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ARTICLE

William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2009

Blake Publications and Discoveries in 2009

Perhaps the most remarkable discovery of 2009 was that Blake took an apprentice named Thomas Owen in 1788 (see illus. 1).11. David Alexander, “William Blake, graveur d’interprétation” (see William Blake [1757-1827]: Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais under 2009 in Part IV) 80. See also the addenda to BR(2), online. Scarcely anything more is known about Owen or his apprenticeship.

The term of the apprenticeship (1788-95) coincides with a period of enormous productivity for Blake. How much of this fecundity was fostered by the assistance of an apprentice able to take on some of the drudgery of polishing plates, sharpening gravers, mixing colors, and laying in outlines, not to mention casual carrying and fetching, which would otherwise have fallen upon Blake and Catherine?

Blake’s Writings

Blake’s letter of 7 August 1804, which disappeared a century and a quarter ago, reappeared in 2009 and, happily for us all, was acquired by Robert N. Essick. Essick will publish a transcription which will supersede the fragments quoted in catalogues of 1878, 1885, and 2009.

Thel pl. 7, Urizen pls. 7, 11-12, 17, 19, 23, and Marriage pl. 16 from Small Book of Designs (B), which were displayed at the Tate in 2007-08, have now been sold by their still-anonymous owner to the Tate.

Songs pl. 30 was acquired by Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

New printings of Blake’s work (mainly poems from Songs) were discovered in publications predating Gilchrist’s Life.

Commercial Engravings

Previously unknown works with engravings after Blake’s designs were first recorded in 2009: the Diamond Bible (1832-34, 1836-37, 1840) with a copy of Blake’s engraving of “Job and His Family”; Diario de los niños, only the second time designs by Blake were lithographed (the first was “Enoch” [1807]) and the first printing—by almost a century—of anything concerned with Blake in Mexico.

Catalogues and Bibliographies

A marvelous new resource is J. R. de J. Jackson, Bibliography of Romantic Poetry 1770-1835, which is online at the University of Toronto Library <http://jacksonbibliography.library.utoronto.ca>. Phase 1, which is up and running, presents 17,160 entries for 1798-1835. Phase 2, “in an advanced state of preparation,” will add 5,359 entries for 1770-97. The Blake entries in phase 1 (Milton and Jerusalem) are derivative, but the thousands of other entries are de visu and wonderfully useful.

Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com> searches by artist’s name to provide links to images at institutional web sites (e.g., 41 Blake images at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney).

The major discovery of 2009 for me has been Google Books <http://books.google.com>. Despite all the hype, this is a wonderfully useful resource. Of course I had heard of it as one of those grandiose cyber-vauntings and its challenge to copyright, but I had no conception of how far the project has advanced or the sophistication of the means of access. Google Books has made possible the discovery of scores of previously unreported references to Blake in publications of 1780-1862, a surprising number of them in French and German.

The volume accompanying the Blake exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris is a handsome quarto. It consists of three streams of information: the first and smallest is the catalogue of the works exhibited, the second is 31 short essays, and the third is the 173 striking reproductions.

The essays, mostly by distinguished Blake scholars, are carefully organized to encompass Blake’s whole career from his apprenticeship to his reputation in England, the United States, and France. The scholars, like the loaning institutions, are mostly British and French.

There has been far too little coordination of the text with the reproductions, which are often scarcely related to the essays. The surprising rewards of the most original of the essays here—those by David Alexander, Robin Simon, and Jon Stallworthy—are not significantly reinforced by the many illustrations.22. The most important visual feature referred to in the text (96)—the cricket bat in the second plate of “Pré tintant” (“The Ecchoing Green”)—is not reproduced at all, although there are many other plates from the Songs.

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Thursday
			10 July 88
			}
			x1   Jno. Scott   Henley upon Thames Co. of Oxford Cordwainer:   Jno. Cornish
			x2   Thos. Betts   Eynesbury Co. of Huntingdon   Grocer &c   Anthy. Norman
			x3   Jno. King   Swerford Co. of Oxford   Cordwainer   Jno. Howard
			x4   Richd Springford   St George Hanover Sqr. Co. of Mx. Coachmaker &c   Edwd H. Brown
			x5   Wm. Blake   St Jame’s Westminster Co. of Mx.   Engraver   Thos. Owen
1. Record of the apprenticeship of Thomas Owen to William Blake, from the Apprenticeship Books 1710-1811 (ref. IR1/33 [pp. 218-19]) in the National Archives.

The record is in a large folio volume. On the verso of one leaf (above) are the date (Thursday 10 July [17]88), the name of the master (Wm. Blake), his parish (St. James’s, Westminster, County of Middlesex), his trade (engraver), and the name of the apprentice (Thos. Owen).

On the recto of the facing leaf (below) are the date on which the apprenticeship began (23 June [17]88), the length of the apprenticeship (7 years), the fee paid for the apprentice (£52.10.0 or 50 guineas), and the duty paid on the fee (£2.12.6).

The book is for apprenticeships outside the City of London, where Blake was apprenticed. The record was first cited by David Alexander (see note 1). The only previous record of a Blake apprentice known to me is in the fiction by Peter Carter, The Gates of Paradise <BBS p. 433>.

Images reproduced by courtesy of the National Archives of the UK.

1   16 June 88   7 yrs f. date   12   6   .
			2   2 July 88   7 do . . .   23   2   .   .   11   7
			1   21 May 88   3 do . . .   8   8   4   2½
			2   5 July 88   do . . .   60   3   .   .
			2   23 June 88   7 do . . .   52   10   .   2   12   6

The contents of the modest volume, Seen in My Visions, that accompanied the Blake exhibition at the Tate are useful but not exciting.33. The Tate exhibition included paintings exhibited in 1809 by Blake’s contemporaries which are not referred to in the catalogue. It is a pity that no attempt was made in either the exhibition or the catalogue to reproduce the layout of the 1809 exhibition on the floor above the haberdashery shop at 28 Broad Street.44. See Troy R. C. Patenaude, “‘The glory of a Nation’: Recovering William Blake’s 1809 Exhibition,” British Art Journal 4 (2003): 52-63 <Blake (2004)>. This would have allowed current viewers to experience the pictures as the few original patrons did.

John Windle’s handsome and enormous catalogue 46 ([November] 2009) of books by and about Blake and his circle is perhaps the largest bookseller’s catalogue ever devoted to Blake. It is valuable to scholars and critics as well as to hopeful collectors for what it brings to light.

Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies

Google Books has made possible the discovery of references to Blake by such notable contemporaries as Lady Charlotte Bury (1830), Leigh Hunt (1810), and John Landseer (1834).

Mei-Ying Sung’s William Blake and the Art of Engraving (2009) is rather more narrowly focused than its title suggests. It concentrates very rewardingly upon Blake’s engraving materials, his copperplates and woodblocks, particularly their unengraved versos with evidence of repoussage or hammering the copper to alter a feature of the engraved recto.55. Almost all the evidence is from Blake’s engravings of his own designs; the copperplates engraved from the designs of others do not survive, except for the Hogarth plate. She finds that Blake used repoussage a good deal more than did other engravers, such as Schiavonetti. “This either means that Blake made many more mistakes in handling his burin than others (and so was not a very skillful engraver), or that he had a freer attitude towards engraving and did not mind making mistakes and subsequently correcting or revising them on the copper plate” (57).

Would she draw similar conclusions about the alterations in Blake’s manuscripts such as his Notebook and Vala? Might such alterations not indicate meticulousness in improving his earlier version?

Her argument is vitally supported by reproductions, but there are only 8 figures; her dissertation (2005) with 99 photographs, including recto and verso of all the Job plates, is far more generous in this respect.

Red Herring

A print in the London Metropolitan Archives bears the imprint “THE ITALIAN PUPPET SHOW.”, “Printed for & Sold by Bowles & Carver”, “No. 69 in St. Pauls Church Yard London”, and “Published as the Act directs” (see cover illus.). The pencil begin page 1 | back to top

Printed for & Sold by Bowles & Carver.
          		
          		The ITALIAN PUPPET SHOW.
          		Published as the Act directs
          		
          		No. 69 in St. Pauls Church Yard London.
Cover: An engraving, improbably attributed to William Blake, after a drawing ascribed to Samuel Collings. 23.5 × 15.9 cm. City of London, London Metropolitan Archives, main print collection, record 26963.
begin page 6 | back to top drawing for it in the same collection is labeled “S. Collings” in a twentieth-century hand, and the catalogue said66. By May 2010 the online catalogue still attributed the engraving to Blake, but made no reference to the Wit’s Magazine. that it was engraved by William Blake for the Wit’s Magazine.

No such print is recorded in the obvious sources, for the very good reason that it almost certainly has nothing to do with Blake. He certainly signed six prints in the Wit’s Magazine (1784), four of them designed by Samuel Collings, and the size of the Italian Puppet Show print (23.5 × 15.9 cm.) is commensurate with those Blake engraved (c. 23 × 18 cm.). However, no such print appears in the Wit’s Magazine (Printed for Harrison and Co. No 18, Paternoster-Row, 1784-85), and there is no story which would justify its insertion. Furthermore, the firm of Bowles & Carver was not founded until 1793, when Henry Carington Bowles (1763-1830) took over the business of his father Carington Bowles (1724-93). The firm flourished from 1793-1830, publishing satirical prints voluminously,77. Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977) 25. but its imprint has not previously been associated with the Wit’s Magazine or elsewhere, though the speculative association with Samuel Collings is not implausible.

* * * * * * * * *

I am deeply grateful for various kinds of assistance generously proffered by Sarah Bentley, Professor Robert Brandeis, Professor Robert N. Essick (for the draft of his “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009” and his essay on etched variants in Europe, and for endless patience and generosity), Professor Heather Jackson (for details of the Diamond Bible in the British Library), Alan Kahan (for a reproduction of the apprenticeship record of Thomas Owen), Jeffrey Barclay Mertz, Agnieszka Osińska, Professor Morton D. Paley, Pickering & Chatto, Susanne Sklar, Tate Publishing, Professor Angus Whitehead, and John Windle.

Research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the University of Toronto and Victoria University in the University of Toronto, Toronto Public Library, Google Books, and, for Japanese publications, CiNii (Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator) online, the National Diet Library online catalogue, and the Komaba Library and the General Library of the University of Tokyo.

I have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, broadcasts on radio and television, calendars, CD-ROMs, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer print-outs (unpublished), conferences, e-mails, festivals and lecture series, furniture, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), pageants, performances, pillows, playing cards, podcasts, poems about Blake, portraits, postcards, posters, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, T-shirts, tattoos, tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. The most comprehensive source of frivolities is CafePress <http://www.cafepress.com>.

The annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning William Blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2009) and those for previous years which are not recorded in Blake Books, Blake Books Supplement, and “William Blake and His Circle.” Installments of “William Blake and His Circle” 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,88. Except for the states of the prints for Blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 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, vol. 1: Plates Designed and Engraved by Blake (Normal: American Blake Foundation, 1972); vol. 2: Plates Designed or Engraved by Blake 1774-1796 (Memphis: American Blake Foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared. The standard authority for prints issued separately is Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). and have noted significant differences from them.

