, as Viscomi argues (Blake and the Idea of the Book 287), the six plates of The Book of Ahania were on only three copperplates, etched back-to-back, the Ahania versos cannot have had The Book of Los pls. 1-5 and Europe pl. 3 (pace BB 145, 113). The Book of Los plates are so similar in size—9.7 to 9.9 cm. wide by 13.5 to 13.7 cm. high—that any one of them could have been on the verso of any other of them. Perhaps four plates were etched back-to-back, and Europe pl. 3 (13.4 × 9.6 cm.), the only Europe plate without a copperplate-maker’s mark, was on the recto of the fifth plate.
begin page 10 | ↑ back to topEurope (1794)
| Copy | Plates | Leaves | Watermark | Leaf size in cm. | Printing color |
| Anon. | 1 | 1 | Wove paper | 24.2 × 17.7 | dark grey-Blue |
Pl. 1 (The Ancient of Days [A], Rosenbach Museum) <BB #10>
“The [brick-red] ink color and flat printing suggest that this is probably a posthumous impression. The broad, thin [grey] washes are similar to those found in some posthumous impressions of plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” e.g., copy h, pl. 40 (“The Fly”), according to Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 149n1.
Pl. 1 (The Ancient of Days [D])
Binding: “Printed by Blake, but probably hand colored, at least in part, by someone other than Blake or his wife Catherine”—note “the careless handling of the rose-red tints on the clouds”—though “the coloring on the figure is more controlled and convincing; perhaps two different artists were responsible for these different styles.”18↤ 18. Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 149, 150, the source of all the information here. The leaf with a hand-drawn brown ink border just beyond the print was mounted, probably for George A. Smith about 1853, in a window cut in a larger sheet 30.7 × 23.7 cm., with stitch marks at the left of the host leaf and inscribed (probably by George A. Smith about 1853) “2” and “From Europe, frontispiece.”
History: See the “Order” of the Songs.
If, as Joseph Viscomi argues (Blake and the Idea of the Book 287), the six plates of The Book of Ahania were etched back-to-back on three copperplates, Europe pl. 3 cannot be on the verso of one of them (pace BB 145, 113). Perhaps Europe pl. 3, the only Europe plate without a platemaker’s mark (BB 145), has a Book of Los plate etched on the verso. Note that Europe pl. 3 appears only in copies H and K printed in 1795 and 1821 (Viscomi 279, 376, 380).
The First Book of Urizen (1794)
Platemaker’s marks on pls. 2, 19, and 28, which I have not observed, are reported by Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) 413n9.
Letters
1804 March 12 to William Hayley
History: Mrs. John Malone (Mary E. Malone) sold it (according to the Pierpont Morgan Library’s records) in 1976 to Charles Ryskamp, who gave it in January 2005 to the Pierpont Morgan Library.19↤ 19. Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 156.
1825 November 25
Found by Virginia Murray for Michael Phillips in the John Murray Archive and reproduced in (1) the catalogue of the Wordsworth Trust exhibition of Milton (6 July-31 Oct. 2004) (recto); (2) G. E. Bentley, Jr., “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake 39.1 (summer 2005): cover (recto) and 11 (verso); (3) Angus Whitehead, “William Blake’s Last Residence: No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, George Richmond’s Plan and an Unrecorded Letter to John Linnell,” British Art Journal 6.1 (2005): 27 (recto); and (4) Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job,” Print Quarterly 22 (2005): 139 (recto) (“a previously unrecorded letter . . . not . . . known to scholars before” [138, 140]).
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([?1790])
Copy C
History: Apparently reproduced in the Brazilian facsimile (2004).
Copy M
History: Dr. A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., <Blake (2001)> gave it in October 2005 with the rest of their collections to Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto.
Editions
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Chelsea: [Printed by Jacques Raverat] 1910) 8°, i, 21 pp. (plus 5 blank leaves at each end).
According to the colophon, it was “Printed at Chelsea by J.P. Raverat. January 1910”; a ms. note in the copy “ex dono impressionis” to “Sydney Cockerell” (in the collection of James Schaffner) says it was printed in “24 copies” “by Mr Hornby’s permission at the Ashendene Press. | SCC”.
§*El Matrimonio del Cielo y del Infierno (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) (1790-1792). Estudio preliminar, traducción y notas de José Luis Palomares. (2000) <Blake (2002)> C. 3a ed. (2005).
*Matrimônio do Céu e do Inferno. Tr. Julia Vidili. (São Paulo [Brazil]: Madras, 2004) 8°, 59 pp.; ISBN: 8573748028. In Portuguese.
A color facsimile [unidentified but apparently of copy C] with translation on facing pages.
Milton (1804[-11])
Edition
*Milton Un Poema. Edició Bilingüe. Traducció i postfaci d’Enric Casassas Figueres. (Barcelona: Edicions dels Quaderns Crema, 2004) In Amicorum Numero 20, 4°, 252 pp.; ISBN: 8477274223. In English and Catalan.
English and Catalan text, plate by plate, on facing pages, with an “Appendix: Planxes Suplementàries” including the Preface (226-35). There are also “Postfaci del Traductor” (237-42) and “Notes” (in Catalan) (243-52).
begin page 11 | ↑ back to top“The Order in which the Songs of Innocence and Experience ought to be paged” (?after 1818)
Europe pl. 1 (The Ancient of Days [D])
Binding: See the entry under Europe, above.
In the collection of leaves including the “Order” of the Songs, (S1), the leaf numbered 97 with Hayley’s Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802) pl. 14 and the “Riddle” manuscript acquired by Dr. A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr. <BB #135>, was given by them with the rest of their collections in October 2005 to (S2) Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto.
| Payer | Date | Sum | Location of ms. |
| Thomas Butts | 5 July 1805 | £5.7.0 | Kenneth Rendell |
1805 July 5
History: Acquired by Joseph Holland; offered with the collection of Joseph Holland and Vincent Newton in John Windle, Catalogue 26 (Dec. 1995), lot 1 (with Keynes [1921] and other ephemera, reproduced, price on enquiry [sold], i.e., kept for the Windle collection) <Blake (1996)>; sold by Windle in June 1996 (according to “Blake in the Marketplace, 1996,” Blake 30.4 [spring 1997]: 102) to the autograph dealer Kenneth Rendell <Blake (1997)>; offered on consignment in John Windle, Catalogue 40 (Nov. 2005), lot 1 (“Price on application”), for (Windle tells me) $45,000; returned to Kenneth Rendell.
“Riddle” ms. (?1802)
See the “Order” of the Songs.
Song of Los (1795)
The 8 prints of Song of Los derive from 4 copperplates; pls. 1 and 8 are recto and verso of a plate 17.6 × 23.5 cm.; pls. 2 and 5 are recto and verso of a plate 17.3 × 24.2 cm.; pls. 3-4 are side by side on a plate 27.2 × 21.4 cm.; and pls. 6-7 are side by side on a plate 28.0 × 22.2 cm.—see Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book 287, and BBS p. 39. The weight would have been 3,014.9 g and the cost £2.0.5¼.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Copy C
History: Reproduced on the CD-ROM (2003).
Copy T
History: The first copy of Muir’s facsimile of Songs of Experience was colored after copy T in the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings and sent in October 1884 to the Times (according to Muir’s letter of 28 November 1885 to the editor of the Times in the collection of Robert N. Essick), but the other copies were colored after copy U <BB p. 422>.
Copy Z
History: Reproduced on the CD-ROM (2003).
Copy o
Pl. 39 History: Dr A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., <BB #139; BBS p. 129> gave it with the rest of their collections in October 2005 to Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto.
Electrotypes (?1861)
History: (2Di) Dr A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., <BB #139; BBS p. 130> gave their set with the rest of their collections in October 2005 to Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto.
Pls. 22, 28, 30, 40, 44-46, 48a-b
History: Dr A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., <BB #139; BBS p. 131> gave them with the rest of their collections in October 2005 to Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto.
Edition
§Songs of Innocence and of Experience [copy C] London, 1794 [copy Z] London, 1826. Commentary by Stuart Curran. 1 CD-ROM. (Octavo Editions: Oakland [California], 2003); ISBN: 1891788892.
Review
§Steve Clark, European Journal of English Studies 8 (2005): 255-57.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793[-1831])
Copy N
Binding: Inscribed in pencil on the front flyleaf: “1848 | 12 8th paid 70s | for this to | A Evans &[?] Son[?] | London | RT [or perhaps RL] | 4 guineas was asked for it”.20↤ 20. According to John Windle, as reported in Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 148.
History: . . . Bought 12 Aug. [or 8 Dec.] 1848 from A. Evans & Son, London, for £3.10.0 (£4.4.0 was asked) by RT (or perhaps RL—see the inscription above) . . . The anonymous individual who said he had acquired Visions (N) from an antique dealer and offered to sell it in 2004 at Swann Galleries (New York) was sued for possession of it by a member or members of the Whitney family; the suit was settled out of court, and the book is again in the possession of a member or members of the Whitney family, who do not plan to sell it.21↤ 21. According to Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 148. The information about the lawsuit, ownership, and plan not to sell came to Essick from Christine von der Linn of Swann Galleries (now Swann). For more details about the history of Visions (N), see BB #213, BBS p. 143, and Blake (2005).
Edition
Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Ed. Robert N. Essick. (2002) <Blake (2003)>
Review
Andrew Wilton, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (2004): 126-27.
Section B: Collections and Selections
The Divine Image. ([?New York, ?1948]) <BBS p. 151 dates it ?1949> B. §The Divine Image. (New York, 1949) C. The Divine Image. Printed by Valenti Angelo for the Zamorano-Roxburghe joint meeting, San Francisco, 1976.
A and B bear a note: “25 copies printed and illuminated by Valenti Angelo” (1897-1982).
“The Edition of the Works of Wm. Blake” by “The Blake Press at Edmonton,” vol. 1.
(d) Songs of Experience: See entry under Songs, copy T, in Part I, Section A.
The Lamb. A Christmas Greeting to their friends printed by Betty & Ralph Sollitt at The Redcoat Press, Westport, Conn. [1952]. A folded sheet making 4 leaves; text only.
§El Matrimonio del Cielo y del Infierno, y Cantos de Inocencia y de Experiencia. Tr. Soledad Capurro. <BBS p. 158, Blake (2002, 2004)> C. §3a. ed. (1997) D. §4a. ed. (2001) E. Prólogo de Luis Cernuda. 5a. ed. (2003); ISBN: 8475220878.
The translation is from the Keynes text, “aceptada generalmente como edición canónica.”
§Obra poética. Tr. Pablo Mañé Garzón (Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 1992) <Blake (1994, 1999, 2003)> D. 4a. ed. (2004) 8°, 258 pp.
The copyright date for Ediciones 29 is 1980, apparently referring to Obra Completa en Poesía, tr. Pablo Mañé Garzón (1980) Libros Río Nuevo <BBS p. 159>.
The Poems of William Blake. Ed. W. B. Yeats. (1893) <BB #293A-E> <BBS p. 161> G. (New York: Carlton House [c. 1950]) viii, 278 pp. H. (1969) <BB #293F> I. (1979) <BBS p. 161> J. (2002) <Blake (2003)>
*Poems of William Blake. Selected by Amelia H. Munson. (New York, 1964) <BB #295> B. Illustrations by William Blake. Collector’s Edition Bound in Genuine Leather. (Norwalk, Connecticut: Easton Press [1999]) 139 pp.
“William Blake” (1-9).
The Portable Blake. Ed. Alfred Kazin. (1946) <BB #306>
See entry in Part VI under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapters 7 and 8.
Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. Northrop Frye. (1953) <BB #319>
See entry in Part VI under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 13.
*Sete Livros Iluminados. Tr. Manuel Portela. (Lisboa [Portugal]: Antígona, 2005) 8°, 175 pp., 32 good color reproductions; ISBN: 9726081815. In Portuguese.
Manuel Portela, “Introdução: Oficina gráfica & forja divina: a gravura como cosmogonia” (5-22); “Notas da introdução” (23-24); “Notas textuais” (25-31); “Pequeno glossário mitológico de William Blake” adapted from Damon’s Blake Dictionary (1965) (159-73)—with a loose leaf of “Errata.”
All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, The Book of Thel, America, Europe, Song of Los, and Book of Los are given, with English and Portuguese on facing pages.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Engraved by Derek Cowan. (Cumberland [British Columbia]: Cowan & Tetley, 2001) edition of 20, horizontal folio, 13 leaves printed on one side only; no ISBN.
Text and un-Blake-like white-line designs for 3 poems from Innocence and 11 from Experience.
Songs of Innocence [pls. 3, 6, 8, 16, 18, 24, 27] and Songs of Experience [pls. 29, 33-34, 36, 43, 46-48, 53]. (Manchester [England]: Manchester Etching Workshop, 1983) <BBS pp. 135-36>
According to a flyer of “Aug. 2005,” Jacqueline Marshall (of Lymm, Cheshire), “a colourist for the Manchester Etching Workshop” edition of the Songs, still has “a few prints [which] were never coloured” and which she would be “willing to colour . . . to order . . . from my own master set”: 2 complete sets at £2,500, plus individual prints of all save “The Divine Image” at £60 (“A Cradle Song,” pl. 1) to £300 (“The Little Girl Found,” pl. 2, which “takes well over five hours” to color).
The Tiger. Illustration by Theodore Ross and printed by Carl J. H. Anderson, Franklin Printing Company, Philadelphia. The paper is Linweave Text, White Antique Finish. ([No place:] Linweave Limited Editions, 1931). A sheet folded to make 4 leaves with a strange design.
William Blake Archive <http://www.blakearchive.org>
The Archive announced in 2005 catalogues of the Blake holdings in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, British Museum, collection of Robert N. Essick (Altadena, California), Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), Fogg Art Museum (Harvard), J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Glasgow University Library, Houghton Library (Harvard), Huntington Library and Art Gallery (San Marino, California), Library of Congress (Washington, DC), Metropolitan Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), New York Public Library, Pierpont Morgan Library, Royal Institution of Cornwall, Tate (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester), and Yale Center for British Art (New Haven).
In 2005 the Archive was “designated an Approved Edition by the Modern Language Association,” its first electronic “seal.”
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Robert Blair, The Grave, watercolors
History: The 19 watercolors were sold by the London dealer Libby Howie in February or March 2005 for £6,000,000 to “Marburg BVI,” said to be a Swiss corporation but perhaps a private collector not necessarily Swiss; the export of the drawings was stopped by the British Arts Minister, Estelle Morris, until 30 May, extended to 30 September 2005, to enable a British institution to purchase the drawings, valued at £8,800,000 in the Reviewing Committee report of 16 March 2005 (<http://213.225.138.141/resources/assets//R/revcom_case043_note_doc_6927. doc>); the watercolors were sent to Switzerland.22↤ 22. The details above are from Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 154. For information about the Blair designs in 2005, see British Department for Culture, Media and Sport 30 March 2005 (<http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/press_notices/archive_2005/dcms051_05. htm>); entries for media reports in Part VI under Anon., Blackstock, Demetriou, Kennedy, Noah, and Reynolds.
The leaf with sketches for an alternative title page (two versions, recto and verso) <Butlin #614> was given in 2001 by Gertrude Weyhe Dennis to the Pierpont Morgan Library (according to Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 [spring 2006]: 154).
Dante
Reproductions of Blake’s watercolors were added to the William Blake Archive in 2005.
Thomas Gray
Reproductions of Blake’s watercolors were added to the William Blake Archive in 2005.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1797)
*Young, Edward. Night Thoughts: The Poem Illustrated with Water Colours by William Blake. Commentary by Robin Hamlyn. [3 vols.] (London: Folio Society, 2005) folio (two volumes of color facsimiles without title page) and 4° (the Hamlyn volume which supplies the title page), xx, 362 pp.
According to the colophons in vols. 1-2, “This facsimile edition of Young’s Night Thoughts has been reproduced by digital photography . . . printed by Bath Press, Blantyre, on Modigliani Neve paper.” 1,000 numbered copies for sale to members of the Folio Society and 20 lettered copies which are not for sale. The leaves (16½″ × 12 13/16″) are virtually the same as the leaves on which Blake made his drawings (c. 16½″ × 12 7/8″) and significantly smaller than the leaves onto which the drawings are mounted (20½″ × 15½″).
Hamlyn, with a workmanlike critical commentary on each watercolor, notes “how carefully Blake usually followed Edward Young’s words” (vii).
Section B: Collections and Selections
*Stevens, Bethan. The British Museum: William Blake. (London: British Museum Press, 2005) square 12°, 96 pp., 56 reproductions, mostly in color; ISBN: 0714126454 and ISBN 13: 9780714126456.
Each reproduction is generally preceded by a page of description or quotation of the text illustrated.
Reviews
§Sunday Herald [Glasgow] 27 Nov. 2005 (One of the “Greatest Reads of 2005”).
§Antiques Magazine 14-20 Jan. 2006.
*William Blake Stained Glass Colouring Book. Rendered by Marty Noble. (Mineola [New York]: Dover Publications, 2005) 4°, 16 leaves and images; ISBN: 0486446670.
Part III: Commercial Book Engravings
Adams, Michael, New Royal Geographical Magazine (1793, 1794)
1793 New Location: Cambridge.
1794 New Location: Cambridge (in 48 parts).
Adams, Michael, New Royal Geographical Magazine (?1794)
New Location: Cambridge; also reproduced by Primary Source Microfilm.
Adams, Michael, New Royal System of Universal Geography (Hogg, ?1794)
New Locations: Cambridge, Leeds.
Allen, Charles, Roman History (1797)
New Locations: British Library, Cambridge, Edinburgh.
Allen, Charles, History of England (1797)
New Location: Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection).
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1783, 1785, 1791, 1799)
1783 New Location: Edinburgh.
1785 New Locations: Glasgow, National Library of Scotland.
1791 New Location: Oxford (Taylorian).
1799 New Locations: National Library of Wales, Trinity College (Dublin).
Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793)
Primary Source Microfilm reproduced it in their Eighteenth Century Collection series (by 2005).
Blake’s engraving was reprinted in The Cabinet of the Arts (1799).
Bible
Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)
New Locations: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester.
begin page 14 | ↑ back to topUnder the terms of the “Memorandum of Agreement between William Blake and John Linnell. March 25th 1823,” “J.L. [was] to find Copper Plates” (BR [2] 386). According to his “Account of Expenses of the Book of Job,” Linnell paid for 3 lots each of “6 copper Plates for Job” in “1823” at £1.0.0, £1.2.0, and £1.3.7, and for 2 more in 1825 [by 3 March] at 6s (BR [2] 804).
