MINUTE PARTICULAR
“Mr. J. Blake”
A hitherto unrecorded reference to William Blake (although with the wrong first initial) appears in the New Monthly Magazine for 1 January 1815 (vol. 2 [1814]: 537). Headed “Intelligence in Literature and the Arts and Sciences,” it reads: “Mr. Flaxman has finished a series of compositions in outline from Hesiod’s Works, which will be engraved by Mr. J. Blake, and printed in folio, to correspond with the outlines from Homer, by the same eminent professor.”
The volume number and year appear anomalous because the first issue for 1815 was paginated as part of the volume for 1814. The Theogony, Works and Days, and the Days of Hesiod, with 37 plates engraved by William Blake after Flaxman’s designs, was published in 1817 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown. The New Monthly’s mistake about Blake’s first initial may be an indication of how obscure he was in what Gilchrist called his “years of deepening neglect.”