The 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
Appendix: Writings Improbably Alleged to Be by Blake
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Section B: Collections and Selections
Part III: Commercial Book Engravings
Appendix: Books Improbably Alleged to Have Blake 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 are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted entirely to him are listed under the titles.

Division I: William Blake

This division is organized by individual (say, William Hayley or John Flaxman), with works by and about Blake’s friends begin page 7 | back to top and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. 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.

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. Note that Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement do not include reviews.

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.

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 second-hand authority.

Abbreviations

BB G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977)
BBS G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995)
Blake Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
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, Reprints, and Translations

Collections of Originals of Blake’s Writings
Addenda

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY in the University of Toronto ILLUMINATED PRINTING: Songs pl. 30

Collections Which Have Disposed of Originals of Blake’s Writings
Addenda

Lipman, Roger ILLUMINATED PRINTING: Songs pl. 30

Table of Watermarks
Addenda

EDMEADS & PINE
Blair watercolors nos. 3, 5, ?6, 7, 11

PRO PATRIA with Britannia and a lion
The Resurrection of the Dead, pencil sketch (watermark and drawing reproduced in Windle’s catalogue 46 [see under 2009 in Part IV] p. 2)

J RUSE | 1800
Blair watercolor no. 2 (backing mat)

J WHATMAN
Blair watercolors nos. 16 (backing mat), 18 (backing mat, in smaller letters)

J WHATMAN | 180099. J WHATMAN | 1800 has not been recorded in another work by Blake.
Blair watercolor no. 11 (backing mat)

America (1793)

Table

Copy Plates Leaves
S 1-18 18
UNTRACED

Copy C
History: Offered by Henry G. Bohn in 1848 (see Part IV).

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy S
Binding: Bound with Thel (S), Europe (N), Urizen (K), and Visions (S) in half calf with the autograph of John Flaxman.
Most copies of America (B-M, R), Europe (A-G), and Visions (B-D, F, H-M, R) are printed on leaves c. 26 × 37 cm. Often America (A-B, F-H, N-Q) was bound with Europe (A-D, I, K-M), twice (C, F) it was bound with Visions (B-C), twice (A, F) with The Song of Los (B, D), and once each (G-H) with Jerusalem (B) and the Large Book of Designs (A). Once Europe (G) was bound with The Song of Los (C) and Visions (H).
History: Acquired by Flaxman after his return in 1794 from seven years in Italy—perhaps this is the work for which he paid Blake £2.2.0 in Oct. 1797;1010. BR(2) 758. at Flaxman’s death in 1826 the collective volume was probably inherited by his sister-in-law and adopted daughter Maria Denman; on her death in 1861 the volume probably passed to her family; offered in Willis and Sotheran’s catalogues of 25 June 1862, lot 116, and 25 Dec. 1862, lot 91 (see Part IV); untraced.

The Book of Thel (1789)

11. The print missing may be pl. 1, “Thel’s Motto,” also omitted from copy E.

Table

Copy Plates Leaves
S ?2-811 7
UNTRACED

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Copy O
History: Offered by Henry G. Bohn in 1848 (see Part IV).

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy S
For the binding and history, see America (S), above. No other copy of the quarto Thel was bound with the folios America and Europe, but two copies (J, N) were bound with copies of the folio Visions (G, P).

A Descriptive Catalogue (1809)

Transcribed, without Blake’s index, in Martin Myrone, ed., Seen in My Visions (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Europe (1794)

12. Pl. 15b is numbered “36” in ink at the top right (see the “Order” of the Songs, below) and “24” in pencil at the top left. 13. Pl. 15b has rough green color printing at the bottom. The plate is poorly inked, and the text and parts of the design are gone over in black ink. There are two framing lines round the print and stabholes in the left margin.

Table

Copy Plates Leaves Watermark Blake nos. Leaf size in cm. Printing color
N
UNTRACED
?1-2, 4-8, 11-18 15
c
HARVARD
15b 1 12 22.6 × 31.3 brown13

Etched Variants1414. The modifications here of BB and BBS derive, mostly word for word, from an unpublished essay by Robert N. Essick, “Miscellaneous Plates from Europe a Prophecy,” generously sent me in 2009. Some of the variants noted in BB are due to differences in inking and coloring rather than to etched changes to the plate.

Pl. 1
State 1 (copy a): The white-line hatching in the clouds to the left of the figure’s right leg does not extend to the left margin. At the top of this cloud, the gap between the margin and the left end of the white-line hatching is c. 1.6 cm.
State 2 (all other copies): The white-line hatching in the clouds to the left of the figure’s right leg has been extended to within 0.2 cm. of the left margin.

Pl. 4
State 1 (copy b, pl. 4a-b: There are no white lines in the road-ruts to the left of the walking figure’s foot or on the walking figure or on the plants to the right of his foot.
State 2 (copy a; copy c, pl. 4c: White-line work has been added to the ruts, to the strip across the right side of the walker’s chest, to the plants to the right of the walker’s foot, to his right knee and inner right thigh, to his left thigh, to his lower torso, and to his upper right arm.
State 3 (all other copies): White-line hatching has been added to the bundle on the walker’s back, to the locks of hair below his hat, to he small area of the bundle visible above and to the left of his right shoulder, now defined with a line that clearly separates the shoulder from the bundle.

Pl. 5
State 1 (copy b): Lacks the white-line work added in state 2.
State 2 (all other copies): Extensive white-line hatching and cross-hatching have been added to the clouds above, below, and to the right of the three struggling figures, to the clouds above the final two lines of text, and to the sky right, left, and above the man at upper right. White lines have been added to the lines defining the interior modeling of his back and hips and to the head of the struggling figure on the left in the group of three.

Pl. 7
State 1 (copy a): The prone young man has a halo of three concentric lines round his head.
State 2 (all other copies): The halo has been removed.

Pl. 9
State 1 (copy b, pl. 9b: Lacks the white lines added in state 2.
State 2 (copy a): Curving white lines have been added to the smoke above and on both sides of the pot. White lines have been added to the three lines defining the neck of the woman on the left and to the folds of her garment where it falls over her lower back, hip, and below her hip, to the supine child’s right shoulder, torso, and hip, and to the cloth surrounding his body. White-line hatching has been added to the garment worn by the woman on the right where it covers her legs and right knee and to the part of her garment below her right leg.
State 3 (all other copies): White-line hatching has been added to the garment of the woman on the right where it falls to the left of her ankle and foot. Two small patches of white-line hatching (not printed or poorly printed in some copies) have been added to the left foot of the woman on the right. Two white lines (not printed or poorly printed in some copies) have been added to her garment where it falls below her lower left leg. The relief lines extending from the supine child’s right shoulder towards his chest and a few of the relief hatching lines just above his biceps have been cut away.

Pl. 10
State 1 (copy a): Lacks the white-line work added in state 2.
State 2 (all other copies): Considerable white-line hatching has been added to the bellman’s hat (upper left crown and brim above his hair), to his coat over his chest, upper stomach, and the left side of his arm, to the relief line just above the lower edge of his bell, to the chest, back, shoulder, and arm of the man lower left, to the hair and gown of the woman lower left (particularly evident below her legs), to the gown of the woman on the right where it falls to the left and below her left leg and right of her left foot, and to the lines extending upward from her waist.

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Pl. 11
State 11515. Not recorded in BB or BBS. (copy a): There is no white-line work in the relief area below the woman’s right foot and ankle, lower left.
State 2 (all other copies): A few white-line strokes have been added to the relief area below the woman’s right foot and ankle, lower left.

Pl. 17
State 1 (copy a; copy b, pl. 17a-b; copy c [all three copies], and Essick copy): Line 6 from the bottom reads “She ceas’d, and all went forth to sport beneath the solemn moon”, and line 3 from the bottom reads “Till morning ope’d the eastern gate, and the angel trumpet blew.”
State 2 (all other copies): Line 6 from the bottom has been altered to read “She ceas’d, for All were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon”,1616. Copy b, pl. 17c, line 6 from the bottom has been altered in ink (not on the etched copperplate) to read “She ceas’d. All were forth in sport beneath the solemn moon”. and line 3 from the bottom reads “Till morning ope’d the eastern gate.”

Pl. 18
State 1 (copy a): Line 1 reads “Shot from the heights of Enitharmon, before the trumpet blew;”.
State 2 (copy c, pl. 18a): The small areas of relief lines on the woman’s back, just above her neck, and on her left shoulder have been modified with white-line work. The relief areas on the back of the child’s raised right hand have been cut away and the middle finger divided into two fingers with white-line work. An “S”-shaped relief line below “all” in the penultimate line of text left of the final line (“FINIS”) has been cut away.
State 3 (all other copies): The final four words in the first line of text and the terminal punctuation have been cut away, so that the line reads “Shot from the heights of Enitharmon,”. White lines have been added to the woman’s dangling hair, just left of her elbow, and the next lock to the left has been narrowed. A few white lines have been cut into the relief areas right and left of the top of the man’s penis.

Copy B
It was reproduced in the Petit Palais exhibition catalogue (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy N
For the binding and history, see America (S), above. In the 1862 catalogues, Europe (N) is said to have “15 engravings,” but all other copies have 17 (pls. 1-2, 4-18 in A-G, I, L-M) or 18 prints (H, K). The prints omitted in Europe (N) may be pl. 3 (lacking in most copies) and pls. 9-10, which are full-page prints without text.

Edition

Europe, copy G. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2009. <http://www.blakearchive.org>.

The First Book of Urizen (1794-1818)

Table

Copy Plates Leaves
K ?1-15, 27
UNTRACED 17-28

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy K
For the binding and history, see America (S), above. Among previously recorded copies, only Urizen (F) was bound with other works—Thel (A) and Marriage (A). In the 1862 catalogues, Urizen (K) is reported as having 27 prints, probably pls. 1-15, 17-28.1717. Two previously recorded copies (A-B) have 28 prints; one (G [1818]) has 27; two (D, F) have 26; two (C, J) have 25 (not counting the duplicate pl. 2 in copy C); and one (E) has 24. All but copy G with fewer than 28 prints lack pl. 16, which is probably the print omitted from copy K.

For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)

Table

Copy Plates Leaves
F 1-18, plus 19
UNTRACED another pl.

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy F
Binding: A small square octavo with 19 prints. If it was acquired about 1797, the work must be For Children with 18 prints, rather than For the Sexes (1826 and later) with 21 prints. The nineteenth print may have been a duplicate.
History: Acquired by John Flaxman, probably about 1797 when he bought America (S), Thel (S), Europe (N), Urizen (K), and Visions (S) bound together; offered “From Flaxman’s library” in the Willis and Sotheran catalogue of 25 June 1862, lot 117 (see Part IV); untraced.

For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise ([1826])

Copy H
History: After its sale at Sotheby’s, 29 July 1925 [for £31 to Parsons], it was sold anonymously at the American Art Association, 14 Jan. 1926, lot 40 (title page reproduced) [for $400 to Phenix, according to the Essick copy of the catalogue].

The Ghost of Abel (1822)

Copy B
It was reproduced in the Petit Palais exhibition catalogue (see under 2009 in Part IV).

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Jerusalem (1804[-20])

Copy A
History: Offered by A. E. Evans & Son in [1845] (see Part IV).