The 18 Job plates acquired in 1823 were almost certainly the 18 plates (pls. 3-14, 16, 18-22) of uniform width (17.0 to 17.2 cm.), height (21.8 to 22.1 cm.), and thickness (0.145 to 0.160 cm.), all bearing the same copperplate-maker’s mark slanting down from the top left corner of R PONTIFEX & C | 22 LISLE STREET | SOHO LONDON. Crossing marks on the versos of these plates show that they were cut from 3 large sheets of copper which already bore these crossing marks.23↤ 23. Mei-Ying Sung, “Technical and Material Studies of William Blake’s Engraved Illustrations of The Book of Job (1826),” Nottingham Trent University PhD (2005) 148-51, generously sent to me. The cost of the 18 plates was at the rate of 11.6 g for a penny.
The 2 plates acquired early in 1825 are almost certainly pls. 15 and 17, which are on the versos of plates originally used for pls. II-III of Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, [tr. John Mills] (1762), which differ significantly from the first 18 plates in width (16.6 cm.), height (20.8 and 20.2 cm.), and thickness (0.100 and 0.106 cm.). The cost of the Duhamel plates was at the rate of 8.6 g for a penny.
The 2 plates not accounted for in Linnell’s “Account of Expenses of the Book of Job” are apparently pls. 1-2, the title page and the first design, which are narrower (16.5 and 16.6 cm.), shorter (21.3 and 20.0 cm.), and thinner (0.143 and 0.114 cm.) than the first 18 plates purchased. Pl. 1 bears vertically at the bottom right corner the copperplate-maker’s mark of G HARRIS | No 3124↤ 24. Not “N” 3″ as in BB p. 518. | SHOE LANE | LONDON (part of the first line cut off), and pl. 2 has the PONTIFEX mark. At least the second of them, pl. 2, must have been acquired before 1825, for at Samuel Palmer’s “never-to-be forgotten first interview” with Blake, “the copper of the first plate—‘Thus did Job continually’ [Job pl. 2]—was lying on the table where he had been working at it” (BR [2] 391); the date must be before 9 October 1824 when Palmer called on Blake with Linnell (BR [2] 400). At the rate of the other PONTIFEX plates (11.6 g for a penny), the cost would have been 5s 8d.
Blair, Robert, The Grave (1808, 1813 . . .)
1808 A-B New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, National Library of Wales, Newcastle, Sheffield, Trinity College (Dublin).
1813 C-D New Location: Southampton.
Blower, Elizabeth, Maria (1785)
New Location: Bristol.
Boydell’s Graphic Illustrations of the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare ([?1803])
New Location: Birmingham.
Brown, John, Elements of Medicine (1795)
New Locations: Birmingham, Cambridge, Wellcome Library.
Burger, Gottfried Augustus, Leonora (1796)
New Locations: Cambridge (3 from Keynes Collection), Institute of German Studies.
New Entry
The Cabinet of the Arts (1799)
Title page 1: THE | CABINET of the ARTS. | - | A SERIES OF ENGRAVINGS, | BY | English Artists, | FROM ORIGINAL DESIGNS, BY | Stothard, Burney, Harding, Corbould, Van Assen, Potter [sic], | Cosway, Paul Sandby, Mather Brown, Catton, &c. | = | [Vignette: London: Published by Castildine & Dunn, Copper-Plate Printers, No 9, Bagnio Court, Newgate Street, February 3, 1796.25↤ 25. The design is assigned to Stothard by A. C. Coxhead, Thomas Stothard (1906) 38. | | = | London, | M.DCC.XCIX. [1799] | PRICE FIVE GUINEAS, BOUND.
Title page 2: THE | CABINET | OF THE | ARTS. | = | A SERIES OF ENGRAVINGS; | BY |
| STOTHARD, | BURNEY, |
| HARDING, | CORBOULD, |
| VAN ASSEN, | PORTER [sic], |
| COSWAY, | PAUL SANDBY, |
| MATHER BROWN, | CATTON, | |
Copies: Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, with 95 prints), British Library (shelfmark 1401.i.25, with 94 prints), Essick (with 64 separate prints), Yale Center for British Art (2; 1 with 117 engravings printed on rectos, 1 with 160 prints on 117 leaves, including duplicates of some portraits).
Size: 24.5 × 17.1 cm., varying slightly (Essick copy).
Paper: Uniform off-white wove paper with watermarks (in the Essick copy) of 1794 | J WHATMAN (fragments on ff. 9, 16, 25, 49, 52, 55-56, 63, 66), and widely spaced “5” and “6” (f. 4, apparently a single inserted leaf). Many leaves show three deckled edges, indicating that these leaves have not been cut or trimmed and that they are halves of a small sheet, though only a few leaves are visibly conjugate. (The size alone would have suggested that it was a quarto.)
Contents: The prints bear no number or indication of where they should be placed, and the only description of the contents is on the two title pages—prints designed by Mather Brown, Burney, Catton, Corbould, Cosway, Harding, Potter or Porter, Paul Sandby, Stothard, Van Assen, “&c.” However, the Essick copy has no print with the name of Burney, Corbould, Cosway, Harding, or Paul Sandby, and two-thirds of the prints are by others: Anon. (19, some of which could be by begin page 15 | ↑ back to top the named artists), G. Bickham, Jr. (2), C. H. Coypel (1), Isaac Cruikshank (3), Gillot (2), Sir Joshua Reynolds (1), Charles Reuben Ryley (2, including one engraved by Blake), Tassie (1), I. Taylor (2), and W. Turner (10).
Sources of the Prints: The prints with dates or which have been traced to dated works appeared in Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (London: T. Bellamy and T. Evans, 1793), Harrison’s British Magazine (1782-83), Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (London: E. and S. Harding, 1796), Thomas Townshend, Poems (London: E. and S. Harding, 1796) (8 Stothard prints), and 1797 (f. 42).
Half the prints (31) seem to come from three books: Townshend (8), a book on the English royal family (10), alternating roughly with a book on English places (13).
Note that the plates identified were originally commissioned by several different booksellers—T. Bellamy and T. Evans, Castildine and Dunn, E. and S. Harding, and Harrison. Apparently an anonymous bookseller—none is named on the two title pages—acquired a miscellaneous collection of copperplates originally commissioned by various different booksellers and had them printed on sheets of uniform paper, two prints per sheet as in a small folio.
The prints in Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793) are on soft wove paper 28.2 × 22.5 cm.; those in The Cabinet of the Arts (1799) are on paper watermarked 1794 | J WHATMAN. The prints in The Cabinet of the Arts are therefore not remainders from Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine but new printings. Description: The work consists of two title pages plus 64 prints printed on rectos only (in the Essick copy).
All the prints probably appeared in previous publications; another print of “French Revolution” (C. R. Ryley-Charles Grignion) appeared in Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), and 8 of the Stothard plates previously appeared in Thomas Townshend, Poems (1796). The Cabinet of the Arts (1799) seems to be a nonce collection, a pair of title pages followed by prints chosen irregularly for their availability without much regard for the artists named on the title pages. Copies vary disconcertingly after the title pages, with 64, 94, 95, 117, and 160 prints. Only the copy in the Essick Collection includes Blake’s print of “F: Revolution” for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793) <BB #418>.
Blake’s connection with the work was first identified in the copy acquired by Robert N. Essick in the eBay auction of July 2005 (£88) and reported in his “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (2006): 158-61, with reproductions of the first title page and the Blake print.
The leaf with the first title page was printed twice, once with the typeset text in black and once with the engraving in brown.
Catullus, Poems (1795)
New Location: Cambridge.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, Poetical Works (1782)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle.
Commins, Thomas, An Elegy, Set to Music (1786)
A copy of Blake’s print was given in 1998 by Charles Ryskamp to the Pierpont Morgan Library.26↤ 26. Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 181.
Cumberland, George, An Attempt to Describe Hafod (1796)
New Locations: British Library, Cambridge, Glasgow, National Library of Scotland, Sheffield, Southampton, Trinity College (Dublin).
Cumberland, George, Outlines from the Ancients (1829)
New Locations: Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester.
Cumberland, George, Thoughts on Outline (1796)
New Locations: Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Edinburgh, Manchester.
Dante, Blake’s Illustrations of (1838)
New Location: London.
Reproductions of Blake’s engravings (Essick set) were added to the William Blake Archive.
Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden (1791, 1795, 1799)
1791 New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Glasgow, King’s College (London), National Library of Wales, Sheffield, Wellcome Library.
1795 New Locations: Birmingham, Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, Southampton, Wellcome Library.
1799 New Locations: Birmingham, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, National Library of Wales, Newcastle, Wellcome Library.
Darwin, Erasmus, Poetical Works (1806)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Edinburgh, London, Nottingham, Wellcome Library.
Earle, James, Practical Observations on the Operation for the Stone (1793, 1796, 1803)
1793 New Locations: British Library, Cambridge, King’s College (London), Leeds, Liverpool.
1796 New Locations: King’s College (London), Wellcome Library.
1803 New Locations: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Wellcome Library.
Emlyn, Henry, A Proposition for a New Order in Architecture (1781, 1784)
1781 New Location: Bodleian.
Enfield, William, The Speaker (1774, 1781, 1785, 1795, 1797)
1781 New Locations: Aberdeen, National Library of Wales.
1797 New Locations: Cambridge, Liverpool.
begin page 16 | ↑ back to topEuler, Leonard, Elements of Algebra (1797)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Newcastle.
Flaxman, John, Hesiod (1817)
New Location: Birmingham.
Flaxman, John, The Iliad (1805)
New Locations: Birmingham, Brasenose College (Oxford), Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen’s College (Oxford).
Flaxman, John, A Letter to the Committee (1799)
New Location: Cambridge.
Fuseli, John Henry, Lectures on Painting (1801)
New Locations: Leeds, Liverpool, Warburg Institute.
Gay, John, Fables (1793, [1811])
Copies of unrecorded date New Locations: Birmingham, Durham, Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Nottingham, Sheffield.
[1811] New Locations: Durham, Manchester.
[Gough, Richard], Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, III (1786)
New Locations: Cambridge, Newcastle.
See Jerome Bertram, Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments: Being a Catalogue of Material Relating to Sepulchral Monuments in the Gough Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library (Oxford: J. Bertram, 2004) 241 pp.
Hamilton, G., The English School (1831-32)
New Locations: Aberdeen, British Library (French title page only), Edinburgh.
Hartley, David, Observations on Man (1791)
1791 two versions New Locations: Aberdeen, Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.
Hayley, William, Ballads (1805)
New Locations: Leeds, National Library of Scotland.
Hayley, William, Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802)
New Location: National Library of Wales (52 pp.).
Hayley, William, Essay on Sculpture (1800)
New Location: Birmingham, Warburg Institute.
Hayley, William, The Life . . . of William Cowper (1803-04)
1803-04 New Locations: Leeds, Manchester, National Library of Wales, Newcastle.
Second edition of vols. 1-2 New Locations: Aberdeen, Cambridge (Keynes Collection), Glasgow.
Hayley, William, The Life of George Romney (1809)
New Locations: Birmingham, Glasgow, King’s College (London), Manchester, Queen’s College (Oxford).
Hayley, William, The Triumphs of Temper (1803, 1807)
1803 New Locations: Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, National Library of Wales.
Henry, Thomas, Memoirs of Albert de Haller (1783)
New Locations: Birmingham, Imperial College, Leeds, National Library of Wales, Wellcome Library.
Hoare, Prince, Academic Correspondence (1804)
New Location: Cambridge.
Hoare, Prince, An Inquiry (1806)
New Locations: British Library, Cambridge, London, National Library of Wales.
Hogarth, William, Works (1788 ff.)
1795 New Locations: Ashmolean Museum, London.
The copperplate in Houghton Library is 45 cm. wide, 58 cm. high, and 0.3 to 0.5 cm. thick, and is stamped on the verso on the center and lower left with the name of the copperplate maker: JONES No 48 | SHOE LANE LONDON.27↤ 27. As I am told by Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Hunter, John, Historical Journal (1793)
1793 4° and 8° New Locations (A and B not distinguished): Aberdeen, Glasgow, School of Oriental and African Studies, Wellcome Library.
1793 B New Locations: London, National Library of Scotland.
Josephus, Flavius, Works (1785-1800?)
A New Locations: Bodleian, Leeds, National Library of Wales, University College (London).
B New Locations: Aberdeen, Manchester.
D New Location: Cambridge.
E New Locations: Aberdeen, Bodleian (“Date of publication from the Denby Mercury, 1 February 1792”), Cambridge, Durham, National Library of Scotland, University College (London).
Note: The descriptions of most of these works in COPAC are so vague as to make it very difficult to identify them with editions listed in BB.
Kimpton, Edward, History of the Holy Bible (1781)
A New Location: Manchester.
Lavater, John Caspar, Aphorisms on Man (1788, 1789, 1794)
1788 New Locations: Aberdeen, Warburg Institute.
begin page 17 | ↑ back to top1789 New Locations: Birmingham, Cambridge (2), Institute of Germanic Studies, Wellcome Library.
1794 New Locations: Cambridge, National Library of Wales, Trinity College (Dublin).
Lavater, J. C., Essays on Physiognomy (1788-99; 1792; 1810)
1788-99 New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Glasgow (“1789-1810”), Institute of Germanic Studies, National Library of Wales.
1792 [i.e., ?1817] New Locations: Christ Church (Oxford), Liverpool (vols. 1-2), National Library of Scotland.
1810 New Locations: British Library, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Warburg Institute.
Malkin, Benjamin Heath, A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806)
New Locations: Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Liverpool, National Library of Wales, Sheffield.
Nicholson, William, Introduction to Natural Philosophy (1782, 1787, 1790, 1796)
1782 New Locations: Imperial College, Manchester, National Library of Scotland.
1787 New Locations: Aberdeen, Cambridge, Imperial College, King’s College (London), Wellcome Library.
Novelist’s Magazine, Vol. VIII (1782, 1784, 1792)
1784 New Location: Edinburgh.
Locations of indeterminate date in COPAC: Bristol, National Library of Wales.
Novelist’s Magazine, Vol. IX (1782, 1785, 1793)
1782 New Location: Bodleian (2).
1785 New Location: Edinburgh.
Novelist’s Magazine, Vols. X-XI (1783, 1785, 1793)
1783 New Location: Edinburgh.
1785 New Location: Edinburgh.
Olivier, J., Fencing Familiarized (1780)
New Location: Cambridge.
Rees, Abraham, Cyclopaedia (1820)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College, Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics, Manchester, Wellcome Library.
Remember Me! (1825, 1826)
1825 New Location: National Library of Wales.
Ritson, Joseph, ed., A Select Collection of English Songs (1783)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle.
Scott, John, Poetical Works (1782, 1786)
1782 New Locations: Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Trinity College.
1786 New Locations: Birmingham, Liverpool, National Library of Scotland.
Seally, John, and Israel Lyons, A Complete Geographical Dictionary (?1784, 1787)
?1784 New Location: Cambridge.
1787 New Location: British Library.
Shakespeare, William, Dramatic Works (1802, 1832)
1802 New Locations: Birmingham, Durham, Leeds, New College (Oxford).
1832 New Locations: British Library, Manchester.
Shakespeare, William, Plays (1802, 1805, 1811)
A in Parts New Locations: British Library (perhaps this is the 10 plays without title page but with a prospectus).
B 10 vols. 1805 New Location: Aberdeen.
C 9 vols. 1805 New Locations: Leeds, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Nottingham.
D 1811 New Locations: British Library, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Sheffield.
Stedman, J. G., Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796, 1806, 1813)
1796 New Locations: Aberdeen, All Souls College (Oxford), Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, Rhodes House (Oxford), Southampton, Trinity College (Oxford).
1806 New Locations: Glasgow, Liverpool, Rhodes House (Oxford).
1813 New Locations: Manchester, New College (Oxford).
1796
According to an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle for 21 July 1796 (discovered by Angus Whitehead),
In a few days will be published, in two vols. large quarto, price three Guineas in boards, ornamented with 80 Copper Plates, consisting of Maps and Views, Figures of the Natives, Subjects of Natural History and Curiosity, &c. all from Drawings made on the Spot by the Author, and executed by Bartolozzi, Blake, Holloway, Benedetti, &c.
NARRATIVE of an EXPEDITION against the Revolted Negroes in the Colony of Sarinam [i.e., Surinam], in South America; from the Year 1772 to 1777; with some Elucidations of the Natural History of that Country, and a Description of its Productions. Also, an Account of the Indians of Guiana, and the Negroes of Guinea.
By Lieut. Col. STEDMAN, then on actual service in that Colony.
Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church Yard.
begin page 18 | ↑ back to topThe ad. abbreviates and paraphrases the title; to “drawings made by the Author” it adds, after “made,” “on the Spot”; the engravers are not named on the title page, but they are so listed in the ad. in Johnson’s Analytical Review 24 (Feb. 1796). Johnson deposited the statutory nine copies in Stationers’ Hall on 25 July 1796 (BBS 256), and the book was reviewed in the Analytical Review 24 (Sept. 1796): 237, suggesting that it was indeed published within “a few days” of 21 July 1796. Stedman was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel on 3 May 1796 (DNB), too late to alter the engraved title page where he is entitled Captain.
1813
A copy of the 1813 edition offered at Christie’s (New York), 14 June 2005, lot 214, is colored in the style of the 1796 edition, not the different style of coloring in the 1806 and 1813 editions; perhaps the colored prints were remainders from the 1796 edition.28↤ 28. According to Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 162.
Stuart, James, and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, vol. 3 (1794)
New Locations: Aberdeen, All Soul’s College (Oxford), Bristol, Bodleian, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (Oxford), King’s College (London), New College (Oxford), Newcastle, Sheffield, University College (London).
Varley, John, A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828)
New Locations: Aberdeen, Bodleian, Cambridge, Manchester.
Vetusta Monumenta, vol. 2 (?1789)
New Locations: Birmingham, British Library (4), Cambridge, Edinburgh, King’s College (London), Lampeter, Liverpool, National Library of Scotland, Newcastle.
Virgil, Pastorals (1821)
New Location: Cambridge.
Whitaker, John, The Seraph (1818-28; 1819-28; 1825-28)
A-B ?1818-28 and ?1819-28 New Locations: Birmingham, Glasgow, King’s College (London), Manchester.
C 1825-28 New Locations: British Library, King’s College (London), Leeds, National Library of Wales.