Letters1818. A letter of Wednesday 24 Apr. [1811] from “W.B.” declining to buy “the little picture of the Pope” is reproduced and attributed to the poet in the American Art Association catalogue of 13-14 Mar. 1928, lot 37 (said to have been sent to Blake’s “old friend John Thomas Smith”). I am confident that the letter is not by the poet and suspect that it is by William Beckford.

1804 7 AUGUST
History: As in BB p. 279 to 1885; thereafter it passed to Robert Griffin (c. 1840-1921) of Court Garden, Marlow, Buckinghamshire, and “thence by descent” to an anonymous owner, for whom it was sold at Sotheby’s (London), 17 Dec. 2009, lot 72 (partially quoted and reproduced) (estimate £25,000-£35,000) for £46,850 to John Windle for Robert N. Essick.

1807 MAY (from R. H. Cromek)
History: See BB p. 280 (simplistic), Blake (1999, 2009). T. H. Cromek transcribed the letter, extensively normalized, in his manuscript “Memorials” (c. 1865) in Princeton; the source of the letter is obscure, since R. H. Cromek’s transcription of his original and Allan Cunningham’s transcription of Cromek’s transcription were not accessible to him. Another copy of the manuscript “Memorials” made by T. H. Cromek passed to his descendant Wilfred Warrington (BR[2] 262fn); presumably this too has a transcription of Cromek’s letter to Blake of the same authority.
T. H. Cromek’s transcription differs in many minor ways from that in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1852) <BB #969>; abbreviations (e.g., “wd”, “exclusy”) are expanded, layout is altered (e.g., the first paragraph in the Gentleman’s Magazine is divided into three). I take it that his source was the Gentleman’s Magazine version and that his version consequently has no authority.

1819 11 OCTOBER
History: It was sold anonymously at the American Art Association auction of 14 Jan. 1926, lot 39 [for $100, according to the marked copy of the catalogue in the Essick collection].

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([1790])

Copy B
History: Perhaps acquired by Charles George Dyer1919. C. G. Dyer’s intimate friend, the engraver and painter Richard Bean (1792-1817), profoundly admired “the sublime conceptions of Blake” (Gentleman’s Magazine 87, part 2 [Oct. 1817]: 369), and Dyer dedicated to Bean his Biographical Sketches of ... Eminent Men (1819). Perhaps Bean was the first owner of Marriage (B). (see BB p. 298, “[?George] Dyer”).

Copy E
It is reproduced online <http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

Copy M
It was reproduced in the Petit Palais exhibition catalogue (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Edition

§* Ægteskabet mellem Himmel og Helvede. Trans. Niels Brunse. Afterword by Marianne Lindgren. Roskilde: Batzer & Co., 1995. 72 pp., facsimile; ISBN: 8798218840. In Danish.

Milton (1804[-10])

Copy D
History: Offered by Henry G. Bohn in 1848 (see Part IV).

Edition

Milton, copy B. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2009. <http://www.blakearchive.org>.

“The Order in which the Songs of Innocence and Experience ought to be paged” <see BB #125>

(27) [?Europe (c) pl. (4c, 9c)]
(*36) Europe (c) pl. 15b (Harvard)2020. Europe (c) pl. 15b, newly recorded here, is numbered “36”; the leaf with Europe (c) pl. (11c, 17c) is numbered “38” <BBS p. 104>; Europe (c) pl. (4c, 9c), listed under 36 in BB p. 338, should perhaps be listed under 27, where (11c, 17c) were.
(*38) Europe (c) pl. (11c, 17c)
History: Europe (c) pl. 15b was acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Philip Hofer and given by Mrs. Frances Hofer in 1979 to Houghton Library, Harvard University.2121. All the information about pl. 15b was recorded by Essick, “New Information on Blake’s Illuminated Books,” Blake 15.1 (summer 1981): 8 and illus. 5, scandalously overlooked by GEB until 2009.

Poetical Sketches (1783)

Table of Corrections

Copy M (see BB p. 344n2)
The situation is further confused by the claim of the anonymous owner to William Wyer of Ursus Books that Poetical Sketches (M) has corrections on pp. 4, 9, 12, and 15 (according to Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 [spring 2010]: 120).

Receipt

1805 5 JULY
History: It was sold in Mar. 2009 to a “museum” (according to Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 [spring 2010]: 120).

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Small Book of Designs (1796)

Copy B
History: The prints of Thel pl. 7, Urizen pls. 7, 11-12, 17, 19, 23, and Marriage pl. 16, newly discovered in 2007, were sold by the anonymous owner in 2009 for £441,000 to the Tate.

The Song of Los (1795)

Editions

The Song of Los, copy C. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2009. <http://www.blakearchive.org>.

The Song of Los, copy E. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2009. <http://www.blakearchive.org>.

Songs of Innocence (1789[-?1831])

Copy Y2
It was lent anonymously by Alan Parker to the Petit Palais exhibition (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Edition

§Songs of Innocence. London: Robert Scott, [c. 1900-10]. The Gem Booklets, ed. Oliphant Smeaton, 5.6 × 8.5 cm., 22 pp. “Introduction” (2 pp.).

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

Table

Copy Leaves Watermark Blake no. Leaf size in cm. Printing color
Pl. 30
Victoria University (Toronto)
1 11.0 × 17.9 gray

Copy P
It was lent by the Wormsley Library to the Petit Palais exhibition (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Copy V
History: Perhaps this is the copy offered by John Bohn in 1843 (see Part IV).

Pl. 30
Binding: Rebound by 1857 in 3/4 calf over cloth boards, the spine elaborately gilt with “SONGS | OF | INNOCENCE | ETC.”, with red marbled paste-downs and endpapers, all edges marbled, with pl. 30 tipped in as the frontispiece in the Pickering edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1839);2222. It is inscribed in pencil “See P. 37”, where the poem is printed. the preface (xxi) is signed by the editor “J. J. G. Wilkinson” “Finchley Road & | 76 Wimpole St.” (DNB says he lived at 4 Finchley Road from about 1848. F. 1v is inscribed in pencil:

Poet, Artist & Musician
Roger Langois died 10th Decr 1859 exactly 100 yrs old to an hour; leaving his wife Kate, a son 75, and a Grandson 50. He was a pupil of Flaxman’s—He left 49 Portraits of his wife
“Times 15 Dec 1859”
History: To Feb. 2006, see Blake (2007); sold through John Windle in Jan. 2009 to the library of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (listed in Windle’s catalogue 46 [see under 2009 in Part IV], lot 6, “sold”).

Editions

Chants d’innocence et d’expérience. Trans. M. L. Soupault and Philippe Soupault. 1927, 1947. <BB #192>
An extract was published in Nouvelle revue française 26, no. 152 (May 1926): 537-42.

*Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Robert N. Essick. 2008. <Blake (2009)>

Review

*Shirley Dent, “Bruised without Mercy,” Times Literary Supplement 15 May 2009: 22 (with Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Erdman [2008])(“These are essential books in the study of an always fascinating author”).

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)

Table

Copy Plates Leaves
S 1-11 11
UNTRACED

Copy A
History: Offered by A. E. Evans & Son in [1845] (see Part IV).

Copy E
History: Perhaps this is the copy offered by John Bohn in 1843 (see Part IV).2323. Or copies A, C-D, I-N.

Newly Recorded Copy

Copy S
For the binding and history, see America (S), above.

Section B: Collections and Selections

Reprints of Blake’s Works before 1863

Addenda

1811
“The Tyger”/“Der Tyger” in English/German (see Ariel in Part VI).

1831
“The Tiger,” Pictures, Scriptural and Historical, ed. Mrs. [Rose] Lawrence (Liverpool: Evans, Chegwin and Hall; London: Longman, Rees and Co., 1831) 102.

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1832
“Introduction” (Innocence) (see J. B. S. in Part VI).

1833
“Edward III,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence), “Holy Thursday” (Innocence), “The Lamb,” “Der Tiger,” and Blake’s letter of 21 Sept. 1800 in prose translations into German (see Anon., “William Blake, ein ausgezeichneter Künstler,” in Part VI).

1837
“Holy Thursday” (Innocence) (see Anon., “Educational Charities,” in Part VI).

1846
“The Chimney-Sweeper” (Innocence) and “On Another’s Sorrow,” Voices of the True-Hearted (Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1846) 135, 192.

1847
“Mad Song” (see review of [Southey], The Doctor, in Part VI).
“To the Muses” (first stanza) (see Goethe in Part VI).

1848
“The Little Black Boy,” Literary Gleanings. By an Invalid, [ed. Fanny H. Henslowe] (London: W. Newbery, 1848) 128.

1849
“To the Muses” (called “The Poet Complains to the Muses of the Decline of Poetry”), Cameos from the Antique, ed. Mrs. [Rose] Lawrence, 2nd ed., rev. (Liverpool: Deighton and Laughton; London: Whittaker and Co., 1849) 75-76.2424. I have not seen the first edition.

1851
“Holy Thursday” (Innocence) (see Platt in Part VI).

1852
“The Tiger” (minus the last stanza) (see J. H. F. in Part VI).

1854
“The Lamb” (p. 228 of BB #248).

1857
“My Silks,” “The Tiger,” “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence), “The Garden of Love,” and “On Another’s Sorrow” <see BBS p. 166>.

1861
“The Piper” (i.e., “Introduction” to Innocence), Folk Songs, ed. John Williamson Palmer (New York: Charles Scribner; London: Sampson Low, Son and Company, 1861) <correction of BB #281>.

* * * * * * * * *

*Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. 1979, 2008. <BBS pp. 149-50, Blake (2008)>

Review

§James Rovira, College Literature 36.4 (2009): 229-31.

*The Complete Illuminated Books. Ed. David Bindman. 2000, 2001, 2005. <Blake (2001, 2008)> D. §London: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Paperback; ISBN: 9780500600252.

*The Lyrical Poems of William Blake. Ed. John Sampson. 1905 .... <BB #275> F. BiblioLife, 2009. ISBN: 9781103979561.

The Poems of William Blake. Ed. W. B. Yeats. 1893 .... <BB #293, BBS p. 161, Blake (2003, 2009)> K. §Echo Library, 2009. ISBN: 9781406880625.

*Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. 1927 .... <BB #303, BBS p. 162> N. [Philadelphia]: Wharton Press, 2008. ISBN: 9781409792253.

*The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. 1965 .... <BB #304A-D> ... F-I. *The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 1982, 1988, 2008. <BBS p. 162F-H, Blake (2009)>

Review

*Shirley Dent (see Songs, ed. Essick, in Part I, Section A).

Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience with Other Poems. [Ed. R. H. Shepherd]. 1866, 1868. <BB #335> C. §BiblioLife, 2009. 126 pp.; ISBN: 9781143261688.

§Walking round Cambridge with William Blake: Auguries of Innocence Illustrated by Rose Harries. Oldham: Incline Press, [2008]. 27 cm., 160 copies.
The illustrations are scenes of modern street life in Cambridge correlated to “Auguries of Innocence.”

§William Blake. Trans. Georges Bataille, illus. André Masson. Saint-Clément-de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2008. 71 pp.; ISBN: 9782851947178. In French.

William Blake Archive <http://www.blakearchive.org>
In 2009 the archive added The Song of Los (C, E), Europe (G), Milton (B), the 14 prints for Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802) and the 5 for his Ballads (1805), the 10 monochrome washes for Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life, and 1791 and 1796 editions of the book, and republished with extra features the sketchbook of drawings for the Job engravings and the watercolors from the Butts and Linnell sets.

§*William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. A Portfolio of Eighteen Facsimile Impressions. Orlando: Flying Horse Editions, University of Central Florida, 2009. 33 copies; $1950 (see <http://www.flyinghorse.cah.ucf.edu/blake>).
It consists of pls. 1, 3, 8, 12, 16-19, 24, 29, 33, 37-38, 42-43, 46-47 in ochre, and b in black, printed “on handmade paper, specially produced for this edition,” “from relief etched copper plates made by Michael Phillips ... using exact-size photo negatives of original monochrome impressions ... modified to eliminate printing flaws in the original.” The ink was “hand mixed for each plate from the same historic dry pigments that we know Blake used.”
It is accompanied by *William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1794, 40 pp., with *Michael Phillips, “A Note on begin page 13 | back to top Production” (9-35), with many quotations from John Jackson [and William A. Chatto], A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (1839) <BB #1932>.

Appendix: Writings Improbably Alleged to Be by Blake

“Directions for ‘Landscape Painting’”
An undated 8-pp. 12o set of “Directions for ‘Landscape Painting,’” on preparing a palette, reproducing the effects of shadows, bark, etc., signed “W B”, is attributed to the poet and partly reproduced in the Anderson Galleries auction catalogue of 3 Apr. 1928, lot 13 (see Windle’s catalogue 46 [under 2009 in Part IV], lot 539). The handwriting is quite unlike that of the poet, and I see no plausible connection besides the initials.

Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings

Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors

Bible: Job (1821—Linnell set)

The drawings at the Fogg Museum (Harvard) are reproduced online <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

BLAIR, Robert, The Grave (1805)

T. H. Cromek wrote of the watercolors: 25. “Memorials of the Life of R. H. Cromek, Engraver” (?1865), now in Princeton University Library.

The original design for the frontispiece, still in my possession, was suppressed, and one much finer substituted. It is a pen outline, slightly shaded with Indian ink, and blue, & represents a soul rising from the tomb, on which Blake has written, very neatly, [the] title.25
This is clearly the drawing called by Butlin “A Spirit Rising from the Tomb” (#616, 20.5 × 24.0 cm., now in the Huntington), on which Blake wrote: “A Series of Designs: Illustrative of The Grave. a Poem by Robert Blair. Invented & Drawn by William Blake”.2626. Butlin does not connect this title-page design with T. H. Cromek. The correct provenance is given in Essick, The Works of William Blake in the Huntington Collections (San Marino: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1985) 122-23.

Edition

*William Blake’s Watercolour Inventions in Illustration of The Grave by Robert Blair. Edited with Essays and Commentary by Martin Butlin and an Essay on the Poem by Morton D. Paley. Lavenham, Suffolk: William Blake Trust, 2009. Folio, 96 pp. 186 copies, 36 with replica portfolio.
In the de luxe edition, the watercolors are reproduced, loose, backed with stiff pasteboard, in a red leather portfolio like that in which they were found in 2001. They are enclosed with the bound text in a handsome black shot-silk-covered box.
The text volume consists of:
John Commander. “Foreword.” 6. (This is “possibly [the] last major publication” of the William Blake Trust.)
Martin Butlin. “Editor’s Acknowledgments.” 7.
Morton D. Paley. “William Blake and Robert Blair’s The Grave.” 8-12. (About the evolution of Blair’s poem.)
Martin Butlin. “The History of Blake’s Illustrations to The Grave.” 13-19.
[Martin Butlin]. “The Newly Discovered Watercolours.” 21-28.
[Martin Butlin]. “The Watercolours: Catalogue and Commentary.” 29-69. (It reproduces all 19 new watercolors, plus another.)
Bibliography. 70.
Appendix 1: “The Grave [facsimile] with Blake’s Dedicatory Verses from Cromek’s 1809 [sic] Edition (Reduced to sixty-seven per cent).” 71-80.
Appendix 2: “Schiavonetti’s Engravings for Cromek’s Edition 1808.” 81-94.
Appendix 3: “Blake’s Rejected Engraving for ‘Death’s Door’ Reproduced Same Size as the Original Proof in the Possession of Robert N. Essick.” 95.

BUNYAN, John, Pilgrim’s Progress (1826-27)

They were lent anonymously by Alan Parker to the Petit Palais exhibition (see under 2009 in Part IV).

DANTE, Divine Comedy (1824-27)

The drawings at the Fogg Museum (Harvard) and Tate are reproduced online <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection>, <http://www.tate.org.uk/collection> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

Heads of the Poets (1800-03)

They are reproduced at <http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

MILTON, John,

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1809—Thomas set)
They were reproduced in the Petit Palais exhibition catalogue (see under 2009 in Part IV) and online <http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

MILTON, John, Paradise Lost

§*Das verlorene Paradies. Trans. Hans Heinrich Meier. Stuttgart: Reclam Philipp, 2008. 20 cm.; ISBN: 9783150106709.

WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary,
Original Stories from Real Life (1791)

In 2009, the 10 monochrome wash drawings in the Library of Congress were reproduced in the William Blake Archive.

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YOUNG, Edward, Night Thoughts (1794-97)

Edition

*Young, Edward. Night Thoughts: The Poem Illustrated with Water Colours by William Blake. 2005. <Blake (2006)>

Review

Jason Snart, Romanticism on the Net 45 (2007) <http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca> (it is “incomparable,” but the colors are not true, it omits borders and margins ...).

Section B: Collections and Selections

Blake-Varley Sketchbook (Large)

It was lent anonymously by Alan Parker to the Petit Palais exhibition (see under 2009 in Part IV).

Part III: Commercial Engravings2727. For the first time I record contemporary references to separately issued prints by Blake.

ALLEN, Charles, History of England (1798)

New Locations: Cambridge, Mitchell Library (Glasgow), National Library of Scotland, West Sussex Record Office.

Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793)

New Location: Northwestern.

Bible

Newly Recorded Engraving

Diamond Bible (1832-34, 1836-37, 1840)

Engraved title page: DIAMOND | BIBLE | WITH | NOTES, | BY THE | REV. H. STEBBING | M.A.M.R.S.L. &c | London: | ALLAN BELL & CO. WARWICK SQUARE: | AND SIMPKIN & MARSHALL, STATIONERS COURT. 1833. [An elaborate wide border with Egyptian motifs separates the title from the imprint. The New Testament has a separate engraved title page with the same imprint but different lineation.]
Typeset title page: THE | HOLY BIBLE, | CONTAINING | THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS, | ACCORDING TO THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. | — | WITH NOTES, | PRACTICAL AND EXPLANATORY, BY THE | REV. HENRY STEBBING, A.M. | MEMBER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. | IN TWO VOLUMES. | VOL. I. | LONDON: | ALLAN BELL & CO. WARWICK SQUARE, | AND SIMPKIN & MARSHALL, STATIONERS’ COURT; | W. CURRY, JUN. & CO. DUBLIN; AND OLIVER | AND BOYD, EDINBURGH. | MDCCCXXXIV [1834].
Vol. 1 consists of the Old Testament plus the New Testament. There are separate title pages for Psalms (vol. 1) and the New Testament (vol. 2).
B. §London: Allan Bell & Co., and Shepherd & Sutton; Edinburgh: Fraser & Co., 1836, 1837.
C. §Glasgow: D. A. Borrenstein, 1840.2828. The details for 1836-37 and 1840 come from T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525-1961, rev. A. S. Herbert (London: British and Foreign Bible Society; New York: American Bible Society, 1968) no. 1801.
1832-34 Locations: British Library (1066.b.7-8 [reported here] and C.150.b.3 [lacks New Testament]).
1836-37 Locations: Cambridge, Glasgow, National Library of Scotland, St. Andrews.
1840 Locations: British Library, Glasgow.
Date: An advertisement in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal for 30 Apr. 1834 (see below) says that the Diamond Bible was being reissued in monthly numbers with two steel engravings each. Since it identifies 56 prints (there were eventually 60), this implies that the first number appeared in Jan. 1832 and the last in June 1834, if they were issued regularly. If the prints appeared in the order in which they are numbered, Blake’s Job print was published with the fifteenth monthly number in Mar. 1833.
Plates: There are 60 steel-plate illustrations 11.5 × 6.5 cm. engraved by W. H. Lizars after great masters. No. 30 is Blake’s “Job and His Family.”
At vol. 1, p. 632 is an engraving with “BLAKE.” at the top, “JOB AND HIS FAMILY.” below the design within a framing line and, below the framing line: “Lizars sc. | Drawn & Engraved for Allan Bell & C.o Warwick Square, London, 1833.” Lizars altered the shape of Blake’s Job pl. “1” from portrait to landscape, shortening it vertically (replacing sheep at the bottom with a little foliage) and extending it horizontally (with additional sleeping sheep). The sky at the right has been altered from black to daylight, with the consequent loss of a star.
This is the first time that any of Blake’s Job plates was copied by another engraver. Lizars’s engraving is copied in The English Version of the Polyglott Bible (1836) (see the reproduction in Blake 38.4 [spring 2005]: 137).
William Home Lizars of Edinburgh subscribed for sets of Job in June 1831 and Aug. 1832, the latter “for a friend” (BR[2] 545, 551, 793, 801, 804).

Reviews, puffs, etc.

Sir William Jardine, The Naturalist’s Library. Mammalia. Vol. I. Monkeys (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, and Stirling and Kenney; London: Longman ...; Dublin: W. Curry, Jun. and Co., 1833) <Ghent University> (at the end is an advertisement for “Allan, Bell, and Co.’s Books,” including “The Diamond Bible ... each Number comprising 48 pages letterpress, and two beautiful Steel Plates, from Drawings of the Great Masters”; also advertised are a Diamond New Testament, Diamond Book of Common Prayer, and an Illustrated Family Bible, ed. Henry Stebbing, with “Plates ... coloured in a very superior manner, by Mr Lizars,” folio).
London Literary Gazette no. 892 (22 Feb. 1834): 136 (vol. 1 is “an extremely neat volume; appropriately illustrated by engravings after celebrated pictures ...”).
Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 1, no. 5 (30 Apr. 1834): 40 <Stanford> (an advertisement for “Re-Issue, In Monthly Parts at begin page 15 | back to top One Shilling, and in Numbers at Six Pence, of the Diamond Bible and Book of Common Prayer ... [ed.] Rev. H. Stebbing .... Each Number to comprise Forty-eight pages letter-press and Two Steel Engravings.” The list of illustrations includes “30 Job and his Family Blake.” It quotes reviews in the Weekly Times, Literary Gazette [see above], and Evangelical Register. The prayer book has seven designs after Stothard).
Analyst; A Monthly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Fine Arts [London] 1 (Aug. 1834): 70 <Michigan> (under “New Publications, From June 7 to July 15, 1834” is “Stebbing’s Diamond Bible, 12mo. 16s. 6d.”).
Sir William Jardine, The Naturalist’s Library. Ornithology. Vol. III. Gallinaceous Birds (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars ..., 1834) <Bodleian> (an advertisement recommends “The Diamond Pocket Bible,” ed. Stebbing, with “Sixty Illustrations”).