The Wit’s Magazine (1784-85)
New Locations: California State University (Fresno), Cambridge (2; 1 from Keynes Collection), Free Library of Philadelphia, Sheffield.
Primary Source Microfilm reproduced it in their Eighteenth Century Collection.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Original Stories from Real Life (1791, 1796)
1791 New Locations: Birmingham, Bodleian (2), Cambridge.
1796 New Locations: Bristol (2), Cambridge (Keynes Collection).
A copy of the 1796 edition offered in John Windle Catalogue 40 (Nov. 2005), #64, has “plates . . . so well-margined that in one plate the edge of the margin has text from another book, perhaps indicating that the plates were printed on paper left over from another printing.” Windle generously sent me a reproduction of the print (“Be calm, my child”) at p. 94 which shows quite clearly at the outer (right) margin of the print the initial letters of a page, at the top half with fragments too small to identify, at the bottom half with “r”, “f”, “r”, “t”, “t”, blank, “n”, “E”, two blanks, “ri”, “p”, “d”, two blanks, and “a”. The page and font size are larger than those for Mary Wollstonecraft. Presumably the blank part of the leaf was the inner margin; Blake himself used the wide inner margins of his quarto Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802) for sketches (see BB #466)—but not, so far as we know, for printing copperplates.
This use of paper for the engravings with previously printed text seems extraordinary. Copperplates and letterpress were printed on different presses and by different printers; for instance, the printer of the letterpress for Hayley’s Designs to A Series of Ballads (1802) and his life of Cowper (1803) was Joseph Seagrave in Chichester, but the printer of the engravings was Catherine Blake in Felpham. Further, the paper for prints was ordinarily thicker and better than that for letterpress. It was remarkably casual to use paper previously printed with letterpress for the prints for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1796).
We do not know the printers of either the letterpress or the engravings for her book, and I have not identified the previously printed letterpress text on the plate paper.
Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (1797)
New Locations: Aberdeen, British Library, Cambridge (Keynes Collection), London, Manchester, National Library of Scotland, Newcastle.
The only recorded copy in contemporary binding without engravings <BBS pp. 270, 389> was given in October 2005 by Dr. A. E. K. L. B. Bentley and G. E. Bentley, Jr., with the rest of their collection to Victoria University Library, University of Toronto.
Colored Copies
Copies B and J were reproduced in Edward Young, The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts: Illustrations by William Blake (Oakland [California]: Octavo Editions, 2004) “digital edition” on CD-ROM.
Edition
§Young, Edward. The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts: Illustrations by William Blake. (Oakland [California]: Octavo Editions, 2004) “digital edition” on CD-ROM.
begin page 19 | ↑ back to topReproductions of colored copies B and J, both in the Rosenwald Collection, with an 18-page commentary by Nicolas Barker.
Review
§Evans, Jean, Library Journal 129 (2004): 83-84.
Sheila A. Spector, European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 519-23 (Barker “failed to take advantage of the intellectual progress made in the field over the last century”).
Part IV: Catalogues and Bibliographies
1957
William Blake’s Illustrations to the Bible: A Catalogue Compiled by Geoffrey Keynes. (1957) <BB #681> §(2003) xii, 53 pp.; ISBN: 0758130732.
The 1957 edition includes reproductions of 174 Bible illustrations.
2002 May 22-June 22
*Ian McKeever. William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ The Emanation of the Giant Albion: [an exhibition] 22 May-22 June 2002. (London: Alan Cristea Gallery, 2002) 4°, 63 pp.; no ISBN.
Frances Carey, “Ian McKeever, William Blake’s Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion” (7-13).
McKeever’s 21 carborundum etchings are said to be based on (but they do not visually echo) Blake’s Jerusalem except that some of them are on typeset pages of Blake’s text.
2005 May
§William Blake. List of Henry Sotheran Ltd. (London, May 2005).
2005 August-September 4
*Cloud & Vision. Curated by Danielle Arnaud, Jordan Kaplan and Philip Norman and presented at the Museum of Garden History, London, summer 2005. (London: Parabola, 2005) 4°, 44 pp.; ISBN: 095476174X.
The “catalogue” includes:
Danielle Arnaud, Jordan Kaplan, and Philip Norman. “The Harmony of Opposition.” 1-2. (“Why commission artists and writers to produce new works exploring his [Blake’s] ten years living and working in Hercules Road.”)
*Michael Phillips. “Blake’s Lambeth.” 3-11. (The accompanying flyer says that this is “an edited form of his essay ‘William Blake in Lambeth’” [History Today 50, #11 (Nov. 2000): 18-25].)
Jon Newman. “William’s Footprint.” 12-17. (“We look in vain within Blake’s work for a . . . sense of Lambeth” similar to that of Felpham [12].)
Tim Heath. “To Be Divine in a Digital Age.” 18-21. (“Blake would have enjoyed our multimedia age” [19].)
Polly Gould. “The Floating Press.” 22-23. (“I work at a copperplate printing press . . . on view to the public.”)
Manuela Ribadeneira. “Without Contraries is no progression.” 24-25. (“Like almost all great poets, he [Blake] was an enemy of dualism”; “This text is taken from ‘Innocence and Experience’ written by Keith Sagar in 2002 as it appears on www.keithsagar.co.uk”.)
*Brian Catling. “Lambeth Tenant Extracted Reflections on Blake’s Ghost of a Flea.” 26-27. (Illustrated by juxtaposed representations of Disney’s Jiminy Cricket and Blake’s Ghost of a Flea.)
Phil Coy. Untitled specifications for Auto-cue Monitor and Manual. 28-29. (According to the first essay above, “Phil Coy’s Auto-Cue (Jerusalem) works to include the audience as participants in the recitations of Blake’s lyrics. The words scrolling through the auto-cue are presented backwards.”)
David Burrows. Untitled page from “Comic Book, work in progress, 2005.” 30-31.
David Burrows. “The Sick Rose.” 32-33. (A commentary.)
Annie Whiles. Untitled. 34-35. (“I came across Glad Day 1794.”)
Andy Harper. Untitled. 36-37.
Sarah Woodfine. Untitled. 38-39. (Visual thoughts on Blake’s garden, presumably in Lambeth.)
Tracy Chevalier. “Blake’s Garden.” 40-42. (She is “writing a novel about Blake” called Blake’s Neighbours which begins with the Blakes naked in their garden, even though “Blake scholars have effectively demolished the Adam and Eve story as apocryphal” [40].)
The exhibits are by David Burrows, Brian Catling (one of the three “new collections of writings”; The Pittancer, on which he is working “is centred around [sic] Blake”), Tracy Chevalier, Phil Coy, Polly Gould, Andy Harper, Tim Heath, Jon Newman, Michael Phillips, Manuela Ribadeneira, and Annie Whiles (“She works with embroidery and appliqué”).
Review
Andrew Lambirth, “Celebrating William Blake: Andrew Lambirth visits an exhibition in the first museum of garden history,” Spectator 6 Aug 2005: 39 (The exhibits by 21st-century artists are “feeble” and “vulgar,” the pamphlet is of “staggering banality and awfulness,” and the catalogue “is the best thing about the project.”)
2005 November
*Catalogue Forty: William Blake and His Circle: Books of Scholarship, Books of Beauty. [Ed. Robert N. Essick.] (San Francisco: John Windle, Antiquarian Bookseller, [Nov.] 2005) 4°, 104 pp., 431 lots; no ISBN.
An admirable catalogue, including Blake’s receipt of 5 July 1805 (#1), the copy of Quincy’s English Dispensatory (1733) with “William Blake his Book” on the title page (#68), multiple sets of Job (#11-13), Blair’s Grave (#20-23), and Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) (#65-67), plus “Works by Blake’s Circle: John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, and Thomas Stothard” (#405-12), “Blake’s Followers, Including Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond” (#413-23), and “The Wrong William Blake” (#424).
Part V: Books Owned by William Blake of London (1757-1827)
Quincy, John, English Dispensatory (1733)
According to John Windle’s catalogue 40 (2005), #68, ↤ 29. The quotation is from Ozias Humphry’s letter of 15 June 1806 to “William” in Blake Records (1969) 178, but BR (2) xxvii dismisses the connection of the poet with this letter as a “red herring.”
Blake has also noted the price at the front on the free endpaper. Although only a couple of pages bear markings in ink (underlinings, not writings), over twenty leaves are folded down to emphatically mark those pages, and numerous other leaves are less obviously dog-eared. . . . Of especial interest is the fact that the one underlined remedy in the entire book is for itching skin and skin disease. Ackroyd (p. 273) notes that Blake suffered from a nervous skin condition called “the Erisepilas.”29 . . . Bentley agrees [“uneasily”] that the copy belonged to Blake, and Essick has pointed out several similarities in letter formation between the signature in this book and known Blake signatures.
History: Acquired by the bookseller John Windle <Blake (2001)>; sold from Windle’s catalogue 40 (2005), #68 (“Price on application”), to an anonymous British collector.
Appendix: Books Owned by the Wrong William Blake (1770-1827)
Milton, John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, ed. Richard Bentley (1732) <BBS p. 322>
The association of the poet with the “WB” whose initials appear in the copy owned by Michael Phillips is convincingly rejected by Alexander Gourlay, Blake 36.2 (fall 2002): 70-71, GEB (pace BBS p. 322), and Jason Snart, “Blake’s Milton: Did Blake Own and Annotate the 1732 Bentley Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost?” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 79-91, and defended again by Michael Phillips, “Blake’s Annotations in Context,” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 93-95.
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. (1995) <Blake (1996, 1998, 2003, 2004)> F. §William Blake: Dichter, Maler, Visionär. Tr. Thomas Eichhorn. (München: Albrecht Knaus, 2004). In German.
*Ackroyd, Peter. “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful: Inspired by Milton’s formidable personal piety, William Blake sought to create his own system in words and images to rouse the nation from spiritual slumber.” Guardian [London] 26 April 2003, online <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,943631,00.html>.
Adams, Hazard. Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision. (1955) <BB #776> C. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) xvii, 328 pp.; ISBN: 0758144725.
*Anon. “Arts Minister Defers Export of William Blake’s Works.” Artdaily.com [now defunct] 19 April 2005, online.
The works are his watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Beyond the Grave: Ban saves lost Blake paintings.” Herald [Glasgow] 30 March 2005, online.
The Blake paintings are his watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Bid to Keep Paintings in Britain.” IcScotland.co.uk [?March 2005], online.
About the watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
*Anon. “Bid to Save Blake Art for Nation.” BBC News 31 March 2005, online <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4396725.stm>.
The Blake art is the drawings for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. [Associated Press]. “Britain Forbids Export of Blake Watercolors.” Relish [Winston-Salem, North Carolina] 3 April 2005, online.
Watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Britain Halts Export of Rediscovered William Blake Watercolors.” Baltimore Sun 30 March 2005, online.
The watercolors are for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Britain Stops Export of Blake Paintings.” Kansas City Star 30 March 2005, online.
The Blake paintings are his watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. [Associated Press]. “Britain Stops Export of Blake Paintings.” Newsday 30 March 2005, online.
The paintings are watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Entertainment: Blake Watercolours Barred from Leaving Country.” Keralanext.com [India] 31 March 2005, online.
The watercolors are those for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “Export of Lost Blake Watercolours Held Up.” Toronto Star 31 March 2005: A31.
“A British buyer now has until May 30 to ante $16.5 million (U.S.) to keep the works [drawings for Blair’s Grave] in Britain.”
*Anon. “Export Stop to Save Blake Watercolours.” Rare Book Review online, 2005 <www.rarebookreview.com>.
Caledonia Books (Glasgow) sold Blake’s 19 Blair watercolors to Paul Williams and Jeffery Bates for £950, who valued them at £1,000,000, offered them to the Tate for £4,900,000, paused to settle a lawsuit with Caledonia Books “who said begin page 21 | ↑ back to top they had not recognized the true significance of the items they had sold,” and sold them for “more than £5 million” to “an anonymous collector living in America”; “their price has now spiralled to £8.8. million,” and “Tate Britain is said to be reviewing its position on the paintings.”
Anon. “Family Library.—Painters.” Sheffield Iris 9 February 1830: 4.
A review of Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830) <BB #1433>: “What a singular being was William Blake!” The review was first identified and quoted in David Groves, “Blake and the Sheffield Iris,” Blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06): 125.
Anon. “Government Bans Export of William Blake Engravings.” InTheNews.co.uk 1 April 2005, online.
The “engravings” are Blake’s watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Anon. “William Blake: The Illustrator of the Grave, &c.” Literary Gazette no. 552 (18 Aug. 1827): 540-41. <BB #1071A>
Note: The volume title and the running heads identify the journal as the Literary Gazette, but the issue titles give the London Literary Gazette.
§Antonielli, Arianna. “Trapassare la superficie fenomenica: Il sostrato cristiano e cabalistico nell’opus blakiano.” Confronto Letterario [University of Pavia] 21, no. 42 (2004): 391-414. In Italian.
§Barfoot, C. C. “‘Jerusalem’ as City and Emanation: Places and People in Blake’s Poetry.” 59-75 of Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature, ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) DQR Studies in Literature.
*Beer, John. William Blake: A Literary Life. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 8°, xi, 250 pp., 23 plates; ISBN: 1403939543 and ISBN 13: 9781403939548.
Critically sensitive and rewarding, but with no attempt to add new biographical details.
Review
Michael O’Neill, “Glory Bound,” Times Literary Supplement 2 Dec. 2005: 32 (“Beer conveys readable information about Blake’s life”).
Bentley, G. E., Jr. Blake Records. 2nd ed. (2004) <Blake (2005)>
Addenda
See *G. E. Bentley, Jr., “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2004,” Blake 39.1 (summer 2005) with an appendix, “Corrigenda and Addenda to Blake Records, Second Edition (2004),” 32-33.
Review
James Fenton, “In My Good Books: James Fenton on the many Lives of William Blake,” Guardian [London] 24 Dec. 2005: 19 (“Put Gilchrist alongside Blake Records and you already have an amazing library”).
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “A Portrait of Milton Engraved by William Blake ‘When Three Years of Age’? A Speculation by Samuel Palmer.” University of Toronto Quarterly 51 (1981): 28-35. <BBS p. 368>
Palmer’s speculation is merely “idle,” for the etching of the bust of Milton in The Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (1780) is identical to copies which Hollis gave away in 1762 and 1765—see David Wilson, “An Idle Speculation by Samuel Palmer: William Blake’s Involvement in Cipriani’s Portrait of John Milton,” British Art Journal 6.1 (spring/summer 2005): 31-36.
§Bidney, Martin. “Neo-Blakean Vision in the Verse of Historian E. P. Thompson: The ‘Abstraction’ of Labor and Cultural Capital.” Science and Society 68 (winter 2004-2005): 396-420.
§Billigheimer, Rachel V. “Interrelations: Blake and Yeats.” ABEI Journal: Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 5 ([São Paulo] 2003): 13-25.
*Blackstock, Colin. “William Blake Illustrations Are Found after 165 Years.” Guardian [London] 31 Jan. 2002, online <http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,642281,00.html>.
The illustrations are for Blair’s Grave.
Blackstone, Bernard. English Blake. (1949) <BB #1212>
See entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 11.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 38, no. 4 (spring [April] 2005)
*Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2004.” 124-50. (An invaluable survey.)
Reviews
*Karl Kroeber. Review of The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (2003). 150-54. (“The most attractive aspect of the Companion” is its demonstration that “confronting its [Blake’s art’s] difficulties is the best way” [154].)
Jason Whittaker. Review of John B. Pierce, The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing (2003). 155-57. (“What Wond’rous Art does is to tease interesting potential from the new bibliography” [156].)
*Sibylle Erle. Review of David Weir, Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (2003). 157-59. (Weir “argues convincingly for Blake’s participation in the Oriental Renaissance [in London]” [159].)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 39, no. 1 (summer [July] 2005)
*G. E. Bentley, Jr., with the Assistance of Hikari Sato for Japanese Publications. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist begin page 22 | ↑ back to top of Publications and Discoveries in 2004.” 4-37. (With an appendix, “Corrigenda and Addenda to Blake Records, Second Edition (2004),” 32-33.)
*Justin Van Kleeck. “Blake’s Four . . . ‘Zoa’s’?” 38-43. (He remarks, virtually for the first time, “the presence of an [apparent] apostrophe between the ‘a’ and ‘s’ of ‘Zoas’ on the title page” [39].)
*Robert N. Essick. “William Blake’s A Pastoral Figure: Some Newly Revealed Verso Sketches.” 44-47. (His “purpose . . . is to reproduce the heretofore unpublished verso sketches . . ., describe them, and suggest some ways they can be situated within Blake’s career as an artist and poet” [44].)
David Groves. “‘Great and Singular Genius’: Further References to Blake (and Cromek) in the Scots Magazine.” 47-48. (Puffs for Blake’s designs for Blair’s Grave in July 1807 and September 1808.)
Howard Jacobson. “Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: St. Paul and the Nakedness of Woman.” 48-49. (Compares Blake’s Proverb of Hell, “The nakedness of woman is the work of God,” with St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians: “Every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head . . .”.)
Review
*Alexander Gourlay. Review of William Blake: The Painter at Work, ed. Joyce H. Townsend (2003). 49-54. (“The perspectives are refreshing and often startling, the discoveries are numerous, and the consequences are substantial for everyone who studies Blake’s art” [49].)
Warren Stevenson. “Cold Colloquy.” 54. (A poem.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 39, no. 2 (fall [October] 2005)
*Justin Van Kleeck. “‘Tenderness & Love Not Uninspird’: Blake’s Re-Vision of Sentimentalism in The Four Zoas.” 60-77.
*Angus Whitehead. “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’: The Will of Henry Banes, Landlord of 3 Fountain Court, Strand, the Last Residence of William and Catherine Blake.” 78-99. (A remarkably fine essay with fascinating new details about individuals who lived, like William and Catherine Blake in 1821-27, at 3 Fountain Court, Strand, chiefly Henry Banes [d. 20 Jan. 1829], “wine cooper” or “vintner,” and his wife Sarah Boucher Banes [1757-March 1824], sister of Catherine Blake, Richard Best [d. 1839?], watch finisher and escapement maker, and his wife Louiza or Louisa [1790?-1845?], probably the daughter of Henry and Sarah Banes, and Louisa’s children Charles [b. 1 April 1805], Charlotte Louisa [b. 16 Aug. 1807], Elizabeth [b. 19 Dec. 1809], Thomas [b. 4 Dec. 1813], print colorer and painter, and Richard John [b. 20 March 1815], painter, nephews and nieces of Catherine Blake, and John Barrow [1757-1838], print colorer, printseller [e.g., of Blake’s “Mrs Q” (1820)], and artist. The will of Henry Banes [drawn 9 Dec. 1826, proved 14 Feb. 1829] was witnessed by John Barrow, the executrix was Louiza Best, and the beneficiaries were Catherine Blake, William Blake, and Louiza Best.)