The English Version of the Polyglott Bible (1836)

The anonymous engraving for “Job and His Family” derives from the engraving by Lizars in the Diamond Bible (1832-34).

בויא רפםIllustrations of the Book of Job (1826, 1874)

1826 New Location: California Palace of the Legion of Honor (“Proof,” reproduced online <http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase>).
Copies of Unrecorded Date New Locations: Albertina Museum (Vienna), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) (reproduced at <http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/browse>), Fogg Museum (Harvard) <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection>, Indianapolis Museum of Art <http://www.imamuseum.org>, Royal Academy (London). (All the online reproductions here are also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>.)
The previously recorded copies in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Tate are reproduced at <http://www.clevelandart.org/explore>, <http://www.tate.org.uk/collection> (also accessible through Artcyclopedia).

BLAIR, Robert, The Grave
(1808, 1813, 1813 [1870])

1808 Quarto New Location: North Carolina (Chapel Hill).
1808 Copy of Unrecorded Format New Location: Trevelyan Library (Wallington Hall, Northumberland, property of the National Trust).
1813 Copies of Unrecorded Format New Locations: Kent (Canterbury), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam).
An 1808 quarto copy in “original drab gray boards, printed paper label on upper cover,” is offered in Windle’s catalogue 46 (see under 2009 in Part IV), lot 48.
For six lithographs after Schiavonetti’s copperplates (via Mora’s Meditaciones poeticas [1826]), see Diario de los niños, below.

Reviews, puffs, etc.

Anon., “Modern Discoveries, and Improvements in Arts, Sciences, and Literature; with Notices Respecting Men of Letters, Artists, and Works in Hand, &c. &c.,” Universal Magazine ns 6, no. 32 (July 1806): 46-52 <California (Berkeley)>

Mr. Cromek intends to publish in the course of the ensuing winter a series of 12 Engravings, etched in a very superior style of excellence by Louis Schiavonetti, from the original inventions of William Blake, illustrative of Blair’s popular Poem “The Grave.” In consequence of the originality of the designs and their vigorous expression, the work has been honoured with the patronage of the principal members of the Royal Academy, and the first professors of art in the metropolis, and by the subscriptions of upwards of 300 of the most distinguished amateurs. (47-48)
Anon., “Monthly Retrospect of the Fine Arts,” Monthly Magazine 22, no. 146 (1 Aug. 1806): 58-61 <Harvard> (notice on p. 61 as in the <Universal Magazine> but with 250 instead of 300, the phrase about the patronage of Royal Academy members omitted, and other small changes, as detailed in Wayne C. Ripley, “The Early Marketing of The Grave in London and Boston,” Blake 43.3 [winter 2009-10]: 109-10. The similarity of the wording in these 1806 puffs and in particular the information about the changing numbers of subscribers indicate that the source of the information is Cromek).
Anon., “Intelligence. Great-Britain,” Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review [Boston] 3, no. 10 (Oct. 1806): 558-59 <Michigan> (notice on p. 559 exactly as in the Monthly Magazine).
Leeds Mercury 4 June 1808 <Leeds Central Library>:
BLAIR’s GRAVE

MR. CROMEK begs to inform the Subscribers at Wakefield and its Vicinity to the New and Splendid Edition of this POEM, that it will be published in London, on the First Day of July next, and that it will be delivered to them with all possible Speed.

Gentlemen who wish to possess this valuable Work, are respectfully apprised that on the Day of its Publication, its Price will be advanced from 2l 2s to 2l 12s 6d. MR. CROMEK will receive Names till the First of July at the Original Subscription Price. No. 64, Newman-street, Oxford-row, London.

The Work is printing in the most elegant Style by BENSLEY, in Imperial Quarto, and illustrated by 13 Engravings, executed from the original Designs of WILLIAM BLAKE.

BONNYCASTLE, John, An Introduction to Mensuration
(1782, 1787, 1791, 1794)

1782 New Locations: British Library, Huntington, Trinity College (Cambridge).

BROWN, John, Elements of Medicine (1795)

New Location: Northwestern.

BÜRGER, Gottfried Augustus, Leonora (1796)

New Location: Northwestern.

Review

[Johann Joachim Eschenburg, ed.], Lenore Ballade von Bürger in drei englischen Übersetzungen (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1797) 5-6 (in German) (describes Blake’s designs).

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Carfax Conduit, Oxford (1810)

A large print inscribed “CARFAX CONDUIT, OXFORD.” and “Blake sc.”, with no sign of the designer or imprint, was discovered, acquired, and described by Robert N. Essick.2929. “A ‘New’ William Blake Engraving?” Print Quarterly 2 (1985): 42-47. The print is reproduced also in Blake 19.1 (summer 1985): 30 (pl. 7), where Essick suggests that it may have been etched about 1780. The only previously recorded reference to Blake and the Carfax Conduit is in Thomas Dodd’s manuscript biography of Blake (c. 1832) (BR[2] 255fn).

The listings below indicate that it was both drawn and engraved by Blake and that it published at 1s. 6d. in 1810. Can it have been published by Blake as well? In some respects, the topographical engraver William Staden Blake seems more plausible than the poet-engraver William Blake.

Reviews, puffs, etc.

Anon., “Quarterly List of New Publications. From February to May, 1810. Arts (Fine),” Edinburgh Review 16, no. 31 (Apr. 1810): 253-54 <Harvard> (“A View of Carfax Conduits, Oxford. Drawn and engraved by Blake. 1s. 6d.” [253]; very similar notices appear in lists of new publications in the Quarterly Review 3 [May 1810]: 518 and Edinburgh Annual Register [for 1810] 3, part 2 [1812]: cviii <California (Berkeley)>).

CUMBERLAND, George, Thoughts on Outline (1796)

New Locations: Belfast Central Library, Birmingham Central Libraries, Chetham’s Library (Manchester), Clark Art Institute (Williamstown), Exeter, Longleat House (England), Morgan Library and Museum, National Gallery (London), North Texas, Northwestern, Oxford (Department of History of Art), Pennsylvania (2; BB #447 gives 1), Royal Academy (London), State Library of South Australia (Adelaide).

A copy in “original blue boards,” inscribed at front “From the Author,” was offered in Windle’s catalogue 46 (see under 2009 in Part IV), lot 64.

DANTE, Blake’s Illustrations of Dante
(1838, 1892, 1955, 1968)

1838 New Locations: Fogg Museum (Harvard) (reproduced online <http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection>), Northwestern (1838 or 1892).
1968 New Location: Tate (reproduced online <http://www.tate.org.uk/collection>).

The online reproductions here are also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>.

Newly Recorded Title
Diario de los niños (1839-40)

Vol. 1, no. 1 engraved title page: DIARIO | DE LOS | NIÑOS | LITERATURA, ENTRETENIMIENTO | é | INSTRUCCION. | No.. 1 | MEJICO 1839. | IMPRESO POR MIGUEL GONZALEZ. [in an elaborate floral border] <New York Public Library>
Typeset title pages for vols. 1-2: DIARIO | DE | LOS NIÑOS.3030. In vols. 1-2 the second “N” of “NINOS” is surmounted by the top quarter of a circle. In vol. 3 the symbol looks like a hard-candy wrapper, oval in the middle and twisted at each end. | | — | [Gothic:] Literatura, Entretenimiento e Instruccion. | TOMO PRIMERO [SEGUNDO]. | — | MEJICO. | IMPRENTA DE MIGUEL GONZALEZ, | TERCERA CALLE REAL N. 3. | — | [vol. 1] 1839 [vol. 2 1840]. <Essick>
Typeset title page for vol. 3: DIARIO | DE LOS NIÑOS. | — | [Gothic:] Literature, entretenimiento e instruccion. | TOMO TERCERO. | — | MEXICO. | IMPRENTA DE VICENTE G. TORRES. | — | 1840. <Essick, Harvard>
Locations: Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), California State Library, Essick (leaf size 15.8 × 24.9 cm.), Harvard, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Nebraska, New York Public Library, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Texas, Victoria University in the University of Toronto,3131. The Victoria copy of vol. 2 has in the spine a leaf with text and decorations printed in Spanish, including the date “1843,” indicating that it was not first bound until that date or later. Washington State.
Description: Diario de los niños is a tall quarto anthology for children in Spanish printed on deplorable paper (in the Victoria copy). The editor is identified as Wenceslao Sánchez de la Barquera by Claudia Agostoni, “Divertir e instruir: revistas infantiles del siglo xix mexicano,” La república de las letras asomos a la cultura escrita del México decimonónico, ed. Belem Clark de Lara and Elisa Speckman Guerra (Mexico [City]: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005) 2: 175.
Plates: There are 54 excellent engravings and 12 woodcut vignettes. The larger prints include six lithographs3232. There is a “Historia de la litografia” in 3: 114-17. (the first after Blake since his design of “Enoch” [1807]) closely copying the prints in Mora, Meditaciones poeticas (1826),3333. Meditaciones poeticas was published by Ackermann in London and “su establecimiento en Megico.” which were made from Schiavonetti’s copperplates for Blair’s Grave. They are also the first prints after Blake made outside Britain, France, and the United States. Each print is on a verso facing a recto on which is a poem by Mora, usually with the same title as the print.

Each Blake print is inscribed “Diario de los Niños” (above the design), “lito. frente al correo, n.o 5” (“lithographer opposite the post office, no. 5”) on pls. 1-2 or “lit. Portal de las flores n.o 5” (“lithographer Gate of the Flowers [street in Mexico City] no. 5”)3434. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 133, points out that “these two addresses may be alternative ways of locating the same establishment. The ‘frente al correo’ address is associated with the Estampería de Julio Michaud y Thomas.” on pls. 3-6 (at lower left), and the title as below (beneath the design). The sizes are for the images; the lithographs left no platemark.
1. “La Eternidad y el Espacio” at 1: 457 (design size 12.2 × 22.8 cm.) (caption on the engraving for Blair’s Grave [1808]: “Christ Descending into the Grave”).
begin page 17 | back to top 2. Untitled at 2: 49 (design size 22.4 × 14.0 cm.); the facing poem is “El sepulcro” (“The Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother & Child in the Tomb”).
3. “La Puerta de la muerte” at 2: 193 (design size 13.7 × 22.7 cm.);3535. For a reproduction, see Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 132. the facing poem is “La puerta del sepulcro” (“Death’s Door”).
4. “El valle de la muerte” at 2: 289 (design size 13.0 × 22.1 cm.) (“The descent of Man into the Vale of Death”).
5. “La Caverna” at 2: 361 (design size 11.6 × 21.8 cm.) (“The Soul exploring the recesses of the Grave”).
6. “La Resurreccion” at 2: 409 (design size 13.7 × 21.7 cm.) (“The Reunion of the Soul & the Body”).

The titles follow those in Mora pls. 2-3, 7-10 (pls. 2, 4, 11, 7, 9, 12 in the 1808 Grave) (except for no. 2, which is untitled). “The lithographs are very accurate reproductions of Schiavonetti’s etchings/engravings” and are “close in size to the engravings,” “except for the elimination of small areas of the designs along the top and bottom margins of ‘La Puerta de la muerte’ and ‘La Caverna,’ and on all 4 sides of ‘La Resurreccion,’” a faithfulness perhaps achieved by tracing, according to Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 132. Essick is the source of all the information about his copy; John Windle was the discoverer of Blake’s connection with the work.

Five of Mora’s poems illustrated in the Meditaciones poeticas are included here without prints: “La muerte del impio” (“Death of the Strong Wicked Man”) (2: 119-20), “La muerte del justo” (“The Death of The Good Old Man”) (2: 167-68), “La separacion” (“The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life”) (2: 190-92), “El juicio” (“The Day of Judgment”) (2: 390-92), and “La reunion” (“The Reunion of the Soul & the Body”) (2: 475-76). One other print from Meditaciones poeticas is omitted: the title page (it has no poem by Mora).

EMLYN, Henry, A Proposition for
a New Order in Architecture
(1781, 1784, 1797)

1781 and 1784 New Location: Royal Academy (London).

ENFIELD, William,
The Speaker (1774 [1780], 1781, 1785, 1795, 1797)

1781 New Locations: California (Santa Barbara), Chicago, Illinois, Library Company of Philadelphia, Louisiana State (Shreveport), Morrab Library (Penzance), Paxton House (Scotland), Trinity College (Cambridge).

“Evening Amusement” (Watteau-Blake) (1782)
Notice

Anon., “Vermischte Nachrichten,” Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste [Leipzig] 28, no. 1 (1783): 123-88 (in German) <Harvard>:

Zwey angenehme Blätter, nach Watteau, aus der Sammlung des Hrn. A. Maskins [i.e., Macklin]; Morning Amusement und Evening Amusement, von W. Blake in Röthel, Ovale, zu 9 Zoll 4 Linien Höhe, und 11 Zoll 3 Linien Breite, kosten zusammen 15 Schillinge. (162)

“The Fall of Rosamond” (Stothard-Blake (1783)
Notice

Anon., “Vermischte Nachrichten,” Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste [Leipzig] 30, no. 2 (1785): 317-68 (in German) <Harvard> (“The Fall of Rosamond ... von Blake, in eben der Manier, gleicher Maasse und Preises” [as “Ophelia” (Stothard-Ogborne)] [342]).

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

New Locations: Guildhall Library (London, 2 copies), Indianapolis Museum of Art (reproduced online <http://www.imamuseum.org> and also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>), Melbourne Public Library, Northwestern.

In Windle’s catalogue 46 (see under 2009 in Part IV), lot 1048 is 37 drawings for Flaxman’s Hesiod (see BB #456). These are neither the preliminary sketches (which are in the British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings) nor tracings from the prints. They are bound in blue morocco of the “1860s” by M. M. Holloway. “We feel safe in concluding ... that the drawings are not copied by a third party” (from the description by Edward Maggs). They are offered for Maggs Bros., price on request.

Reviews, puffs, etc.3636. I report advertisements only when they specify (as most do) that it was “engraved by J. Blake.” See BB p. 560.

Anon., “Literary Intelligence,” Gentleman’s Magazine 84, part 2 (Dec. 1814): 550-52 (notice on 551).
Anon., “Literary Intelligence,” European Magazine 68 (Nov. 1815): 469-70 <Bodleian> (notice on 470).
Anon., “Select Literary Information,” Eclectic Review ns 4 (Dec. 1815): 622-26 (“Messrs. Longman and Co. will shortly publish” Flaxman’s Hesiod [623-24]).
“Messrs. Longman and Co. are about to Publish” Flaxman’s Hesiod (at the end of The Remains of Hesiod ..., ed. Charles Abraham Elton, 2nd ed. [London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1815]). <Harvard>
“New Works Preparing for Publication, by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown” (July 1816) 2 (bound with Demosthenis Orationes de Republica Duodecim, ed. William Allen [Oxford, 1810]). <Bodleian>
Anon., “New Publications, from March 1816, to March 1817,” Edinburgh Annual Register [for 1816] 9, part 2 (1820): cccccxxvii-cccccl (notice on cccccxxxiv).
Anon., “Literary Register,” Literary Panorama, and National Register ns 5, no. 30 (Mar. 1817): cols. 951-60 <Harvard> (notice in col. 953).
begin page 18 | back to top Anon., “Monthly List of New Publications,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1817): 90-95 (notice on 90).
Anon., “New London Publications,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register 3, no. 16 (Apr. 1817): 393-94 (notice on 394).
“Recently Published, by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row” (Apr. 1817) 3 (bound at the end of G[eorge] Dyer, Four Lectures on the English Constitution, 3rd ed. [London: Longman, 1817]). <Princeton>

FLAXMAN, John, The Iliad of Homer (1805)

New Locations: Guildhall Library (London), Melbourne Public Library, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), St. Bride Library (London).

FLAXMAN, John,
Letter to the Committee for Raising the Naval Pillar (1799)

New Location: Royal Academy (London).

FUSELI, John Henry, Lectures on Painting (1801)

New Locations: Northwestern, Royal Academy (London).

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

[1811] New Location: Northwestern.

HAYLEY, William, Ballads (1805)

New Location: California Palace of the Legion of Honor (Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; reproduced online <http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase>).

A copy in “original drab gray boards, printed paper label” is listed in Windle’s catalogue 46 (see under 2009 in Part IV), lot 34.

In 2009, a copy from the Huntington was reproduced in the William Blake Archive.

The text of Hayley’s ballad of the horse was apparently omitted by Phillips in the proofs, and Blake, in ignorance of this, made an engraving for it. He discovered his mistake when Phillips happened to send him in London a proof of “the last sheet” to be forwarded to the printer Joseph Seagrave in Chichester. In his letter of 4 June 1805, Blake wrote to Hayley: “I write to entreat that you would contrive so as that my plate may come into the work” (presumably including the text of “The Horse” in the Ballads), so that Blake would not have to omit “ten guineas from my next demand on Phillips.”3737. The problem was pointed out to me by Morton Paley, from his article “William Blake, Richard Phillips, and the Monthly Magazine,” forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism.

Sales

Anon. [“An English Gentleman”], Sketch of the Present State of France (London: Richard Phillips, 1805) (an advertisement at the end, Useful and Valuable Books Recently Published by Richard Phillips, p. 11: “Ballads, chiefly intended to illustrate certain facts in the history of animals. By William Hayley, Esq. With engravings by Mr. Blake, price 6s. in boards” [the printed title page reads: “Founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals”]).
Miss Owenson, Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught, vol. 2 (London: Richard Phillips, 1807) <New York Public Library> (an advertisement at the end, Useful and Valuable Books Recently Published, or in Course of Publication, by Richard Phillips, n. pag., contains an almost identical notice).

HAYLEY, William, Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802)

Ballad 1 New Location: Northwestern (Windle’s catalogue 46 [see under 2009 in Part IV], lot 33).

In 2009, a copy from the Huntington was reproduced in the William Blake Archive.

Sales

Bibliotheca Reediana, auction by King and Lochee, Nov.-Dec. 1807 <BB #529> (lot 8936 includes Designs “2 No. 1802”).

HAYLEY, William, The Life of George Romney (1809)

New Location: Royal Academy (London).

Large-paper copies are on heavy paper watermarked “1807” and include an advertisement for “Epistles to Romney,” while small-paper copies are watermarked “Rye Mill 1807” and lack the advertisement (Windle’s catalogue 46 [see under 2009 in Part IV], lot 79).

HAYLEY, William, Little Tom the Sailor (1800)

New Location: Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (University of Glasgow).

Little Tom the Sailor, colored, was offered in the Willis and Sotheran catalogue of 25 June 1862, lot 118 (see Part IV).

HENRY, Thomas, Memoirs of Albert de Haller (1783)

New Locations: Cheshire Libraries Arts and Archives, McGill (2; BBS gives 1), Medical Society of London, Royal College of Physicians (London), Science Museum (London), Dr. Williams’s Library (London).

HOARE, Prince, An Inquiry into the ... State of the Arts of Design in England (1806)

New Location: Royal Academy (London).

LAVATER, J. C., Aphorisms on Man (1788, 1789, 1794)
Sales

Catalogue of Biblical Classical and Historical Manuscripts and of Rare and Curious Books ... on Sale by William Pickering (London, 1834) <Bodleian> (“1941 Lavater’s [J. C.] Aphorisms on Man, frontispiece by Blake” [1794], 4s. 6d.).

MORA, Jose Joaquin de, Meditaciones poeticas (1826)

For lithographs after Schiavonetti’s copperplates (via Mora), see Diario de los niños, above.

Sales

[J. de A.], El Mentor (London: Ackermann, 1836) (in Spanish) <New York Public Library> (a list at the end, “Catalogo de begin page 19 | back to top libros españoles. Publicados por los SS. Ackermann y Compa. en su repositorio de artes, 96, Strand, Londres,” includes “Meditaciones Poéticas, por J. J. de Mora, con estampas”).

“Morning Amusement” (Watteau-Blake) (1782)
Notice

See “Evening Amusement,” above.

“Robin Hood & Clorinda” (Meheux-Blake) (1783)
Notice

Anon., “Vermischte Nachrichten,” Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste [Leipzig] 30, no. 2 (1785): 317-68 (in German) (“Robin Hood and Clorinda” after J. Meheux, engraved by “W. Blake, in punktirter Manier,” in the round, 8″ in diameter, “4 Schillinge im Preise” [337]).

SALZMANN, C. G.,
Elements of Morality (1791, 1792, 1799, 1805, ?1815)

1791 New Location: Victoria University in the University of Toronto (with Pamela Lister’s bookplate).

STEDMAN, John Gabriel,
Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition ... (1796, 1806, 1813)

Plates with fine contemporary coloring from an 1806 copy in the University of Glasgow Library are reproduced in the Petit Palais exhibition catalogue (see under 2009 in Part IV). The “second edition ... 4l. 4s. or with coloured plates, 6l. 6s.” is listed in the Eclectic Review 3, part 1 (May 1807): 460. In 2009 booksellers conventionally assume that the coloring in the second edition is modern.

Review referring to Blake’s work

R. R., European Magazine 31 (Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr. 1797): 20-25, 116-18, 175-80, 253-56 (the picture of the Aboma snake is “a very good print” [118]).

STUART, James, and Nicholas REVETT
The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 3 (1794)

New Locations: Northwestern, Royal Academy (London).

A “re-issue” of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, four volumes, folio, with over 400 prints issued in 80 folio parts at 5s. each, was “now in course of Publication” in Sept. 1835. I have not seen this edition3838. In the library of the University of California (Berkeley) is a collection of 50 miscellaneous prints 39 cm. high; according to Morton Paley, seven engravings are by James Basire, two by William Sharp, but none by Blake. The volume has no title page or indication of place or date of publication, but the spine of the library binding is lettered “Grecian Sculptures.” and do not know if it included Blake’s four prints for the Temple of Theseus.

Notices, etc.