*Joyce H. Townsend, Bronwyn Ormsby, Julia Jönsson, and Mark Evans. “Blake’s Only Surviving Palette?” 100-03. (The palette, reproduced in black and white here and in color on Blake’s web site, is inscribed round the thumbhole “William Blake | 28 | Broad Street | 1780” [where Blake then lived]; it is said to have come from the dealer Francis Harvey [who sold Blakes acquired from Catherine Blake by Blake’s disciple Frederick Tatham]; it was given in 1927 to the V&A by the dealer Gabriel Wells. Chemical analyses “suggest a date of use of c. 1834-45 for the palette. . . . The only certain conclusion is that the paint on the palette could not have been used by William Blake” [103].)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Volume 39, no. 3 (winter [January 2006] 2005-06)
Harry White. “Blake’s Resolution to the War Between Science and Philosophy.” 108-25. (Blake “questioned the conclusions of speculative philosophy” in “the great British tradition of empirical-analytic” philosophers from Berkeley to Ayer and “sketched an alternative view of science based on our actual experience of living forms” [109] “completely separate from the concerns and claims of [abstract] philosophy,” a view widely accepted today [123].)
David Groves. “Blake and the Sheffield Iris.” 125. (Points out a review of Cunningham [1830] focusing on Blake in the Sheffield Iris for 9 February 1830.)
*Robert N. Essick. “A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake.” 126-39. (On the basis of similarities shared by the wash portrait of Blake [Essick Collection], Blake’s tempera of Adam Naming the Beasts, and the life mask of Blake, particularly in asymmetrical features such as the deep vertical crease slightly to the right of Blake’s forehead and the slight flaring of his right nostril [features of course on the left in the mirror portrait], Essick demonstrates conclusively that his drawing is a self-portrait of Blake of about 1802.)
Review
David Fuller. Review of Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening (2003). 140-43. (“Paley shows in an exemplary way what a range of knowledge and modes of thought can be brought to bear on contemplating these heterogeneous creations” of Blake [143].)
Blake Journal [Number] 9 [June 2005]
Charles Hobday. “Blake and Lafayette.” 4-18. (Blake “intended to make Lafayette the hero” of The French Revolution [1791], modeling the poem on Paradise Lost, but when on 17 July 1791 “Lafayette ordered the National Guard to open fire” on a crowd assembled to sign a “petition . . . for the deposition of the king,” killing and wounding many, “Blake withdrew the first book of The French Revolution and destroyed the other six” [13, 14].) Susanne Sklar. “Transfiguration.” 19. (A poem.)
*David Fallon. “‘My left foot’: Milton and Blake.” 20-35. (Concerned with the “specific anatomical sense of ‘tarsus’ and its relationship to symbolism used in Genesis, Paradise Lost begin page 23 | ↑ back to top and antinomian theology”; “Blake uses this motif to stress the palpable humanity of Christ” [20, 33].)
Brian Louis Pearce. “Bunhill Fielders.” 36-37. (A poem.)
*Will Easton. “William Blake and the Culture of Slavery in the Late 1780s and 1790s.” 38-60. (About the extent to which Visions of the Daughters of Albion and “The Little Black Boy” from Innocence “were influenced by a poetic and cultural context of slavery,” with “some possible sources of African influence on Blake” [38, 40].)
Bill Goldman. “The Other Side (one word more for Robert Browning).” 61-62. (A poem.)
Susanne Sklar. “Jacob Boehme & Blake’s Jerusalem.” 63-73. (“Jacob Boehme’s apocalyptic imagery has much in common with Blake’s” [63].)
*Charlotte Davies. “Blake and Costume in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” 74-86. (Vague “point[s] of commonality between Blake’s work and contemporary fashion”; Blake depicted in his work “fashionable dress during his lifetime” [83, 85].)
*Angus Whitehead. “But, Kitty, I better love thee: George Richmond’s Annotation to ‘Song [I love the jocund dance]’ in Volume II of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863).” 87-97. (George Richmond annotated the word “Kitty” as “his good Wifes name,” suggesting that the “Song” refers to Catherine Blake and was written or revised after Blake’s “twentieth year” [i.e., 1777], when, according to the integral “Advertisement,” Blake no longer touched the poems in Poetical Sketches [88, 97]. The annotations in the first volume of Richmond’s Gilchrist, belonging then to Anthony W. Richmond, were reported in G. E. Bentley, Jr., “William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and George Richmond,” Blake Studies 2.2 [1970]: 43-50; both volumes now belong to Stephen Keynes.)
Jennifer Schofield. “Encounters with Blake.” 98-101. (Agreeable poems.)
Reviews
Angus Whitehead. Review of Judy Cox, William Blake: The Scourge of Tyrants (2004). 103-09. (A “very readable book [which] is excellent on contemporary context,” though with “frequent grammatical errors and typos” and frequent “attempts to impose upon Blake too rigorous a socialist reading” [107, 103].)
Andrew Solomon. Review of Morton Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (2003). 110-14. (“Even if it does not convey the full depth of Blake’s vision, it contains much that is interesting and valuable” [114].)
Susanne Sklar. Review of Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme, and the Creative Spirit (2004). 114-16. (It “contains some of the best insights about Jacob Boehme I’ve yet encountered” [114].)
Minne Tanaka. Review of John B. Pierce, The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing (2003). 116-17.
Bode, Christoph. “Schreiendes Baby! Grausamer Mann! William Blake, entwickelt (anglistische Perspektiven).” Anglistik 15 (2004): 119-35. In German.
§Braida, Antonella. “William Blake: The Romantic Illustrator of Dante.” Chapter 6 (151-78) of her Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
§Cabañas Alamán, Rafael. “Del tigre de la ira al tigre del ensueño: William Blake y Jorge Luis Borges.” Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 30 (2004): 9-18. In Spanish.
§Chauvin, Danièle. “Images de l’Apocalypse: William Blake et Victor Hugo.” Grenoble, Thèse de troisième cycle en Littérature Générale et Comparée, 1981. In French.
§Chauvin, Danièle. “William Blake et l’Apocalypse: le Verbe et l’Image.” Grenoble, Thèse d’état en Littérature Générale et Comparée, 1987. In French.
Her L’oeuvre de William Blake: Apocalypse et Transfiguration (Grenoble: Ellug, 1992) is based on the Thèse d’état.
§Church, Michael. “The Story Behind: Jerusalem.” Times Educational Supplement 28 March 2003: 15.
On the background of the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton.
§Ciompi, Fausto. “Le introduzioni ai Songs of Innocence and of Experience di William Blake: Sulle soglie dell’ispirazione romantica.” Anglistica Pisana ½ [Pisa] (2004): 21-56. In Italian.
*Ciseri, Ilaria. Il Romanticismo: 1780-1860: La nascita di una nuova sensibilità: Joseph Wright of Derby, Heinrich Füssli, Francesco Goya, Jacques-Louis David, William Blake .... (Milano: Mondadori, 2003). In Italian.
A picture book with scattered references and reproductions of Blake, Fuseli, and the 16 other artists named on the title page.
Connolly, Tristanne J. William Blake and the Body. (2002) <Blake (2003)>
Reviews
Mark Lussier, Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 168-69 (with Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake [2002], Alexander Gourlay, ed., Prophetic Character [2002], and Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence [2000]).
§Jeffrey Longacre, College Literature 31 (2004): 197-99.
§Jeremy Tambling, Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 752-54.
§*Corti, Claudia. Rivoluzione e rivelazione: William Blake tra profeti, radicali e giacobini. (Napoli: Giannini, 2000) Biblioteca di anglistica “Fernando Ferrara” no. 2, 165 pp. In Italian.
*Cox, Judy. William Blake: The Scourge of Tyrants. (London: Redwords, 2004) Revolutionary Portraits no. 6, 12°, 96 pp.; ISBN: 1872208215.
begin page 24 | ↑ back to top“Blake was a Jacobin” (12); a simplistic and assertive work which is often right.
Review
Angus Whitehead, Blake Journal 9 (2005): 103-09 (A “very readable book [which] is excellent on contemporary context,” though with “frequent grammatical errors and typos” and frequent “attempts to impose upon Blake too rigorous a socialist reading” [107, 103]).
Davies, J. G. The Theology of William Blake. (1948) <BB #1466>
See entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 10.
Demetriou, Danielle. “Export Bar Placed on Blake Paintings.” Independent [London] 31 March 2005, online.
The Blake paintings are his watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
Dent, Shirley, and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake. (2002) <Blake (2003)>
Review
Mark Lussier, Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 168-69 (with Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body [2002], Alexander Gourlay, ed., Prophetic Character [2002], and Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence [2000]).
*De Selincourt, Basil. William Blake. (1909) <BB #1480> <Blake (2002)> B. §(London: Duckworth; New York: Scribner’s, 1911).
Directories
§William Bailey’s Western and Midland Directory or, Merchant’s and Tradesman’s Useful Companion for the Year 1783 (Birmingham, 1783) 14, gives “Blake, Stephen, Haberdasher, Carnaby Market.”
§William Bailey’s British Directory or, Merchant’s and Trader’s Useful Companion, For the Year 1784 (1784) gives “Blake, James, and Son, Hosiers and Haberdashers, Carnaby-market.”
§William Bailey’s British Directory or, Merchant’s and Trader’s Useful Companion, For the Year 1785 (London: dedication dated June 1785) 32, 144 lists
Blake, James, Haberdasher, 28, Broad-Str. Carnaby-Market
Blake and Parker, Print-sellers, 27, ditto . . .
Stephen Horncastle, Stationer, 29 Broad Street, Carnaby Market.30↤ 30. See Angus Whitehead, “A Reference to William Blake and James Parker” (entry in Part VI).
§Doce, Jordi. “Tiriel.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 660 (2005): 73-91. In Spanish.
*Dörrbecker, D. W. “Schriftbilder und Bildzeichen. William Blakes Experimente.” Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 1 (2005): 41-70. In German.
Doyle, Brian. “Billy Blake’s Trial.” American Scholar 63 (1994): 557-68 <Blake (1995)> B. §“Billy Blake’s Trial: The Exuberant Poet William Blake.” In his Spirited Men: Story, Soul, & Substance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 2004).
Eaves, Morris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
Reviews
D. W. Dörrbecker, BARS Bulletin & Review 25 (March 2004): 30-31 (expresses “huge respect for the achievement of Eaves and his contributors”). <Blake (2005)§>
Karl Kroeber, Blake 38.4 (spring 2005): 150-54 (“The most attractive aspect of the Companion” is its demonstration that “confronting its [Blake’s art’s] difficulties is the best way” [154]).
§W. H. Stevenson, Essays in Criticism 55 (2005): 270-75.
El-Hage, George Nicolas. “William Blake and Kahlil Gibran: Poets of Prophetic Vision.” DAI 41 (1981): 4024A. State University of New York (Binghamton) PhD, 1981. <BBS p. 461> B. William Blake & Kahlil Gibran: Poets of Prophetic Vision. (Louaize [Lebanon]: NDU [Notre Dame University], 2002).
In 2002 is Boulos A. Sarru’, “Preface” (7-8).
“This is a study of influences” (14), with little revision, for the latest work in the bibliography is 1979. “Ever since, I have published the dissertation in a series of articles and also translated and published selected chapters in Arabic” (13), but these by-blows are not recorded in his bibliography or in BBS or Blake (1994 ff.).
Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. (1954) <BB #1561>
See entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 14.
§Erle, Sibylle I. “From Face Values to Inner Visions: Blake and Lavater’s Perception of Body and Soul.” Nottingham Trent PhD, 2004.
Fischer, Kevin. Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme, and the Creative Spirit. (2004) <Blake (2005)>
Reviews
Susanne Sklar, Blake Journal 9 (2005): 114-16 (It “contains some of the best insights about Jacob Boehme I’ve yet encountered” [114]).
§Bryan Kirby, German Quarterly 78 (2005): 385-86.
Fisher, Peter F. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Ed. Northrop Frye. (1961) <BB #1611> C. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 261 pp.; ISBN: 0758115156.
See also entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 19.
begin page 25 | ↑ back to top§Freedman, Carl. “London as Science Fiction: A Note on Some Images from Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, and Orwell.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43 (2002): 251-62.
Frye, Northrop, ed. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays. (1966) <BB #1643; BBS p. 477>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 21.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake after Two Centuries.” (1957) <BB #1642; Blake (1995)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 17.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake, William.” (1967) <BB #A1643>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 23.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Bible.” (1990) <BBS p. 477>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 29.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Bible Illustrations.” (1990) <BBS p. 477; Blake (1994)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 28.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Introduction to Experience.” (1957) <BB #1644; BBS pp. 416, 477; Blake (2001)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 18.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype.” (1951) <BB #1645; BBS pp. 329, 331, 478; Blake (1994, 2002)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 9.
Frye, Northrop. “The Keys to the Gates.” (1966) <BB #1647; BBS pp. 414, 415, 478; Blake (2004)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake below, chapter 22.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 16, 4°; ISBN: 0802039197.
The essays on Blake are in chapters
7 “Blake on Trial Again.” Reviews31↤ 31. Reviews are not reported in Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995). of Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision (1946) and of The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (1946). (From Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 69 [1947]: 223-28.) 185-88, 446-47.
8 Review of The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (1946). (From University of Toronto Quarterly 17 [1947]: 107.) 189. (Quite different from the review in Poetry.)
9 “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype.” (From English Institute Essays, ed. Alan S. Downer [1950].) 190-206, 447.
10 Review of J. G. Davies, The Theology of William Blake (1948). (From Review of English Studies 1 [1950]: 77-78.) 207-08, 447-48.
11 Review of Bernard Blackstone, English Blake (1949). (From Modern Language Notes 66 [1951]: 55-57.) 209-11, 448.
12 “Poetry and Design in William Blake.” (From Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism [1951].) 212-20, 448.
13 “Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake [ed. Northrop Frye (1953)].” 221-36, 448-50.
14 Review of David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954). (From Philological Quarterly 34 [1955]: 273-74.) 237-38.
15 “Notes for a Commentary on Milton.” (From The Divine Vision, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto [1957].) 239-65, 450-54.
16 “William Blake (I).” (From The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Carol W. and Lawrence H. Houtchens [1957].) 266-89, 454-55.
17 “Blake after Two Centuries.” (Originally in University of Toronto Quarterly [1957].) 290-302, 455-56.
18 “Blake’s Introduction to Experience.” (From Huntington Library Quarterly [1957].) 303-12, 456.
19 Preface to Peter Fisher, The Valley of Vision (1961). 313-15, 456-57.
20 “The Road of Excess.” (From Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote [1963].) 316-29, 457-58.
21 Introduction to Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (1966). 330-36.
22 “The Keys to the Gates.” (From Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays, ed. James V. Logan, John E. Jordan, and Northrop Frye [1966].) 337-359, 458.
23 “William Blake (II).” (From The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards [1967].) 360-63, 459.
24 “Comment on Adam and Eve and the Angel Raphael.” (From Man and His World, Montreal exhibition 28 April-27 October 1967.) 364-65, 459.
25 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job (I).” (From William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld [1969].) 366-77, 459. (Revised in no. 27 below.)
26 “William Blake (III).” (From the typescript of a lecture [25 August 1971], recorded for the BBC Open University program, “reprinted” [sic] in Frye, Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976, ed. Robert D. Denham [1990].) 378-86, 459.
27 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job (II).” (Rewritten from no. 25 above and printed in Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society [1976].) 387-401, 460.
28 “Blake’s Biblical Illustrations.” (Printed from the typescript of his address to the Blake Symposium at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; published in Northrop Frye Newsletter [1990] and in Frye, The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990, ed. Robert D. Denham [1993].) 402-18, 460.
29 “Blake’s Bible.” (Printed from the typescript of his address to the Blake Society of St. James [2 June 1987]; first printed in Frye’s Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, begin page 26 | ↑ back to top 1974-1988, ed. Robert D. Denham [1990].) 419-35, 460-61.
Of course it omits Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, which is volume 14 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series.
Frye, Northrop. “Poetry and Design in William Blake.” (1951) <BB #1648>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake above, chapter 12.
Frye, Northrop. “The Road of Excess.” (1963) <BB #1650; BBS p. 479>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake above, chapter 20.
Frye, Northrop. “William Blake.” (1957) <BB #1651; BBS p. 479>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake above, chapter 16.
Frye, Northrop. “William Blake.” (1990) <Blake (1994)>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake above, chapter 26.
F[rye], N[orthrop]. “William Blake. 1757-1827, Adam and Eve and the Angel Raphael. 1808: Adam et Eve et l’Archange Raphael. 1808.” (1967) <BBS p. 479>
See Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake above, chapter 24.
*Garrido, Luis and Carol. “William Blake’s Final Resting Place.” (Unpublished printout, 2005) 96 pp., 70 figures and illustrations.
Meticulous details of his grave site in Bunhill Fields.
Gaunt, William. Arrows of Desire: A Study of William Blake and His Romantic World. (1956) <BB #1671> B. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 200 pp.; ISBN: 0758179162.
§Ghita, Catalin. “Poetic Quaternaries: William Blake’s Unsystematic System.” Shiron 42 (2004): 19-39.
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” 2 vols. (1863) <BB #1680> <BBS p. 484> <Blake (1999)> O. §Gilchrist on Blake: Life of William Blake Pictor Ignotus. Ed. with an introduction by Richard Holmes. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005) 8°; ISBN: 0007111711.
A reprint of vol. 1 of the 1863 edition, replacing the “Supplementary” section with the letters from Blake to Butts in vol. 2: 178-98.
The introduction, mostly about Gilchrist, is full of wonderful new information, such as that Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb read Blake’s poems in manuscript and that Blake engraved the “texts” of poems by Young and Blair.
Gimeno Suances, Francisco. “Imaginaciön, deseo y libertad en William Blake.” Tesis Doctoral, Universidad Nacional de Educaciön a Distancia (Madrid, 2004). 913 pp., 40 reproductions. In Spanish.
Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and The Bard: A Study of William Blake. (1959) <BB #1702> <BBS p. 487> C. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 200 pp.; ISBN: 0758106459.
§Gnappi, Carla Maria. “The Sunflower and the Rose: Notes Towards a Reassessment of Blake’s Illustrations of Dante.” 55-68 of British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, ed. Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (New York: Rodopi, 2005) Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, no. 92.
Gourlay, Alexander, ed. Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant. (2002) <Blake (2003)>
Reviews
§James Harris, Romantic Circles Reviews 8.1 (winter 2005): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/current/gourlay.html>.
Alice G. den Otter, European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 490-93 (“richly resonant,” “an impressive collection of essays”).
Mark Lussier, Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 168-69 (with Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body [2002], Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake [2002], and Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence [2000]).
§Graves, Roy Neil. “Blake’s ‘London.’” Explicator 63 (2005): 131-36.
Green, Matthew. “Outlining the ‘Human Form Divine’: Reading Blake’s Thoughts on Outline and Response to Locke alongside Lavater and Cumberland.” European Romantic Review 15 (2004): 511-32.
Green, Matthew J. A. Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 8°, x, 218 pp.; ISBN: 1403942315 and ISBN 13: 9781403942319.
Halmi, Nicholas. “New Impressions X: Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry.” Essays in Criticism 55 (2005): 159-72.
About the history of the book both before and after 1947; “It has long been almost impossible to read Blake except through the lenses of Frye’s criticism” (171).
Harper, George Mills. The Neoplatonism of William Blake. (1961) <BB #1793> B. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 324 pp.; ISBN: 0758118252.
Hartigan, David Sean. “‘Listen to My Vision’: William Blake and Orality.” DAI 64 (2003): 2499A. Alberta PhD, 2003.
Hastings, Sheena. “William Blake and the Book Dealer.” Yorkshire Post 1 April 2005, online <http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=105&ArticleID =98768>.
begin page 27 | ↑ back to topAbout Dr. Paul Williams (age 76) of Ilkley who found Blake’s watercolors [which he then thought were colored engravings] in a Glasgow bookshop.
Haywood, Peter. “Joseph Johnson and William Blake: With a Mention Also of Fuseli.” Chapter 5 (15-27) of his Joseph Johnson, Publisher 1738-1809 ([Aberystwyth]: College of Librarianship Wales, 1976) Student Project no. 6, 4°, 62 pp.; ISBN: 0904020010.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Old Age of Artists.” New Monthly Magazine 8 (Sept. 1823): 33.
Hazlitt’s essay referring to Blake in his Plain Speaker (1826), 1: 223-24 <BB #1817>, originally appeared three years earlier in the New Monthly Magazine.32↤ 32. The earlier Hazlitt reference was generously pointed out to me by Angus Whitehead.
Heringman, Noah. “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century.” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005): 961-1037.
*Ima-Izumi, Yoko. Blake Shuseisareru Onna—Shi to E no Fukugo Geijutsu: Blake’s Re-vision of the Female. (2001) <Blake (2003)>
It includes “Blood and Sexuality” (289-310), which was revised as “Blood, Sexuality, and the Will to Power—Blake’s Composite Art,” 99-130 of Shoichi Matsushima et al., Ekkyo suru Geijutsuka—Ima Blake wo Yomu: William Blake: A Border-Crossing Artist—Reading His Works Now33↤ 33. Ima-Izumi gives the title as Reading Blake the Transgressive Artist. (see entry under Matsushima, below) and expanded as “Blood in Blake’s Poetry,” 56-72 of Voyages of Conception: Essays in English Romanticism, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (Tokyo: Published by Japan Association of English Romanticism, Distributed by Kirihara Shoten, 2005).
“I will explore, in the present essay, the ways in which blood becomes sexual in the relations between men and women and . . . how the major bodily fluids, milk and semen, relate to blood” (Voyages of Conception 57).
The International Blake Conference “Blake in the Orient”: Programme. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
See under Nakamura, below.
Ishizuka, Hisao. “‘Why Wilt Thou Create a Female Will?’ Blake’s Idea of ‘Female Will’ and the Cultural Sensibility.” Studies in English Literature [Japan] no. 46 (2005): 1-18.
§Iwasaki, Toyotaro. Roman shugi no shi to kaiga [The Poetry and Paintings of Romanticism]—Blake, Wordsworth, Turner to [and] Constable. (2002) <Blake (2005)§>
Review
Noriko Kawasaki, Eibungaku Kenkyu: Studies in English Literature 81 (2005): 213-18 (in Japanese).
§Jasper, David. “Desert Theology and Total Presence: The Poets William Blake and Yves Bonnefoy Meet Hegel and Tom Altizer.” Chapter 10 (142-59) of his The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
§Kaplan, Carter. “Fractal Fantasies of Transformation: William Blake, Michael Moorcock, and the Utilities of Mythographic Shamanism.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 45 (2004): 419-36.
§Kawasaki, Noriko. “Iburi dasareru Orc: Blake no Milton Dai 18 [20] yo kohan bu [Orc Smoked Out: The Latter Part of Plate 18 [20] of Blake’s Milton].” Gifu Shiritsu Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kenkyu Kiyo [Bulletin of Gifu City Women’s Junior College] 54 (2004): 11-16. In Japanese.
*Kennedy, Maev. “Art Historian Dents Image of William Blake, Engraver: Research shows how artist ‘fumbled and bungled.’” Guardian [London] 18 April 2005: 10 and online <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1462047,00.html>. B. “William Blake’s Secrets and Lines.” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 19 April 2005: R4.
“Mei-Ying Sung . . . has made the first systematic study of the backs of dozens of surviving plates, and has revealed the repeated mistakes in the engravings which he toiled to correct . . . by repoussage or beating out the plate from the back to knock out the mistakes.”
*Kennedy, Maev. “Export Bar on Blake Pictures.” Guardian [London] 31 March 2005, online <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1448929,00.html>.
Export ban on Blake’s watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
§Kim, Minho. “[Blake’s Cultural Criticism by ‘Contraries’: The Class Differences on the Cultural Signifier ‘Liberty’].” Nineteenth Century Literature in English [Seoul] 9 (2005): 5-34. In Korean.
§Kitamura, Kensuke. “Suwodoringu [Swaddling] to [and] William Blake.” Hikaku Bunka Kenkyu [Studies in Comparative Culture] 56 (2002): 81-89. In Japanese.
§Kotani, Mayumi. “William Blake no Muku to Keiken no Uta [William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience].” Philokalia [Osaka Daigaku Daigakuin Bungaku Kenkyuka Geijutsu Gaku Geijutsu Shi Koza (Department of Art and Art History, Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University)] 22 (2005): 121-43. In Japanese.
§Larrissy, Edward. “Blake’s Orient.” Romanticism 11 (2005): 1-13.
Presumably related to his lecture on “Blake and Orientalism”[e] at the conference on Blake in the Orient (2003) <Blake 2004)>.
begin page 28 | ↑ back to top§Lee, Seunghun. “Yanagi Muneyoshi no Blake rikai: ‘Sozo’ to ‘Chokkan’ no gainen who chushin ni [Yanagi Muneyoshi’s Interpretation of William Blake: ‘Imagination’ and ‘Intuition’].” Shukyo Kenkyu [Journal of Religious Studies] 127.4 (2004): 989-90. In Japanese.
§Lindop, Grevel. “A Golden String: Kathleen Raine, Blake, and Tradition.” Temenos Academy Review 7 (2004): 129-44.
Linnell, John. “Autobiography of John Linnell.” Ms. (1850s-1864).
The manuscript with its references to Blake (see Blake Records [1969] 256-57 and fn; BR [2] 341-42 and fn) has passed from the collection of John S. Linnell to the Fitzwilliam Museum.
§*Lucas, E. V. [On Blake]. 4 pp. in A Petworth Posie. Arranged by Lady Leconfield for the Petworth Park Fete, 5th August 1918 In aid of the Sussex County Prisoners of War Fund. ([1918]) Price One Florin.
Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
Reviews
§Alexander S. Gourlay, Albion 36 (2003): 313-14.
§Roger Whitson, Clio 33 (2004): 483-86.
§Michael Scrivener, Criticism 46 (2004): 151-65.
Kenneth Johnston, “‘Enough! or Too much’: Probable, Possible, and Impossible Histories,” Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 210-15.
Mark Lussier, European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 505-11 (with John B. Pierce, The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing [2003]: they are “among the most important Blake books in the last decade” [509]).
Malvern, Jack. “Lost Grave of William Blake Found in London.” Times 16 April 2005.
Carol Garrido and her husband Luis have established that “Blake’s grave now lies unmarked beneath a patch of grass” in Bunhill Fields.
§Martin, Julia. “The Speaking Garden in William Blake’s The Book of Thel: Metaphors of Wisdom and Compassion.” Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 19 (2003): 53-81. With a summary in Afrikaans.
Matsushima, Shoichi. “Bara to Mushi Blake ‘Yameru Bara’ko [A Rose Versus a Worm: Reading ‘The Sick Rose’ by Blake].” Gakushuin Daigaku Bungakubu Kenkyu Nenpo [Annual Collection of Essays and Studies, Faculty of Letters, Gakushuin University] 11 (2004): 151-63. In Japanese.
Matsushima, Shoichi, Hisao Ishizuka, Masashi Suzuki, Yoko Ima-Izumi, Hiroko Takahashi. Ekkyo suru Geijutsuka—Ima, Blake wo Yomu: William Blake: A Bordercrossing Artist—Reading His Works Now. (2002) <Blake (2004)§>
It consists of five essays:
Shoichi Matshushima. “Blake no shiso-teki [The Source of Blake’s Ideas]—Ranters, Muggletonians, Gnosis sonata [and so on].” 3-34.
Hisao Ishizuka. “Fururu shintai no display—Blake to 18 seiki shinkei bunka [Display of a Trembling Body—Blake and Eighteenth-Century Nerve Medicine].” 35-66.
*Masashi Suzuki. “Yahweh to futari no musuko Satan to Adam—‘The Laocoon’ to ‘shi wa e no gotoku’ no shuen matawa gansei [Yahweh and His Two Sons Satan and Adam—‘The Laocoon’ and the Ending or Completion of ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’].” 67-98.
*Yoko Ima-Izumi. “Ketsueki, Sexuality, Shuken eno yokubo—Blake no fukugo geijutsu [Blood, Sexuality, and the Will to Power—Blake’s Composite Art].” 99-130. It is a revised version of “Blood and Sexuality,” 289-310 of her Blake Shuseisareru Onna—Shi to E no Fukugo Geijutsu: Blake’s Re-vision of the Female (2001) <Blake (2003)>, and was expanded as “Blood in Blake’s Poetry,” 56-72 of Voyages of Conception: Essays in English Romanticism, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (2005); see entry under Ima-Izumi, above.
*Hiroko Takahashi. “Bijutsu-shi no naka no William Blake—20 seiki ni okeru hyoka to eikyo [William Blake in the History of Art—His Evaluation and Influence in the 20th Century].” 131-62.
§Mee, Jon. “‘Image of Truth New Born’: Iolo, William Blake, and the Literary Radicalism of the 1790s.” In A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (University of Wales Press, 2005) Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales, vol. 1.
§Mee, Jon. Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
There is a section on Blake.
Miner, Paul. “Blake and the Sinful Arts of Forgiveness.” English Studies 86 (2005): 399-423.
A dense and richly allusive study of Blake’s dense and richly allusive wordplay.
§Nagashima, Kazuhiko. “Blake no vision ni okeru kodomo to yorokobi ‘Hajime no uta’ ni okeru kyo jaku kaku no yoho [Children and Joy in Blake’s Vision: The Use of Stress in “Introduction” (to Innocence?)].” Kawamura Gakuen Joshi Daigaku Kenkyu Kiyo [Journal of Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University] 16 (2005): 63-78. In Japanese.
§Naito, Takako. “Skellig in Mirareru William Blake no Vision [The Vision of William Blake Observed in Skellig].” Shirayuri Joshi Daigaku Jido Bunka Kenkyu Center Kenkyu Rombun Shu [Studies of the Research Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, Shirayuri College] 7 (2003): 11-25. In Japanese.
begin page 29 | ↑ back to topNakamura, Hiroko. “Blake’s Influence on Muneyoshi Yanagi and His Pilgrimage to Buddhism.” 73-85 of Voyages of Conception: Essays in English Romanticism, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (Tokyo: Published by Japan Association of English Romanticism, Distributed by Kirihara Shoten, 2005).
The text of the paper given at the international conference on Blake in the Orient (2003) <Blake (2004)>.
Noah, Sherna. “Blake Paintings Barred from Leaving U.K.” News.Scotsman.com 30 March 2005, online.
The paintings are his watercolors for Blair’s Grave.
§Nosková, Martina. “The Eternal Female: A Contribution to the Gendered Reading of William Blake’s Thel and Oothoon.” Brno Studies in English [Prague] 30 (2004): 159-78.
Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. (2000) <Blake (2002)>
Review
Mark Lussier, Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 168-169 (with Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body [2002], Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake [2002], and Alexander Gourlay, ed., Prophetic Character [2002]) (Otto’s is an “insightful commentary” [169]).
Otto, Peter. “A Sublime Allegory: Blake, Blake Studies, and the Sublime.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43 (2002): 61-84. <Blake (2005)§>
Deals especially with The Four Zoas.
Paglia, Camille. “The Chimney Sweeper” and “London.” Chapters 11 and 12 (52-57, 58-62) of her Break, Blow, Burn (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).
Text and explication de texte.
Paley, Morton D. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. (2003) <Blake (2005)>
Reviews
§T. Hoagwood, Choice 42 (2004): 102-03.
Angus Whitehead, “‘Free to be inconsistent,’” Cambridge Quarterly 34 (2005): 65-71 (“It is gratifying to encounter such solid and pioneering scholarly detail in so readable a form, helped not least by Paley’s admirable clarity and quirky humour. . . . an outstanding contribution” [71]).
Sheila A. Spector, Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004 [April 2005]): 164-67 (“Paley’s narrative is suffused with a tangible sense of grace” [167]).
Andrew Solomon, Blake Journal 9 (2005): 110-14 (“Even if it does not convey the full depth of Blake’s vision, it contains much that is interesting and valuable” [114]).
David Fuller, Blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06): 140-43 (“Paley shows in an exemplary way what a range of knowledge and modes of thought can be brought to bear on contemplating these heterogeneous creations” of Blake [143]).
Phillips, Michael. “Blake’s Annotations in Context.” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 93-95.
A defense of his identification of the “WB” initials and annotations in his copy of the Bentley Milton (1732) as those of the poet, in answer to Jason Snart (see entry below).
*Phillips, Michael. “The Printing of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job.” Print Quarterly 22 (2005): 138-59.
Particularly useful for details of copperplate printers of Blake’s time.
Phillips, Michael. “William Blake in Lambeth ....” History Today 50, no. 11 (Nov. 2000): 18-25. <Blake (2001)>
An “edited form” of the essay appears in the summer 2005 exhibition catalogue of Cloud & Vision.
Pierce, John B. The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
Reviews
Jason Whittaker, Blake 38.4 (spring 2005): 155-57 (“What Wond’rous Art does is to tease interesting potential from the new bibliography” [156]).
Minne Tanaka, Blake Journal 9 (2005): 116-17.
Mark Lussier, European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 505-11 (with Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s [2003]: they are “among the most important Blake books in the last decade” [509]).
*Pinto, Vivian de Sola, ed. The Divine Vision. (1957) <BB #2402A-B> C. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 216 pp.
See also entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 15.
Plotnitsky, Arkady. “Chaosmic Orders: Nonclassical Physics, Allegory, and the Epistemology of Blake’s Minute Particulars.” <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/complexity/plotnitsky/plotnitsky.html> <Blake (2005)§>
The essay is “an investigation of the epistemology of Blake’s poetic vision and practice,” “an exploration of the connections between Blake’s epistemology and key epistemological aspects of quantum physics and of chaos theory,” and “a discussion of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts [sic] as the artists’ books [sic].”
§Raine, Kathleen. The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul. [Apparently the printed text of a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, when she was a fellow there in 1955-61.]
*Reynolds, Nigel. “Export Ban on Blake’s Vision of ‘Blair’s Grave’: 19 watercolours commissioned for the poet (not the Prime Minister) could stay in Britain—if £8m can be found.” Telegraph [London] 31 March 2005 and online <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/31/npoet31.xml>.
begin page 30 | ↑ back to topThe “anonymous collector living in America . . . recently applied to remove them from Britain but Miss Morris [Arts Minister] announced a temporary export stop of up to six months yesterday to allow a public collection in this country to come up with a ‘matching’ offer of £8.8 million, excluding VAT.”
§Rix, Robert William. “William Blake, Thomas Thorild and Radical Swedenborgianism.” Nordic Journal of English Studies [Oslo] 2 (2003): 97-128.
§Röden, Peter Ulrick. “William Blake’s ‘Imagination’: Blake’s Role in English Romanticism.” Copenhagen thesis, 2005.
Rosenfeld, Alvin A., ed. William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. (1969) <BB #2565; BBS p. 626>
See also entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapters 25 and 27.
Rudd, Margaret E. Organiz’d Innocence: The Story of Blake’s Prophetic Books. (1956) <BB #2586> <BBS p. 629> D. §(Temecula [California]: Textbook Publishers, 2003) 266 pp.; ISBN: 0758145942.
Rudy, John G. “Blake and the Void of Koan [meditative] Practice.” Chapter 4 (93-126) of his Romanticism and Zen Buddhism (Lewiston [New York]: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) Studies in Comparative Literature, vol. 56.
Mostly based on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
§Rutland, Laura Ellen. “Hindrance, Act, and the Scapegoat: William Blake, Kenneth Burke, and the Rhetoric of Order.” DAI 64 (2003): 2098A. Tennessee PhD, 2003.
§Ryu, Son-Moo. “Imagining Society: William Blake, William Wordsworth, and George Eliot.” DAI 66 (2005): 1010-11A. Indiana PhD, 2005.
Sato, Hikari. “Prophets Interviewed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blake, Religion and Relativism.” 104-117 of Voyages of Conception: Essays in English Romanticism, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (Tokyo: Published by Japan Association of English Romanticism, Distributed by Kirihara Shoten, 2005).
“Blake’s Isaiah and Ezekiel are akin to these rational theologists [Lowth, Geddes, and Unitarian thinkers] in their approach to the Bible” (113).
Schneider, Matthew. “The Anxiety of Innocence in Blake and Kierkegaard.” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 351-59.
§Schock, Peter A. Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) <Blake (2004)§>
Review
§Simon Bainbridge, Romanticism 10 (2004): 258-60.
Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. (1946) <BB #2672, Blake (1994)>
See also entry under Frye, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, chapter 7.
§Schott, G. D. “William Blake’s Milton, John Birch’s ‘Electrical Magic’, and the ‘falling star.’” Lancet [London] 362 (2003): 2114-16.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “William Blake and the Jewish Swedenborgians.” Chapter 3 (61-86) of The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, ed. Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
“Blake’s complex and ambivalent attitude toward the Jews was rooted in his early Moravian-Swedenborgian religious background and developed through his access to a Jewish-Christian subculture within Illuminist Freemasonry” (62).
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Rediscovering William ‘Hurricane’ Gilbert: A Lost Voice of Revolution and Madness in the Worlds of Blake and the Romantics.” Romantic Revelations conference, Keele University (July 1999), online <http://www.williamgilbert.com/Gilbert_Schuchard.htm>.
Sínger, June. The Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake. (1970) <BB #2707> <BBS p. 640> D. §*Blake, Jung e o Inconsciente Coletivo: O Conflito entre a Razão e a Imaginação. Tr. Milena Soares Carvalho. (São Paulo [Brazil]: Madras, 2004) 287 pp.; ISBN: 8573747757. In Portuguese.
Snart, Jason. “Blake’s Awareness of ‘Blake in a Newtonian World’: William Blake, Isaac Newton, and Writing on Metal.” History of European Ideas 31 (2005): 237-49.
*Snart, Jason. “Blake’s Milton: Did Blake Own and Annotate the 1732 Bentley Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost?” European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 79-91.
“The annotations, while attributed to William Blake by Michael Phillips, in whose possession the volume currently resides, in fact neither sound nor look like other of Blake’s annotations”; a careful examination of the handwriting demonstrates that “the annotations in the Milton volume are not by William Blake, the poet” (79, 80).
See the reply by Michael Phillips (entry above).
Spector, Sheila A. “Glorious incomprehensible” (2001); “Wonders Divine” (2001) <Blake (2002)>
Reviews
Mark Lussier, Romantic Circles Reviews 8.1 (winter 2005): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/current/spector.html>.
Stephen C. Behrendt, European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 384-88 (they “add immeasurably to our understanding of Blake” [388]).
begin page 31 | ↑ back to top§Sturrock, June. “Lark, Wild Thyme, Crowing Cock, and Waterfall: The Natural, the Moral, and the Political in Blake’s Milton and Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans.” 329-50 in Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum, ed. Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).
§Suied, Alain. Blake et Dante, un malentendu poétique: Conférence à la Maison de la poésie, Paris, 20 février 2001; suivi de Penser avec l’autre. (Juillan: éditions de l’improbable, 2001) 49 pp.; ISBN: 2847390030. In French.
*Sung, Mei-Ying. “Technical and Material Studies of William Blake’s Engraved Illustrations of The Book of Job (1826).” Nottingham Trent University PhD, April 2005, 255 pp., 99 reproductions.
“The aim of this thesis is to lay out the overlooked importance of Blake’s overlooked original copper plates” (abstract). The reproductions include the rectos and versos of each of Blake’s 22 Job engravings plus prints from the rectos.
§Suzuki, Masashi. “18 Seiki Igirisu ni okeru Geijutsu ni Ikai to sono Shometsu: William Blake to ut pictura poesis [The Status of Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Decline: William Blake and ut pictura poesis].” Seiyo Bijutsu Kenkyu [Studies in Western Art] 7 (2002): 76-89. In Japanese.
Symons, Arthur. William Blake. (1907) <BB 2804A-C> D. §(London: Cape, 1940) St. Giles Library E. §(New York, 1970) <BB 2804D>.
Tambling, Jeremy. Blake’s Night Thoughts. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 8°, x, 202 pp.; ISBN: 1403942846.
A wayward, self-indulgent book with sporadic “reason[s] for linking Blake and night” (11). He writes of the poet’s mother as “Catherine Harmitage” (not “Armitage”), of his friends “Thomas Stodhard” (i.e., “Stothard”) and John Flaxman “engraver” (i.e., sculptor), he refers to “plate [i.e., page] 53” of “The manuscript of The Four Zoas [which] is of 70 pages [i.e., leaves]” (118, 119, 56, 184).
“Part of the material on Dante and Blake, now dispersed in the book, comes from my essay ‘Dante and Blake: Allegorizing the Event’ edited by Nick Havely (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 33-48 [Blake (2005)], and a draft of Chapter 7 [‘Dante’s “Deep and Woody Way’”] called ‘Illustrating Accusation: Blake on Dante’s Commedia’ in Studies in Romanticism 37 (1998), 395-420” (viii).
Tambling, Jeremy. “Illustrating Accusation: Blake on Dante’s Commedia.” Studies in Romanticism 37 (1998): 395-420.
See preceding entry.
§Tokareva, G. “Zhestokaia starost’ i prokliataia iunost’ v monomife Uil’iama Bleika [Cruel Old Age and Damned Youth in William Blake’s Personal Mythology].” Voprosy Literatury no. 3 (2005): 245-62. In Russian.
*Townsend, Joyce H., ed. William Blake: The Painter at Work. (2003) <Blake (2004§, 2005)>
Reviews
§Nadine Dalton Speidel, Library Journal 129 (1 April 2004): 92.
*Alexander Gourlay, Blake 39.1 (summer 2005): 49-54 (“The perspectives are refreshing and often startling, the discoveries are numerous, and the consequences are substantial for everyone who studies Blake’s art” [49]).
§Townsend, Joyce H., Bronwyn Ormsby, Julia Jönsson, and Mark Evans. “William Blake’s Only Surviving Palette?” V&A Conservation Journal 49 (2005): 20-21.
A longer version appears in Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 100-03.
Wada, Ayako. “Revisions of Blake’s America and Their Meaning.” 86-103 of Voyages of Conception: Essays in English Romanticism, ed. Eiji Hayashi et al. (Tokyo: Published by Japan Association of English Romanticism, Distributed by Kirihara Shoten, 2005).
A discussion of “the dating of America, . . . the post-1793 development of the work, and . . . the latent implications of the revisions” (86).
Wada, Ayako. “The Rise and Fall of the Myth of Orc (1) Orc’s Origin Traced to Blake’s Poems Composed between 1789 and 1792 [(2) Mythogenesis in Blake’s America and in Visions of the Daughters of Albion] [(3) Realization of the Central Myth in Blake’s “The Tyger”, Europe, and The Book of Urizen].” Tottori Daigaku Kyoiku Gakubu Kenkyu Kiyo: Journal of the Faculty of Education Tottori University Cultural and Social Science 48 (1997): 277-87; 49 (1998): 113-21; 123-33.
“The process by which America was perfected reflects the gradual crystallization of the myth of Orc” (part 2, 113).
Wardi, Eynel. “Space, the Body, and the Text in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Orbis Litterarum 58 (2003): 253-70. <Blake (2005)§>
“The notion, projected by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that the textual space spatializes to the embodied movement of the imagination saves that space from such self-referential closure as worried Blake in The Book of Urizen” (268, all sic).
Warner, Janet. Other Sorrows, Other Joys: The Marriage of Catherine Sophia Boucher and William Blake. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
Review
§Matthew Beaumont, “Help for the Helpmate,” Times Literary Supplement, 24-31 Dec. 2004: 26
Weir, David. Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance. (2003) <Blake (2004)>
Review
*Sibylle Erle, Blake 38.4 (spring 2005): 157-59 (Weir “argues convincingly for Blake’s participation in the Oriental Renaissance [in London]” [159]).
begin page 32 | ↑ back to top*Wethered, Newton. “William Blake and the Imagination.” Chapter 6 (80-99) of his From Giotto to John: The Development of Painting (London: Methuen & Co., 1926).
Blake was clairvoyant.
Whitehead, Angus. “New Information Concerning Mrs Enoch, William and Catherine Blake’s ‘Fellow Inhabitant’ at 17 South Molton Street.” Notes and Queries 250 [ns 52] (2005): 460-63.
The Blakes’ “Kind & attentive fellow inhabitant, the young & very amiable Mrs Enoch, who gave my wife all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother” until Blake’s triumphant return from his trial on 14 January 1804, was probably Mary Enoch (née Naylor), the wife of Blake’s landlord William Enoch, a tailor, and mother of their son William (christened 18 May 1801).
Whitehead, Angus. “A Reference to William Blake and James Parker, Printsellers, in Bailey’s British Directory (1785).” Notes and Queries 250 [ns 52] (2005): 32-35.
A “Correction” by eds. (Sept. 2005): 381, alters “James Parker . . . was a bachelor in 1748” to “. . . 1784.”
*Whitehead, Angus. “William Blake’s Last Residence: No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, George Richmond’s Plan and an Unrecorded Letter to John Linnell.” British Art Journal 6.1 (spring/summer 2005): 21-30.
A wonderfully original, thorough, and valuable account. A “Correction,” British Art Journal 6.2 (2005): 88, says that on 30n49, “the measurements for Blake’s printing studio at Felpham should apply to the westernmost room not the easternmost room.”
Whittaker, Jason. “Blake.” Section 5 (593-603 and passim) of “The Nineteenth Century: The Romantic Period,” The Year’s Work in English Studies 83 [“Covering work published in 2002”] (2004 [i.e., 2005]).
*Wilson, David. “An Idle Speculation by Samuel Palmer: William Blake’s Involvement in Cipriani’s Portrait of John Milton.” British Art Journal 6.1 (spring/summer 2005): 31-36.
Blake could not have worked, while an apprentice with Basire in 1772-79, on Cipriani’s etching of the bust of Milton published in The Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (1780), as suggested by Samuel Palmer (reported in G. E. Bentley, Jr., University of Toronto Quarterly 51 [1981]: 28-35 and BR [2] 428-29), for the copies of the print given away by Hollis in 1762 and 1765 are identical with those in the Memoirs of 1780.
*Wood, Marcus. “John Gabriel Stedman, William Blake, Francesco Bartolozzi and Empathetic Pornography in the Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.” Chapter 6 (129-49) of An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2003).
Scarcely related to Blake.
Wright, Julia M. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. (2004) <Blake (2005)>
Review
§David Baulch, Romanticism on the Net nos. 36-37 (Nov. 2004-Feb.2005): <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36-37/011146ar.html>.
Jack Bushnell, Studies in Romanticism 44 (2005): 274-77 (it is “dense, jargon-laden” but “tightly woven, impressively researched, and often genuinely original” [274]).
§Yamazaki, Yusuke. “Futari no yogensha ga ataeta Blake eno aihansuru kannen: Emanuel Swedenborg to John Wesley [Contrary Conceptions that Two Prophets Gave to Blake: Emanuel Swedenborg and John Wesley].” Hikaku Bunka Kenkyu [Studies in Comparative Literature] 64 (2004): 43-53. In Japanese.
§Yamazaki, Yusuke. Kami to Ningen: Jesus no Ningen sei: William Blake Rombun Shu [God and Human: Humanity of Jesus: Essays on William Blake]. (Tokyo: Kindai Bungei Sha, 2004) 129 pp.; ISBN: 4773372117. In Japanese.
Yoder, R. Paul. “Blake and the Book of Numbers: Joshua the Giant Killer and the Tears of Balaam.” Chapter 4 (87-102) of The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, ed. Sheila A. Spector (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Jerusalem pl. 38 “brings together three important events from the book of Numbers: the sending of the spies in advance of the army, the attempt of Balak to hire Balaam to curse the Israelites, and the battle of Peor” concerning “how to distinguish valid claims of divine authority from invalid claims” (90-91, 99).
§Zeng, Fangrong. “Bulaike shi ge zhong de lun li si xiang.” Foreign Literature Studies/Wai Guo Wen Xue Yan Jiu 6 (2005): 20-27, 170. In Chinese.
Division II: Blake’s Circle
Cumberland, George (1754-1848)
Dilettante, polymath, friend of Blake
Manuscript Geological Commonplace Book
Description: Large folio, with notes by Cumberland and others, mss. from Italy, etc., letters from geologists, lists of dealers in, and collectors of, fossils, etc., with some printed George Cumberland ephemera, some of which are also in the Bristol begin page 33 | ↑ back to top Library collections of cuttings34↤ 34. G. E. Bentley, Jr., A Bibliography of George Cumberland (1754-1848) (New York: Garland, 1975) 45; the geology commonplace book is not listed here. on coal, ichthyosaurs, geological lectures, but apparently with nothing on Blake or the arts.
History: Sold by Cumberland with his other geological manuscripts (apparently including a ms. catalogue of his fossil collection and mss. on fossil crinoids now not traced) to the philanthropist James Heywood (1810-97) who gave these mss. in 1842 to the Manchester Geological Society,35↤ 35. It is listed in J. Plant’s catalogue of the Manchester Geological Society library (1875) 14. to which Cumberland had sold in 1842 his fine collection of fossils and two copies of his Reliquæ Conservatæ . . . with Popular Descriptions of . . . Some Remarkable Encrinites (Bristol: J. M. Gutch; London: Harding, Lepard, and Co., 1826); the fossil collection and Reliquæ Conservatæ went to the university’s Manchester museum, but the society’s library was disbanded in 1965 and the contents scattered; the ms. Geological Commonplace Book was acquired by a Wigan colliery office, whence it was purchased by Professor Hugh Torrens36↤ 36. Hugh Torrens, a distant connection of Blake’s patron Major General Sir Henry Torrens (see BR [2] 441, 786, 800), also has Cumberland’s heavily annotated copy of Johann Samuel Müller’s Crinoidea (1821), which had also escaped from the society’s library. He intends to do some justice to Cumberland’s interests in science. of the Keele University Department of Earth Sciences (from whom all this information derives).
A previously unrecorded portrait in pen, ink, and black wash by George Cumberland, apparently of Catherine Blake reading (c. 1783-85), on wove paper 23.1 × 17.8 cm. pasted to a sheet of unwatermarked paper 23.7 × 18.0 cm., inscribed in pencil on the verso “64”, loose in an old mat inscribed “Mrs. Blake by George Cumberland” and “10”, was sold by William Drummond in 2005 to Robert N. Essick. (Cumberland’s hand is almost certain, the subject somewhat less so, but it is very like Cumberland’s portrait of Catherine in the Fitzwilliam Museum.) Catherine, who signed her marriage register with an X in 1782 (BR (2) 27-28), had apparently learned to read by the time of the portrait. The portrait is described and reproduced in Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 164-65 and cover illustration.
Johnson, Joseph (1738-1809)
Bookseller, patron of Blake
Braithwaite, Helen. Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
A worthy book, originally a Birmingham PhD dissertation.
Haywood, Peter. See entry under Part VI, above.
Palmer, Samuel (1805-81)
Artist, disciple of Blake
2005 February
§Samuel Palmer: 1860s Books. Adam Mills catalogue (Feb. 2005).
2005 October 21-2006 January 22;7 March-29 May
William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker, Colin Harrison, with contributions by David Bindman, David Blayney Brown, Alexandra Greathead, Marjorie Shelley, and Scott Wilcox. Samuel Palmer 1805-1881: Vision and Landscape. [Catalogue . . . to accompany an exhibition shown at the British Museum from 21 October 2005 to 22 January 2006 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 7 March 2006 to 29 May 2006]. (London: British Museum Press, 2005) 4°, 256 pp., 211 reproductions, mostly in glorious color; ISBN: 0714126411 and ISBN 13: 9780714126418.
“The exhibition was selected and organized by William Vaughan . . . in collaboration with Elizabeth E. Barker, [and] . . . Constance McPhee” (7). The book consists of:
Neil MacGregor and Philippe de Montebello. “Directors’ Foreword.” 7.
William Vaughan. “Introduction.” 10-16.
William Vaughan. “‘Brothers in art, brothers in love’: The Ancients as an Artistic Community.” 17-21.
David Blayney Brown. “‘To fancy what is lost to sight’: Palmer and Literature.” 22-27.
David Bindman. “The Politics of Vision: Palmer’s Address to the Electors of West Kent, 1832.” 28-32. (The text of the Address was given by Bindman in Blake 19.2 [fall 1985]: 56-68.)
Alexandra Greathead. “Samuel Palmer’s Materials and Techniques: The Early Years.” 33-35.
Marjorie Shelley. “Samuel Palmer’s Materials and Techniques: The Later Years.” 36-41.
Scott Wilcox. “Poetic Feeling and Chromatic Madness: Palmer and Victorian Watercolour Painting.” 42-46.
Elizabeth E. Barker. “‘The excitement of gambling, without its guilt and its ruin’: Palmer and Printmaking.” 47-54.
Colin Harrison. “The Artistic Rediscovery of Samuel Palmer.” 55-61.
Catalogue: Part One: The Visionary
William Vaughan. “Early Years (1805-23).” 66-74, nos. 1-8.
William Vaughan. “The Primitive Vision (1823-5).” 75-104, nos. 9a-t, 10-27.
William Vaughan. “Shoreham and the Ancients (1825-30).” 105-36, nos. 28-64.
Colin Harrison. “Later Shoreham (1830-35).” 137-68, nos. 65-95.
Part Two: The Victorian
Elizabeth E. Barker. “The Traveller (1835-7).” 170-78, nos. 96-103.
Elizabeth E. Barker. “Italy (1837-40).” 179-91, nos. 104-13.
Elizabeth E. Barker. “Sketches and Idylls (1840-c.1865).” 192-223, nos. 114-44.
begin page 34 | ↑ back to topWilliam Vaughan. “The Lonely Tower (c.1865-81).” 224-44, nos. 145-64.
The occasion was the 200th anniversary of Palmer’s birth; the reproductions include works by Blake, Linnell, Calvert, and Richmond.
Reviews
§Kathy Brewis, “Burning Love,” Sunday Times Magazine [London] 16 Oct. 2005: 38, 43; <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1813696,00.html>.
Richard Dorment, “The Joyful Visions of Britain’s Most Lovable Artist: Exhibition: Samuel Palmer’s Vision and Landscape,” Telegraph [London] 18 Oct. 2005 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/10/18/ bapalmer18.xml>.
Simon Jenkins, “Skip the Secular Rituals of the Turner Prize for a Real Radical: The British Museum’s exhibition of the painter Samuel Palmer is an exhilarating vision of archaic beauty,” Guardian [London] 21 Oct 2005: 32 and <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1597156,00.html>.