James Hakewill, An Attempt to Determine the Exact Character of Elizabethan Architecture ... (London: John Weale, 1835) <Harvard> (at the end, “Works Recently Published ... by John Weale” contains the information that a reissue of The Antiquities of Athens with 384 prints engraved by “Aliamet, Basire, Baxter, Blake ...” will begin on 1 May [13]).
Anon., “Literary Intelligence,” Eclectic Review 3rd ser., 14 (Sept. 1835): 254-56 <Harvard> (a “re-issue” of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens in four folio volumes “is now in course of Publication,” with “upwards of Four Hundred Plates, [many engraved expressly for this Edition]” in “Eighty Parts” at 5s. each).

Another version3939. Notice that the “re-issue” in folio and the separate publication of Grecian Sculpture in quarto are listed discretely (but successively) in the Eclectic Review (Sept. 1835), indicating that they were two distinct publications. of Stuart and Revett was advertised as “Grecian Sculpture; a Series of Engravings of the most celebrated specimens of ancient Art .... Originally published in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, with numerous important additions. ... With historical, descriptive, and explanatory remarks”4040. See the Eclectic Review 3rd ser., 14 (Sept. 1835): 255. (London: John Weale and Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835-36).

It was in imperial quarto, issued in parts at 2s. 6d. each, with “nearly Two Hundred and Fifty Plates” (Nov. 1835) or “upwards of two hundred and fifty plates,” “engraved by Aliamet, Basire, Baxter, Blake ...” for, inter alia, “the Temple of Theseus, at Athens” (Sept. 1835). In addition, there were “a small number of Copies on Superfine Paper, in Columbier Quarto, price Four Shillings” (Feb. 1836). Blake’s four prints are not named in the lists in the Eclectic Review and Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser. It is possible that only parts 1-5 (the only ones of which I have evidence) were issued.

Notices, etc.

Anon., “Literary Intelligence,” Eclectic Review 3rd ser., 14 (Sept. 1835): 254-56. <Harvard>
Anon., Eclectic Review 3rd ser., 14 (Nov. 1835): 432-34 <Harvard> (lists engravings in parts 1-2).
Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser no. 372 (10 Feb. 1836): 19 (announces the publication of Grecian Sculpture, parts 3-5, in imperial quarto, at 2s. 6d. per part).

VARLEY, John, Zodiacal Physiognomy (Part 1, 1828)

Zodiacal Physiognomy was to be “completed in four parts” (according to its cover); according to Anon., “Literary and Miscellaneous Intelligence,” Monthly Review ns 10, no. 42 (Feb. 1829): 313-14, “Mr. Varley[’s] ... Zodiacal-physiognomical investigation ... exemplified by plates, now preparing for the second number of his Zodiacal Physiognomy, ... will shortly issue from the press” (314). However, no other part was ever issued.

VIRGIL, Pastorals (1821)

New Locations: Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) (reproduced online <http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au>), California Palace of the Legion of Honor (Achenbach Foundation begin page 20 | back to top for Graphic Arts; reproduced online <http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase>), Tate (1830 reprints; reproduced online <http://www.tate.org.uk/collection>) (the New South Wales and Tate images are also accessible through Artcyclopedia <http://www.artcyclopedia.com>).

In at least one set, a printed slip reading “At the French and English Juvenile Library, No. 195, (St. Clement’s), Strand,”4141. The French and English Juvenile Library was “an imprint of M. J. Godwin & Co., founded by William Godwin (1756-1836) and his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin (1768-1841),” as Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 128, points out. is pasted over the price at the foot of the vol. 1 title page, and in vol. 2 the “15s” price is scratched out (Windle’s catalogue 46 [see under 2009 in Part IV], lot 39).

Review

Anon., European Magazine 79 (Mar. 1821): 341-43 (the prints are “executed in a very superior manner,” and the masters of St. Paul’s and Mercers’ Schools will adopt it for their students).

Wit’s Magazine (1784)

New Locations: Kansas, Morgan Library and Museum (2), National Trust (Swindon), Victoria University in the University of Toronto,4242. The original (Bentley) copy in Victoria has Blake’s print of “The Temple of Mirth” in the first version; the new (2009) copy has the second version. Yale (Walpole Library).

Pl. 6, “May-Day in London”: A proof before letters is in the London Metropolitan Archives.

WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary,
Original Stories from Real Life (1791, 1796)

1791 New Locations: California Palace of the Legion of Honor (Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; reproduced online <http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase>), North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Northwestern, Royal Academy (London).

In 2009, copies from the Huntington (1791) and Essick (1796) were reproduced in the William Blake Archive.

YOUNG, Edward, Night Thoughts (1797)

New Locations: Alberta (3), British Library (2; BB reports 1), Bryn Mawr, Cambridge (2), California Palace of the Legion of Honor (reproduced online <http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase>), Kansas (3; BBS lists 2), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), Royal Academy (London), Trinity College (Cambridge), Witwatersrand (Johannesburg).

Notice

Anon., “Varieties, Literary and Philosophical; Including Notices of Works in Hand. From the Same [Monthly Magazine],” Edinburgh Magazine ns 8 (Dec. 1796): 447-50 <Bodleian> (notice on p. 450 as in the Monthly Magazine [Nov. 1796] <BBS p. 270>).

Appendix: Books Improbably Alleged to Have Blake Engravings

HUME, David, The History of England (1793-1806)
Prospectuses

Algemene Konst- en Letter-Bode [Haarlem] no. 195 (23 Mar. 1792) <Ghent University> (at the end of the issue is Bericht-Blad no. 64, with the prospectus in English naming Blake as an engraver <BBS p. 278>).
Anon., “Kunstnachrichten,” Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste [Leipzig] 46, no. 2 (1792): 317-28 (in German) <Princeton> (proposals for Hume’s History of England; “Die Kupferstecher: F. Bartolozzi ... W. Blake ...” [317-19]).
Critical Review ns 5 (1792) <Harvard> (at the end is the June 1792 prospectus [BR(2) 62fn]).

Wit’s Magazine (1784-85)

For a speculation, probably idle, that a print called “The Italian Puppet Show” was engraved by Blake for the Wit’s Magazine, see “Red Herring” in the introduction.

Part IV: Catalogues and Bibliographies

1820

Catalogue of the Library [of Frances Mary Richardson Currer] at Eshton-Hall, in the County of York. “London. By Robert Triphook. 1820.” 87. <Bodleian>

Lists Blair’s Grave with Blake’s designs (1808).

1834 22-27 MARCH

Catalogue of the Fifth and Concluding Portion of the Valuable and Extensive Library of P. A. Hanrott, Esq. ...Which Will Be Sold by Auction, by Mr. Evans ... on Saturday, March 22, and Four Following Days; (Sunday Excepted). 1834. <New York Public Library>

“1450 A Collection of Drawings, in colours, by the late William Robson, of heads .... A Collection rivalling almost in whim and extravagance the works of Blake.”

1834

Nouvelles recherches bibliographiques, pour servir de supplément au Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres, par Jacq.- Ch. Brunet. Vol. 1. Paris: Silvestre, 1834. 169. In French. <University of Lausanne> B. Manuel du libraire .... 4th ed. 1839. In French. <BB #552A> C. 1842. <BB #552B> D. 1860. <BB #552C>

Quotes the description of Songs (U) in Rivington’s catalogue (1824) <BB #536>.

1843

Catalogue of English Books, in All Classes of Literature, on Sale by John Bohn. London, 1843. <Harvard>

The Blake lots are:
begin page 21 | back to top 1120 Visions of the Daughters of Albion [E],4343. It could also be Visions (A, C-D, I-N). “tinted by the Author himself,” folio, £1.11.6.
1121-22 Job, £3.3.0 (plain) and £5.0.0 (India proofs).
1123 Songs of Innocence and of Experience [?V],4444. Songs (V) was in the 1841 Henry G. Bohn catalogue (see BB #554, A551). However, its edges are marbled (not gilt) and its binding is russia (not morocco). “coloured by the Author,” 2 vols. in 1, 8vo, half bound in morocco, gilt edges, the listing accompanied by quotations from Cunningham and Lamb, £5.5.0.4545. Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf 2nd, William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census (New York: Grolier Club, 1953), cite an 1843 Henry G. Bohn catalogue for Vine’s copies of Thel (O) and Milton (D) bound together, but Ruthven Todd, “The Bohn Catalogue and James Vine,” Blake 4.4 (spring 1971): 149, writes that “1843” is a misprint for “1848,” and BB #556 is so indiscreet as to say that “there appears to be no 1843 Bohn catalogue.” Though there is an 1843 John Bohn catalogue, it does not list Vine’s Thel and Milton.

1845

A. E. Evans & Son. Catalogue of a Collection of Books, Books of Prints, and Works in General Literature, on Sale at Very Moderate Prices. Part 3. [1845] (bound with Gentleman’s Magazine, ns 24 [1845]).4646. Another copy of the catalogue is dated [1860] in the Bodleian catalogue. <Michigan>

The Blake lots are:
717 Job, £2.12.6.
718 Jerusalem [A], 100 plates, quarto, half calf, “neat,” £7.7.0.
719 Visions of the Daughters of Albion [A], “11 pages, beautifully coloured by Blake himself,” £4.4.0.
720 “a Stereotype design for Pilgrim’s Progress, presented by Mrs. Blake to Mrs. Tatham, 1828, rare,” 10s. 6d.4747. This copy of “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour” (c. 1822) is not recorded in Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
721 “a Small Etching by him, representing Sampson destroying the Lion,” 10s. 6d.4848. No such print is reported in Essick, Separate Plates, or BB.
722 “the Death of the Good Man,” a print from Blair’s Grave, 7s. 6d.
723 “a very Curious Coloured Drawing, illustrating the Revelations by this original Artist, signed and dated 1809, 4to. 2l 12s 6d.”4949. This is probably The Whore of Babylon (Butlin #523), signed “W Blake inv & del 1809” and sold by Evans to the British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings in 1847. This 1845 catalogue is not listed in Butlin.

1848

Henry G. Bohn’s Catalogue of Books. Vol. 1. London, 1848. <Bodleian>

The catalogue includes (pp. 74, 259, without lot numbers):
Milton [D] in 12 books, 50 prints, bound with Thel [O], 8 prints, £10.10.0.
America [C], “folio, 18 curiously engraved plates, hf. bd.,” £3.3.0.
Job, £2.12.6.
Blair’s Grave (1808), 3 copies for £1.1.0, £1.4.0, and 18s.
Dante (“1839”), £1.16.0.

1853 19 DECEMBER

John Hugh Smyth Pigott sale at Sotheby’s <see BBS pp. 86, 98>

Review

Anon., “Our Weekly Gossip,” Athenæum no. 1367 (7 Jan. 1854): 21-22 (“the sale of Mr. Pigott’s library” included as lots 300 and 352 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [I], £4.16.0, and Jerusalem [D], £4.16.0).

1860 8 OCTOBER-

Bibliotheca Dramatica. Catalogue of the Theatrical and Miscellaneous Library of the Late William E[vans] Burton, the Distinguished Comedian, Comprising an Immense Assemblage of Books Relating to the Stage .... To Be Sold by J. Sabin & Co., ... New York, on Monday, October 8, 1860, and Following Days.