Souren Melikian, “Samuel Palmer: A Versatile Visionary Who Lost His Way,” International Herald Tribune 21 Oct. 2005 <http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/21/opinion/melik22.php#> (“The brilliant show” ranges from an early “true masterpiece” down to “insipid kitsch”).
Frances Wilson, “Beauty with a Pinch of Salt: The strange and double flowering of Samuel Palmer,” Times Literary Supplement 4 Nov. 2005: 16-17 (“a richly researched and deeply fairminded exhibition”; the author has discovered a Blake proverb unknown to previous scholars: “‘Talent thinks,’ Blake said, ‘Genius sees’” and a new “mentor, John Liddell”; Adam Johns, “Samuel Palmer,” Times Literary Supplement 18 Nov 2005: 17 deplores the misspelling and denigration of John Linnell in Frances Wilson’s review).
Brian Sewell, “English Eccentric Who Put Poetry in Pictures: The British Museum’s Samuel Palmer exhibition shows him to be one of Europe’s greatest romantic artists,” Evening Standard [London] 4 Nov. 2005: 36-37.
Robin Blake, “Landscape Ancient and Modern: Samuel Palmer’s unique, intensely felt vision of rural life is evident even in his earliest works,” Financial Times 7 Nov. 2005.
Palmer, Samuel. Samuel Palmer’s Sketch-Book. An Introduction and Commentary by Martin Butlin with a Preface by Geoffrey Keynes. ([London?], 1962) <BB #2356> B. Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824. Ed. with an Introduction and Commentary by Martin Butlin and with a Foreword by William Vaughan. (London: Thames & Hudson in association with the William Blake Trust,37↤ 37. The book was “Edited, designed and produced by the William Blake Trust” (5). 2005) oblong 8°, 221 pp., including color reproductions of the sketchbook; ISBN: 0500976511 and ISBN 13: 9780500976517.
It consists of:
Anon. “Preface: The William Blake Trust.” 6.
William Vaughan. “Foreword: Palmer and the ‘Revival of Art.’” 7-16.
Martin Butlin. “Introduction: The 1824 Sketchbook.” 17-31. (Butlin has made “extensive revision of his introduction and commentary of 1962” [6].)
Sketchbook reproductions. 34-199.
[Butlin.] “Commentary on the Sketchbook Pages.” 201-19.
[Butlin.] “Appendix A: Leaves Removed from the Sketchbook.” 220. (The pages removed are pp. 3-4, 15-16, 19-22, 25-26, 31-32, 49-50, 125-26, 137-38, 179-82.)
[Butlin.] “Appendix B: Media Use in the Sketchbook.” 220.
Wilcox, Timothy. Samuel Palmer. (London: Tate Publishing, 2005) British Artists, 4°, 80 pp.; ISBN: 1854375636.
Stothard, Thomas (1755-1834)
Book illustrator, sometime friend of Blake
A pencil portrait by Stothard of Blake (c. 1780), 4.5 × 4.0 cm. on laid paper 21.2 × 19.0 cm., inscribed in pencil probably by George Cumberland “Mr Blake Engraver by | Stothard”, was bought from William Drummond in 2005 by Robert N. Essick and reproduced and described in his “Blake in the Marketplace, 2005,” Blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 178-79.
Appendix: Addenda to Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004)
The most extensive and important discoveries of contemporary references to William Blake and his relations since the second edition of Blake Records went to press concern the Moravian faith of his mother before he was born1↤ 1. Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard, “Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family,” Blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. and the will and family of his wife’s brother Henry Banes after his death.2↤ 2. Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’: The Will of Henry Banes, Landlord of 3 Fountain Court, Strand, the Last Residence of William and Catherine Blake,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 78-99.
P. xix
Owners and Repositories of Unique Materials
Fitzwilliam Museum (including the ms. “Autobiography of John Linnell” formerly in the collection of John S. Linnell).
P. xxxiv
To Boucher-Butcher genealogy for Catherine’s sister Sarah,3↤ 3. The new information about the Banes and Best families derives from Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 78-99. substitute fig. 1.
Pp. 62fn, 741, 816, 894
For “Callisto” read “Calisto.”
begin page 35 | ↑ back to top![Sarah Boucher
Battersea
(1757-March 1824)
[married] 10 Nov. 1788
St. Bride’s
London
[to] Henry Banes
St. Bride’s
(d. 20 Jan. 1829)
Wine cooper
[parents of] Louisa
(?1790-?1845)
[married to] Richard Best
(d. ?1839)
Watch finisher
[parents of]
Charles
St. Pancras
(b. 1 April 1805)
Charlotte Louisa
St. Pancras
(b. 16 Aug. 1807)
Elizabeth
St. Pancras
(b. 19 Dec. 1809)
Thomas
St. Pancras
(b. 4 Dec. 1813)
Print colorer, artist
(exhibited 1834-39)
Richard John
St. Pancras
(b. 20 March 1815)
Artist](img/illustrations/Boucher.genealogy.40.1.bqscan.png)
P. 67
For an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle for 21 July 1796 for Stedman’s Narrative, see “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake 40.1 (summer 2006): 17-18.
P. 246
Cromek industriously touted Blake’s designs for Blair’s Grave. He took them on a tour which included Edinburgh and arranged for a puff in the Scots Magazine for July 1807, quoted in David Groves, “‘Great and Singular Genius’: Further References to Blake (and Cromek) in the Scots Magazine,” Blake 39.1 (summer 2005): 47.
The statement in the notice that “Mr Cromek . . . proposes to engrave them” means “proposes to have them engraved,” for in May 1807 Cromek wrote to Blake about “Mr Schiavonetti . . . etching a plate” for The Grave, and on 21 July 1807 Schiavonetti wrote to Cromek about engraving “the last judgment.” The “beautiful painting of the procession of Chaucer’s pilgrims” which Cromek exhibited was Stothard’s, not Blake’s.
P. 264
In September 1808, an advertisement appeared among a list of “New Works Published in Edinburgh” in the Scots Magazine 70 (1808): 683: “Illustrations of Blair’s Grave, in 12 Etchings, executed by Louis Schiavonetti, from the Original Inventions of William Blake, 4to. 2l. 12s.6d.”4↤ 4. Reported by David Groves (see article under entry for p. 246). And a long, generous review appeared in the Scots Magazine for November 1808 (BR [2] 274-75).
P. 386
After “£49.6.8 in 1825,” see Illustrations of the Book of Job in “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake 40.1 (summer 2006): 13-14.
P. 387
William Hazlitt’s essay “On the Old Age of Artists” (excerpt quoted in BR [2] 446-47) was originally published in 1823; see “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake 40.1 (summer 2006): 27.
P. 388
Sarah Banes, the sister and landlady of Catherine Blake, died in March 1824. She had been the “sole Executrix and Legatee named in the . . . former Will” of her husband Henry Banes. 5↤ 5. Information about the death of Sarah Banes derives from the authentication (6 Feb. 1829) of the will (9 Dec. 1826) of Henry Banes reproduced in Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 84-85.
begin page 36 | ↑ back to topP. 399
After “Purgatorio, and Paradiso” add:
There is no record of the original cost of the copperplates for Dante, but it seems very likely that Linnell acquired them, as he did those for Job (1823, 1825), but neglected to record them in his account books. As the weight of the 7 Dante plates (11,209 g) was more than that of the 22 plates for Job (10,516 g), the cost is likely to have been more than that for Job (£3.11.7, not counting 2 plates unaccounted for).
P. 418
Footnote to “he fetched the porter for dinner himself, from the house at the corner of the Strand.” 6↤ 6. The public house was the Coal Hole, beside the alley from the Strand leading to Fountain Court (Angus Whitehead, “William Blake’s Last Residence: No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, George Richmond’s Plan and an Unrecorded Letter to John Linnell,” British Art Journal 6.1 [spring/summer 2005]: 21-30 [22]). Henry Banes, vintner, may have been at the Coal Hole public house where Blake got his porter.
P. 418
Letter of 25 November 1825 recorded in “William Blake and His Circle,” Blake 39.1 (summer 2005): 32-33; for “Banes may well have lived in the same building” substitute:
Banes lived in the ground-floor flat. When the four-storey house was built about 1720 as a single family unit, almost certainly the kitchen occupied most of the basement. This basement was probably larger than the Blakes’ exhibition room, which was 19′ × 14′.7↤ 7. Angus Whitehead, “William Blake’s Last Residence . . .,” British Art Journal 6.1 [spring/summer 2005]: 30. After the death of his wife in March 1824, Banes may not have made much use of his kitchen.
P. 428
Footnote to Crabb Robinson, “He thinks all men partake of it [the faculty of Vision]—but it is lost by not being cultivd.”8↤ 8. George Richmond wrote in his copy of Gilchrist (1: 326), “He said to me that all children saw ‘Visions’ and the substance of that [?i.e., what] he added is that all might see them but for worldliness[?] or unbelief, which blinds the spiritual eye. GR”. Richmond’s annotations in Gilchrist vol. 1 were quoted in G. E. Bentley, Jr., “William Blake, Samuel Palmer and George Richmond,” Blake Studies 2.2 (1970): 43-50; those in vol. 2 in Angus Whitehead, “But, Kitty, I better love thee: George Richmond’s Annotation to ‘Song [I love the jocund dance]’ in Volume II of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863),” Blake Journal no. 9 (2005): 87-97. Vol. 1, the only one I saw, was in 1969 in the collection of Anthony W. Richmond; both volumes now belong to Stephen Keynes. None was included in Blake Records (1969, 2004).
P. 429
In “first printed in the Memoirs of Thomas Hollis,” delete “first” and, for “but, though the face does seem different in graphic style and engraving technique from the others in the book, the differences are not so idiosyncratic as to make it possible to say with confidence either that they are by William Blake or that they are not by Cipriani,” substitute:
However, the etching of the bust of Milton in The Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (1780) is identical to copies given away by Hollis in 1762 and 1765;9↤ 9. David Wilson, “An Idle Speculation by Samuel Palmer: William Blake’s Involvement in Cipriani’s Portrait of John Milton,” British Art Journal 6.1 (spring/summer 2005): 31-36. neither Blake nor any one else altered Cipriani’s etched bust of Milton between 1762 and 1780.
Pp. 446-47
Omit the Hazlitt references, which originally appeared in September 1823.
P. 453
The lawyer Henry Crabb Robinson called on Blake on 7 December 1826 to talk about the recent death of John Flaxman. Perhaps this stimulated Blake’s brother-in-law Henry Banes to draw up his will two days later, replacing that in which he had named his wife Sarah (d. 1824) as his sole heir and executrix. In the new will of 9 December 1826, Henry Banes wrote: ↤ 10. The clerical transcription of the will dutifully reproduces as an interlineation the phrase “I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel,” but the phrase “& silver plate” is not so distinguished, though the authenticating document remarks “the interlineation of the words ‘I also beg Mr. Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ between the 10th and 11th lines and the words ‘& silver plate[’] between the 13th and 14th lines.” ↤ 11. The will is reproduced in Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 84-85.
I give & bequeath to Catherine Blake half my household goods consisting of Bedsteads Beds & pillows Bolsters & sheets & pillow Cases Tables Chairs & crockery & £20 in lawful money of Great Britain ^I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel^—I also give & bequeath to Louiza Best the remaining part of my household goods as aforesaid with the Clock & my Watch & silver plate10 (& pictures [what is worth her acceptance del]) and all the remainder of my property in money & outstanding debts of whatever nature or description for her whole and sole use or disposal I also constitute and appoint the said Louiza Best my sole Executrix of this my last Will and Testament—H. Banes Decr. 9th 1826 Witness John Barrow11No other beneficiary is named. His property therefore went to his sister-in-law Catherine Blake, his brother-in-law William Blake, and his daughter Louisa Best, though their relationships to him are not specified.12↤ 12. The relationship of Henry Banes to Louisa Best is merely a very probable hypothesis, based chiefly on her roles as (1) executrix (replacing Sarah Banes in the former will), (2) chief legatee, and (3) discoverer (with her son) of his will in Jan. 1829.
Did the pictures include any by his brother-in-law William Blake? And were the watch and clock made by his son-in-law Richard Best, watch finisher?
begin page 37 | ↑ back to topThe specification that the bequests to Louisa Best were “for her whole and sole use” was to ensure that they did not pass to the control of her husband, as they would otherwise have done by law and convention.
The bequest to Blake of Banes’ “wearing apparel” suggests that they were similar in size (Blake was 5′6″ tall and sturdy) and that for reasons of size or affection Banes preferred that his clothes should go to Blake rather than to his son-in-law Richard Best.
P. 457fn
To the record of the burial of James Blake from Bunhill Fields Indexes in Somerset House add:
According to the Bunhill Fields Burying Ground Order Book in Guildhall (reproduced in the typescript of Luis and Carol Garrido’s excellent “William Blake’s Final Resting Place” [2005] 96, 98), “James Blake [Age] 71 years [was Brought from] 7 Cirencester Place [and buried in a Grave] 11 feet [deep] [E&W] 52..53 [N&S] 62.” This adds the house number of the street from which the body was brought, and the exact location of the grave. Linnell had a house at 6 Cirencester Place.
P. 464
Footnote to George Richmond’s letter to Samuel Palmer of 15 August 1827.13↤ 13. Beside the version of this letter in Gilchrist (1: 362) without the names of recipient or author, George Richmond wrote in his copy: “This note was written to Mr Palmer by Geo. Richmond.”
P. 493
20 January 1829
Henry Banes, Catherine’s brother-in-law, died on 20 January 1829, and his will was authenticated on 6 February by his daughter Louisa Best and her son Thomas.14↤ 14. The will and its proving (Public Record Office: PROB 11/1751, Liverpool Quire 51-100) are reproduced in Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 84-85. By its terms (see 9 December 1826), Catherine Blake was to inherit “half my household goods consisting of Bedsteads Beds & pillows Bolsters & sheets & pillow Cases Tables Chairs & crockery & £20.” The “wearing apparel” bequeathed to Blake probably stayed with Louisa Best, for her husband or sons—her firstborn, Charles, would have been 23 in February 1829. The furniture Catherine did not much need,15↤ 15. Linnell paid her £1.10.0 in April 1828 for “Furniture sold” (BR [2] 808). as she was staying with Frederick Tatham and his wife. However, when she moved in the spring of 1829 to lodgings with a baker at 17 Upper Charlotte Street16↤ 16. BR (2) 755. the furnishings might have proved useful to her. By this time she was accumulating significant resources, with the bequest of £20 from Henry Banes in February 1829 (presuming it was paid) plus the £84 from Lord Egremont for Blake’s “The Characters of Spenser’s Fairie Queene” in August 182917↤ 17. BR (2) 498. and the sale of other works by Blake. These resources made her feel sufficiently comfortable to ask on 5 January 1830 that an application on her behalf to the charity of the Artists’ General Benevolent Association should be withdrawn,18↤ 18. BR (2) 501-02. and some time “after Blake’s death” she returned the “gift of £100” sent her by Princess Sophia.19↤ 19. Seymour Kirkup reported by Swinburne (1868); see BR (2) 462-63.
P. 504
For the review in the Sheffield Iris for 9 February 1830 of Cunningham’s Lives (1830) with its account of Blake, see David Groves, “Blake and the Sheffield Iris,” Blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06): 125.
It is striking that the same two paragraphs about Blake’s courtship and marriage are quoted in this review and in the Athenaeum (6 Feb. 1830), London Literary Gazette (6 Feb. 1830), Edinburgh Literary Gazette (13 Feb. 1830), Edinburgh Literary Journal (20 Feb. 1830), Fraser’s Magazine (March 1830), and New Jerusalem Magazine (Jan. 1832).
P. 534
Correct the entry in Linnell’s journal for “Friday 3d [August]” 1830 to “Friday 3d [September]” and omit the duplicate entry for Friday 3 September 1830.20↤ 20. The entry is correctly dated but only approximately transcribed by John Linnell, Jr., as given in Blake Records (1969) 401. In Linnell’s original journal, discovered by GEB in 1970, the dates are mostly implied rather than explicit, and I misinterpreted the implied month as Aug. in BR (2). In 1830, 3 Aug. was a Tuesday and 3 Sept. a Friday. The error was pointed out by Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 88n58.
P. 570
Footnote to “Kitty, I better love thee.”21↤ 21. In his copy of Gilchrist (1863), 2: 6, George Richmond underlined the word “Kitty” and annotated it in the margin: “His good Wifes name.” Angus Whitehead, “But, Kitty, I better love thee: George Richmond’s Annotation to ‘Song [I love the jocund dance]’ in Volume II of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863),” Blake Journal no. 9 (2005): 87-97, reproduces the page and argues that “Kitty” is Catherine Boucher whom Blake married in 1782, even though, according to the Advertisement to Poetical Sketches (1783) in which the poem appears, since “his twentieth year” (1777) Blake had not had “the leisure requisite to . . . revis[e] . . . these sheets,”
P. 625
Footnote to J. T. Smith, “lighting the fire.”22↤ 22. By this passage in his copy of Gilchrist (1: 315), George Richmond wrote: “I remember his saying to me, that he saw the devil when lighting the fire. Not in the fire but in himself. This was his way of confessing his natural impatience[.] | G R.” For Catherine’s drawing of “something she saw in the fire,” see BR (2) 608fn.
begin page 38 | ↑ back to topP. 626
Footnote to Blake “was buried in Bunhill-fields, . . . at the distance of about twenty-five feet from the north wall.”23↤ 23. “Twenty-five feet” is a mistake for 25 yards or paces, as Luis and Carol Garrido point out in “William Blake’s Final Resting Place” (2005) 49.
P. 704
Footnote to Crabb Robinson’s report of 13 June 1826, “He was as wild as ever.”24↤ 24. Beside this passage in his copy of Gilchrist (1: 350), George Richmond wrote: “I must say that Mr Crabb Robinson[’]s conclusion that Blake was mad was the very kindliest one he could come to, if he believes his own journal.”
P. 735
To “28 Broad Street” after “The New Complete Guide” add: and William Bailey’s Western and Midland Directory (Birmingham, 1783) 14 (only “Carnaby Market”).
P. 735
Under “28 Broad Street” at the beginning of the bottom paragraph, add:
“Blake, James, and Son, Hosiers and Haberdashers, Carnaby-market” appears in William Bailey’s British Directory or, Merchant’s and Trader’s Useful Companion, For the Year 1784 (1784), and next year, after the death of the elder James Blake, “Blake, James, Haberdasher, 28, Broad-str. Carnaby-Market” appears in Bailey’s (1785).
P. 741
Under “27 Broad Street” add at end:
“Blake and Parker, Print-sellers, 27, ditto [i.e., Broad-Str. Carnaby-Market]” are listed with James Blake, 28 Broad Street, in William Bailey, Bailey’s British Directory or, Merchant’s and Trader’s Useful Companion, For the Year 1785 (London: dedication dated June 1785) 32.
P. 742
To end of “29 Broad Street” add:
“Stephen Horncastle, Stationer, 29 Broad Street, Carnaby Market” is listed in William Bailey’s British Directory or, Merchant’s and Trader’s Useful Companion, For the Year 1785 (London: dedication dated June 1785) 144; he may have been a sitting tenant when Blake’s brother John paid the rates (1784-93) for 29 Broad Street, for Stephen Horncastle (d. 14 Jan. 1792), Stationer, was listed in directories at Broad Street, Carnaby Market (1763-88), 29, Broad Street (1779-88); 85, New Bond Street (or New Broad Street) (1789-99), but trading as William Horncastle (1794-99).25↤ 25. Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977) 115; Horncastle is not in William B. Todd, A Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades London and Vicinity 1800-1840 (1972) or Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1701-1800, ed. D. F. McKenzie (1978).
P. 749
For “The rates for 17 South Molton Street were paid by Mark Martin, who was presumably Blake’s landlord,” read:
The rates for 17 South Molton Street while the Blakes lived there were paid in March 1804 by a tailor named “Willm Enoch”26↤ 26. All the information here about the Enochs derives from Angus Whitehead, “New Information Concerning Mrs Enoch, William and Catherine Blake’s ‘Fellow Inhabitant’ at 17 South Molton Street,” Notes and Queries 250 [ns 52] (2005): 460-63. The ratepayer information is from the rate books in Brook Street Ward, St. George’s, Hanover Square, in the City of Westminster Archives, and the information that Enoch was a “taylor” is from Holden’s Triennial Directory 1805-6-7 (London, 1805) and . . . 1808-9-10 (London, 1808). Information for the 1805 directory was presumably collected in 1804 or early 1805 and repeated anachronistically in that for 1808. and in March 1805-21 by Mark Martin.
P. 750
Under “17 South Molton Street,” for “There were other lodgers in the house as well, including ‘our Kind & attentive fellow inhabitant, the young & very amiable Mrs Enoch, who gave my wife all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother’ until Blake’s return from his trial on 14 January 1804,” read:
Soon after the Blakes moved into 17 South Molton Street in the autumn of 1803, they formed a close friendship with their landlord William Enoch, who probably lived above his ground-floor tailor shop, and with his twenty-one year old wife Mary (née Naylor) and presumably with their son William (born 1801). When Blake went to Chichester for his trial for sedition in January 1804, his wife was prostrated with worry and “near the Gate of Death as was supposed by our Kind & attentive fellow inhabitant, the young & very amiable Mrs Enoch, who gave my wife all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother,” as Blake reported in his letter of 14 January 1804 on his triumphal return, a free man.
P. 750
Under “Cirencester Place” for James Blake, for “Cirencester Place” three times read “7 Cirencester Place,” and at the end add “John Linnell had a house at 6 Cirencester Place.”27↤ 27. BR (2) 477fn, 482, 854.
P. 751
Under “3 Fountain Court,” for “the rooms were small and dark,” delete “small and” and add a paragraph after “the radiance of their occupants”:
The Blakes had “the most spacious rooms in the house.” The front room, which Blake used to exhibit his pictures and probably to house his press, was 19′ × 13′6″, and the back room leading from it, where the Blakes slept, cooked, and worked, was 12′ × 13′9″.
The Poor Rates were paid by Henry Ba[i]nes in 1803-22, 1826-28, by Mary Banes in 1823, and by both in 1824-25.28↤ 28. BR (2) 751fn for 1820-29, supplemented by Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 80, 82, 90. “Mary” Banes may refer to Henry’s wife Sarah; however, since Sarah died in 1824, this suggests that the 1825 record was in error, mechanically repeating the entry for the previous year. begin page 39 | ↑ back to top Richard Best paid the rates from 182929↤ 29. BR (2) 751 fn. to 1838, when presumably he died, after which they were paid by Louisa Best until 1844, when presumably she in turn died; in 1845 she was replaced as ratepayer by William Walker.
P. 752
Footnote § describing Fountain Court, add at the end:
The building “was finally demolished c1902” (Angus Whitehead, “William Blake’s Last Residence. . .,” British Art Journal 6.1 [2005] 29).
P. 753
After “bar of gold” add:
Perhaps the plan was the one Richmond sketched in his copy of Gilchrist (1: 305) on the page where the description of Fountain Court begins.
“Blake’s fellow lodgers [who] were humble but respectable”30↤ 30. Gilchrist (1863) 308 (one hopes based on Samuel Palmer) in BR (2) 752. presumably include his wife’s niece Louisa Best and her family. Louisa Best may well have been the “humble female neighbour” who was Catherine’s “only other companion” when Blake died. The children playing below the window of 3 Fountain Court of whom Blake said “That is heaven,” may have been his wife’s grandnephews and grandnieces.
John Barrow (1757-1838) the artist and printseller (e.g., of Blake’s “Mrs Q” [1820]) lived at 3 Fountain Court at least in 1831-38.31↤ 31. The entries for John Barrow in the exhibitions of the Royal Academy for 1831, 1835, and 1836 and for the Society of British Artists in 1832 and 1836 give his address as Fountain Court, and Robson’s London Directory (London: William Robson, 1832) gives it at 3 Fountain Court, (Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 [fall 2005]: 92n87). John Barrow of 3 Fountain Court, age 81, was buried at St. Clement Danes on 25 March 1838 (Whitehead 92n91). Perhaps he moved there after Catherine Blake moved out in September 1827, as Whitehead suggests.
P. 754
For information on the Banes and Best families and on John Barrow, residents of the apartments at 3 Fountain Court, Strand, while the Blakes lived there in 1821-27, see fig. 1 and the entries for pp. 418, 439, 453, 493, 751 and 753 above.
Other residents at 3 Fountain Court probably included a family named Walker, for Martha Walker of 3 Fountain Court, age 3 weeks, was buried at St. Clement Danes, Strand, on 8 January 1816, and William Walker took over payment of the rates at 3 Fountain Court from Louisa Best in 1845.32↤ 32. See Angus Whitehead, “‘I also beg Mr Blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’ . . .,” Blake 39.2 [fall 2005]: 82, 90n75.
P. 755
Under “Lisson Grove”:
Catherine Blake lived with Tatham from April 1828 until she removed to Upper Charlotte Street by 11 April 1829 (not “early 1830”).
P. 778
Catherine Blake was bequeathed £20 in February 1829 in the will of her brother-in-law Henry Banes.
P. 804
To footnote ‡ add:
See 25 March 1823.
P. 811
| Payments to Catherine 1827-31 1829 from Will of Henry Banes |
£20. 0. 0 |
| 1827-31 | £224.15.0 |
| 1782-1831 | £2,043.19.5 |
P. 839
For “Eight engravings by W.S. Blake (1798-1809) are known,” read:
Twenty-five engravings (1783-1809) by W.S. Blake are known, including seventeen trade cards.33↤ 33. See Book Collector 37 (1988): 127-33.
Index
Ackroyd, Peter 20
Adams, Hazard 20
Angelo, Valenti 12
Antonielli, Arianna 21
Arnaud, Danielle 19
Bainbridge, Simon 30
Barfoot, C. C. 21
Barker, Elizabeth E. 33
Barker, Nicolas 19
Barrow, John 7, 22, 36, 39
Baulch, David 32
Beaumont, Matthew 31
Beer, John 6, 21
Behrendt, Stephen C. 30
Bentley, A. E. K. L. B. 4, 9, 10, 11, 18
Bentley, G. E., Jr. 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 23, 32
Bidney, Martin 21
Billigheimer, Rachel V. 21
Bindman, David 33
Blackstock, Colin 21
Blackstone, Bernard 21
Blake, Robin 34
Blake, William:
All Religions are One 12; America 12, 31; Book of Ahania
9, 10; Book of Los 9, 10, 12; Book of Thel 4, 12, 28; Book of
Urizen 4, 10, 31; Europe 9, 10, 12, 31; Four Zoas 22, 29;
French Revolution 22; Jerusalem 19, 32; Letters 4, 9, 10, 32; Marriage 4, 9,
10, 12, 30, 31; Milton 4, 10, 23, 25, 27, 30, 31; Poetical Sketches 4, 23;
Receipt 11; “Riddle” ms. 4, 9, 11;
begin page 40 |
↑ back to top
Self-portrait 7, 9, 22; Song of Los 11, 12; Songs 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 23,
26, 27, 28, 29, 31; There is No Natural Religion 12; Tiriel 24;
Visions 4, 11, 23, 31
Illustrations/engravings of/for:
Adams 13; Allen 13; Ariosto 13; Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine 5, 13; Bible (Job) 4, 5, 6,
7, 13-14, 29, 31, 35, 36; Blair, Grave 5, 6, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 35; Blower
5, 14; Boydell’s Shakspeare 14; Brown 14; Bürger 14; Cabinet of the
Arts 5, 14-15; Catullus 15; Chaucer 15; Commins 15; Cumberland 15; Dante 4, 13, 15, 23, 26, 36; Darwin
15; Earle 15; Emlyn 15; Enfield 15; Euler 16; Flaxman 16; Fuseli 16; Gay 16; [Gough] 16; Gray 13; Hamilton 16;
Hartley 16; Hayley 16; Henry 16; Hoare 16; Hogarth 16; Hunter 16; Josephus 16; Kimpton 16; Lavater 16-17;
Malkin 17; Nicholson 17; Novelist’s Magazine 17; Olivier 17; Rees 17;
Remember Me! 17; Ritson 17; Scott 17; Seally and Lyons 17; Shakespeare 17; Stedman 5, 17-18, 32;
Stuart and Revett 18; Varley 18; Vetusta Monumenta 18; Virgil 4, 18; Whitaker 18;
Wit’s Magazine 18; Wollstonecraft 5, 18; Young 4-5, 6, 7, 13, 18-19
Burial 26, 28, 38
Family 7, 22, 24, 31, 33, 34-39 passim
Residences 7, 19, 29, 32, 36, 38, 39
Bode, Christoph 23
Boehme, Jacob 23, 24
Borges, Jorge Luis 23
Braida, Antonella 23
Braithwaite, Helen 33
Brewis, Kathy 34
Brown, David Blayney 33
Burrows, David 19
Bushnell, Jack 32
Butlin, Martin 34
Cabañas Alamán, Rafael 23
Capurro, Soledad 12
Carey, Frances 19
Casassas Figueres, Enric 10
Catling, Brian 19
Chauvin, Danièle 23
Chevalier, Tracy 19
Church, Michael 23
Ciompi, Fausto 23
Ciseri, Ilaria 23
Clark, Steve 11
Connolly, Tristanne J. 23
Corti, Claudia 23
Cowan, Derek 12
Cox, Judy 23-24
Coy, Phil 19
Cumberland, George 4, 26, 32-33, 34
Cunningham, Allan 21, 22, 37
Curran, Stuart 11
Davies, Charlotte 23
Davies, J. G. 24
Davies, Keri 34n
Demetriou, Danielle 24
den Otter, Alice G. 26
Dent, Shirley 24
De Selincourt, Basil 24
Directories 24, 32, 38
Doce, Jordi 24
Dorment, Richard 34
Dörrbecker, D. W. 24
Doyle, Brian 24
Easton, Will 23
Eaves, Morris 21, 24
Eichhorn, Thomas 20
El-Hage, George Nicolas 24
Erdman, David V. 24
Erle, Sibylle 21, 24, 31
Essick, Robert N. 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14-15, 18n, 20, 21, 22, 33, 34
Esterhammer, Angela 25
Evans, Jean 19
Evans, Mark 22, 31
Exhibitions:
Cloud & Vision 6, 19; McKeever 19; Palmer 33-34
Facsimiles 4-5, 11
Fallon, David 22
Fenton, James 21
Fischer, Kevin 23, 24
Fisher, Peter F. 24
Flaxman, John 4, 36
Freedman, Carl 25
Frye, Northrop 12, 25-26
Fuller, David 22, 29
Fuseli, Henry 27
Garrido, Luis and Carol 26, 28, 37, 38n
Gaunt, William 26
Ghita, Catalin 26
Gilchrist, Alexander 7, 23, 26
Gimeno Suances, Francisco 26
Gleckner, Robert F. 26
Gnappi, Carla Maria 26
Goldman, Bill 23
Gould, Polly 19
Gourlay, Alexander 6, 20, 22, 26, 28, 31
Graves, Roy Neil 26
Greathead, Alexandra 33
Green, Matthew 26
Groves, David 21, 22, 35, 37
Halmi, Nicholas 26
Hamlyn, Robin 5, 7, 13
Harper, Andy 19
Harper, George Mills 26
Harris, James 26
Harrison, Colin 33
Hartigan, David Sean 26
Hastings, Sheena 26-27
Hayley, William 10
Haywood, Peter 27, 33
Hazlitt, William 27, 36
Heath, Tim 19
Heringman, Noah 27
Hoagwood, T. 29
Hobday, Charles 22
Holmes, Richard 7, 26
Hugo, Victor 23
Ima-Izumi, Yoko 27, 28
Ishizuka, Hisao 27, 28
Iwasaki, Toyotaro 27
Jacobson, Howard 22
Jasper, David 27
Jenkins, Simon 34
Johnson, Joseph 27, 33
Johnston, Kenneth 28
Jönsson, Julia 22, 31
Kaplan, Carter 27
Kaplan, Jordan 19
Kawasaki, Noriko 27
Kazin, Alfred 12
Kennedy, Maev 27
Keynes, Geoffrey 19
Kim, Minho 27
Kirby, Bryan 24
begin page 41 | ↑ back to topKitamura, Kensuke 27
Kotani, Mayumi 27
Kroeber, Karl 21, 24
Lambirth, Andrew 6, 19
Larrissy, Edward 27
Lavater, Johann Caspar 24, 26
Lee, Seunghun 28
Lindop, Grevel 28
Linnell, John 14, 28, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38
Locke, John 26
Longacre, Jeffrey 23
Lucas, E. V. 28
Lussier, Mark 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30
Makdisi, Saree 28
Malone, Mary E. 9, 10
Malvern, Jack 28
Mañé Garzön, Pablo 12
Marshall, Jacqueline 12
Martin, Julia 28
Matsushima, Shoichi 28
McKeever, Ian 19
Mee, Jon 28
Melikian, Souren 34
Milton, John 20, 21, 22, 29, 30, 32, 36
Miner, Paul 28
Munson, Amelia H. 4, 12
Nagashima, Kazuhiko 28
Naito, Takako 28
Nakamura, Hiroko 29
Newman, Jon 19
Newton, Isaac 30
Noah, Sherna 29
Norman, Philip 19
Nosková, Martina 29
O’Neill, Michael 21
Ormsby, Bronwyn 22, 31
Otto, Peter 29
Paglia, Camille 29
Paley, Morton D. 22, 23, 29
Palmer, Samuel 14, 21, 32, 33-34, 37
Palomares, José Luis 10
Pearce, Brian Louis 23
Phillips, Michael 10, 19, 20, 29, 30
Phillips, Thomas 4
Pierce, John B. 21, 23, 29
Pinto, Vivian de Sola 29
Plotnitsky, Arkady 29
Portela, Manuel 4, 12
Quincy, John 6, 20
Raine, Kathleen 28, 29
Raverat, Jacques 4, 10
Reynolds, Nigel 29-30
Ribadeneira, Manuela 19
Richmond, George 7, 23, 32, 36n, 37, 38n, 39
Rix, Robert William 30
Robinson, Henry Crabb 36, 38
Röden, Peter Ulrick 30
Rosenfeld, Alvin A. 30
Ross, Theodore 12
Rudd, Margaret E. 30
Rudy, John G. 30
Rutland, Laura Ellen 30
Ryskamp, Charles 10, 15
Ryu, Son-Moo 30
Sato, Hikari 30
Schneider, Matthew 30
Schock, Peter A. 30
Schofield, Jennifer 23
Schorer, Mark 30
Schott, G. D. 30
Schuchard, Marsha Keith 30, 34n
Scrivener, Michael 28
Sewell, Brian 34
Shelley, Marjorie 33
Singer, June 30
Sklar, Susanne 22, 23, 24
Snart, Jason 6, 20, 29, 30
Solomon, Andrew 23, 29
Spector, Sheila A. 19, 29, 30
Speidel, Nadine Dalton 31
Stevens, Bethan 13
Stevenson, Warren 22
Stevenson, W.H. 24
Stothard, Thomas 14n, 34, 35
Sturrock, June 31
Suied, Alain 31
Sung, Mei-Ying 5, 7, 14n, 27, 31
Suzuki, Masashi 28, 31
Swedenborg, Emanuel 32
Symons, Arthur 31
Takahashi, Hiroko 28
Tambling, Jeremy 7, 23, 31
Tanaka, Minne 23, 29
Tatham, Frederick 22, 37, 39
Thompson, E. P. 21
Tokareva, G. 31
Townsend, Joyce H. 22, 31
Van Kleeck, Justin 22
Vaughan, William 33, 34
Vidili, Julia 10
Viscomi, Joseph 9, 10, 11
Wada, Ayako 31
Wardi, Eynel 31
Warner, Janet 31
Watermarks 9
Weir, David 21, 31
Wethered, Newton 32
Whiles, Annie 19
White, Harry 22
Whitehead, Angus 7, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27n, 29, 32, 34-39 passim
Whitson, Roger 28
Whittaker, Jason 21, 24, 29, 32
Wilcox, Scott 33
Wilcox, Timothy 34
William Blake Archive 4, 12, 13, 15
Wilson, David 21, 32, 36n
Wilson, Frances 34
Wilton, Andrew 11
Windle, John 6, 11, 18, 19, 20
Wood, Marcus 32
Woodfine, Sarah 19
Wright, Julia M. 32
Yamazaki, Yusuke 32
Yanagi, Muneyoshi 28, 29
Yeats, W. B. 12, 20, 21
Yoder, R. Paul 32
Zeng, Fangrong 32