Lot 2717 is Sir Joshua Reynolds, Works, 3 vols. (1798), in half calf: “This copy belonged to the celebrated artist who is so well known as the illustrator of Blair’s Grave, and other works,”; “it is full and running over with marginal notes, all” “written with all the spirit of a good hater.” Blake’s note on the title page is quoted, as are passages about him by Charles Lamb and Mrs. Jameson.

1862 25 JUNE

A Catalogue of Superior Second-Hand Books ... on Sale, at Remarkably Low Prices, by Willis and Sotheran, No. 136, Strand, (W. C.). 25 June 1862. <Michigan>

The catalogue includes:
116 America [S] (1793), “18 engravings”; Europe [N] (1794), “15 engravings”; First Book of Urizen [K] (1794), “27 engravings”; Visions of the Daughters of Albion [S] (1793), “11 engravings”; Book of Thel [S] (“1792”), “7 engravings”; “in all 78 most remarkable Designs ... 5 vols. 4to. in one, half calf, £21.10s,” “A VOLUME OF EXTREME RARITY, from the LIBRARY of JOHN FLAXMAN, the SCULPTOR, with his AUTOGRAPH.”
117 The Gates of Paradise, “19 remarkably singular and spirited plates ... sqr. sm. 8vo. hg. bd. RARE, £3.10s—(From Flaxman’s library).”
118 Little Tom the Sailor, “2 very characteristic coloured engravings, the entire Poem likewise composed and engraved by Blake, RARE, £1.1s.” Perhaps this copy belonged to Flaxman, like the two lots above. It was probably sold quickly, for it does not appear in the catalogue of 25 Dec. 1862, below.

Mike Drew of Henry Sotheran Ltd. told me on 7 May 2010 that the Sotheran “archives were blitzed during the war.”

1862 25 DECEMBER

A Catalogue of Superior Second-Hand Books ... on Sale, at Remarkably Low Prices, by Willis and Sotheran, No. 136, Strand, (W. C.). 25 December 1862. <Michigan>
91 “RARE VOLUME OF BLAKE’s DESIGNS” (described as in lot 116 of the catalogue of 25 June 1862, above).

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1926 14-15 JANUARY

Rare First Editions of Famous Writers of the Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, English and American. New York: American Art Association, 1926.

Lots 39-50 are Blakes, including lot 40, *The Gates of Paradise [For the Sexes (H)].

1952 24-26 MARCH

Catalogue of Printed Books Comprising Valuable Books on Art, Including ... Works by, and Relating to, William Blake, the Property of Philip Alden Wright, Esq. ... Which Will Be Sold by Auction by Messrs. Sotheby & Co. ... on Monday, the 24th of March, 1952, and Two Following Days. London, 1952.

[?1970]

§William Blake Samuel Palmer and the English Visionaries: An Exhibition of the Engravings for William Blake’s Master Work The Book of Job. San Francisco: Thackrey & Robertson, [?1970]. 4o, 16 leaves.

1978 19 OCTOBER-10 NOVEMBER

G. Ingli James. Images of William Blake: Exhibition at the Arts and Social Studies Library, University College, Cardiff. 1978. 1 sheet.

Typescript catalogue of 48 photographs and facsimiles.

1989 10-14 APRIL

English Illustrated Books of the Late Eighteenth Century: Exhibition of Works from the Library’s Collection [at the] Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide. “This exhibition has been prepared to complement an address given to the Friends of the Special Collections ... by Gerald E. Bentley on the topic ‘The great illustrated book publishers of the 1790s and William Blake.’” Adelaide: Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide, 1989. Exhibition catalogue no. 14, 16 leaves, 30 cm.

Introduction by Susan Woodburn and Elizabeth Lee.

1999 28 APRIL-30 JUNE

§Tyger of Wrath. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. <Blake (2000)>

*Tyger of Wrath, “a comprehensive website of 176 works” <http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/blake>.

2000 9 NOVEMBER-2001 11 FEBRUARY;
2001 27 MARCH-24 JUNE

*William Blake. [Catalogue of an exhibition at the] Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2000, 2001. <Blake (2001, 2002)>

Reviews, etc.

*Stella Gambling, with additional contributions by Anthony Dyson, Liz Ellis, and Malcolm Livingstone, Notes for [primary and secondary school] Teachers and Group Leaders, 20 pp. <http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/worksinfocus/blake/tools/blake_teachers_pack.pdf>.
§Anon., “[William Blake Revived: Tate Britain],” [Art World] no. 1961 (Mar. 2001): 36-39 (in Korean).
Hilton Kramer, “A Mystery and Genius: Blake Is a Conundrum,” New York Observer 15 Apr. 2001 <Blake (2008)§> (visitors should “acquaint themselves with Blake’s poetry before seeing this show”).

2000 1 DECEMBER-2001 25 MARCH

Burning Bright: The Visionary Art of William Blake, 1757-1827. National Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

From the collections of the Turnbull Library and the National Library of New Zealand.

2006 2 FEBRUARY-19 APRIL

Flaming Pages: The Illuminated Books of William Blake. California State University, East Bay. <Blake 2009>

An exhibition of Blake Trust facsimiles. There is no catalogue, but the *brochure, with a 2-pp. introduction by Lanier Graham, is online <http://class.csueastbay.edu/artgallery/ArtBrochure.pdf>.

2006 20 JULY-15 SEPTEMBER

William Blake: Visionary and Illustrator. [Catalogue of an exhibition at] Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. 2006. <Blake (2007)>

Review

Anon., “USC Holding Exhibit on Poet, Artist William Blake,” Gaffney Ledger 21 July 2006 <http://www.gaffneyledger.com>.

2006 16 SEPTEMBER-2007 1 JANUARY

§Robert Cook. Under God’s Hammer: William Blake versus David Shrigley. [Catalogue of an exhibition at the] Art Gallery of Western Australia. Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2006. 22 × 24 cm., 47 pp.; ISBN: 0975809881.

2007 31 MARCH-10 JUNE

*Simon Martin, Martin Butlin, and Robert Meyrick. Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art. [Catalogue of an exhibition at] Pallant House, Chichester. 2007. <Blake (2008)>

Reviews

§Anon., Independent [London] 31 Mar. 2007.
*Andrew Motion, “Songs of Experience: From William Blake to the Romantics of the 1940s, artists took refuge in capturing the idyll of the countryside. Andrew Motion finds little peace but much beauty in their work,” Guardian [London] 7 Apr. 2007.
*Richard Moss, Culture24 17 Apr. 2007 <http://www.culture24.org.uk>.
Robin McKie, “The Other Life of Walter Hussey: We have one man to thank for much of the thrilling British painting on show at Chichester’s beautiful Pallant House,” Observer [London] 29 Apr. 2007 (also about the Hussey Legacy exhibition).
§Alex Butterworth, “Enduring Visions: William Blake continues to exert a profound influence over modern artists and writers,” RA Magazine no. 94 (spring 2007) (also mentions begin page 23 | back to top Under the Influence at the British Library and Mind-Forg’d Manacles at Ferens Art Gallery).
§Andrew Lambirth, Spectator (June 2007): 45.
Melany Hughes, Art Book 15.2 (May 2008):26-27.

2008 26 JANUARY-20 APRIL;
2008 14 NOVEMBER-2009 14 FEBRUARY

Blake’s Shadow: William Blake and His Artistic Legacy. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2008) <Blake (2009)>; Seoul National University Museum of Art (2008-09).

Reviews, etc.

“Julian Cope’s Opening Speech at the Exhibition Blake’s Shadow: William Blake and His Artistic Legacy, the Whitworth Art Gallery 26 January-20 April 2008,” 4 pp. <http://www.headheritage.co.uk/downloads/William_Blake.pdf>.
*Penelope Thompson, Art’n’About in Korea [blog] 6 Dec. 2008 <http://art-n-about.blogspot.com>.
§Anon., British Council <http://collection.britishcouncil.org/exhibition/past/12/15684>.

2008 7 OCTOBER-2009 4 JANUARY

William Blake: Angels and Imagination. New Art Gallery, Walsall.

Review

*Freya McClelland, “William Blake: Angels and Imagination at New Art Gallery Walsall,” Culture24 29 Oct. 2008 <http://www.culture24.org.uk>.

2008 12 DECEMBER-2009 29 MARCH

William Blake: The River of Life. Tate Liverpool.

2008

John Hart and Chris Johnson. Robert Hartley Cromek and Thomas Hartley Cromek [catalogue of an archive offered by Hart and Johnson]. 2008. <Blake (2009)>

The archive was sold in winter 2009 to Princeton University Library.

2009 2 APRIL-28 JUNE

*William Blake (1757-1827): Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. [Exhibition] sous la direction de Michael Phillips avec la collaboration de Catherine de Bourgoing. [Trans. from English by Jeanne Bouniort.] Petit Palais—Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris 2 avril-28 juin 2009. Paris: Petit Palais/Paris Musées, [2009]. 4o, 256 pp., 173 reproductions, including all of Europe (B), The Ghost of Abel (B), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (M), and all the watercolors for Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; ISBN: 9782759600779. In French.

The text is chiefly a collection of very brief essays:
Bertrand Delanoë. “Préface.” 11.
Gilles Chazal and Daniel Marchesseau. “Avant-propos.” 13-14.
Daniel Marchesseau. “Exposer Blake à Paris: une mission de reconnaissance.” 17-20.
Yves Bonnefoy. “Un prophète de l’écriture.” 23-37. (“Blake a été mal connu en France.”)
Michael Phillips. “William Blake, graveur visionnaire.” 39-61, 209-10.
Martin Butlin. “L’Art de William Blake.” 65-73, 210.
Mark C. Crosby. “L’apprentissage de William Blake, 1772-1779.” 75-77, 210.
David Alexander. “William Blake, graveur d’interprétation.” 79-81, 210-11. (In June 1788 William Blake, engraver of St. James’s parish, took as an apprentice Thomas Owen for a fee of 50 guineas.)
Angus Whitehead. “Blake dans son atelier.” 83-85, 211.
Elizabeth C. Denlinger. “Catherine Blake, une esquisse.” 86-87, 211.
Robin Simon. “Les Chants d’innocence et Les Chants d’expérience.” 91-99, 211. (In the “première édition [1789]” of Songs of Innocence, the second plate of “The Ecchoing Green” shows the boy’s cricket bat as “incurvée selon l’usage,” but in the 1820s the bat is straight according to the new standard of the time.)5050. No copy of either version is cited or reproduced. My own survey of reproductions of Songs B (1789), E (1789), W (1825), and c (posthumous) shows the cricket bat with exactly the same curvature. The dates derive from Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 376-81.
Jon Stallworthy. “Les chants syncopés du poète, une étude linguistique.” 101-03, 211. (The “nouveau rythme ‘syncopé’ de Blake” consists of “la suppression d’une syllable que l’on attendrait normalement dans un vers anapestique [par exemple ‘When the tongues | of the chil | dren are heard | on the hill’].”)
Saree Makdisi. “Blake et la politique.” 105-07, 211.
Jon Mee. “William Blake et Thomas Paine.” 108-09, 212.
Bethan Stevens. “Visions des filles d’Albion, féminisme et esclavage?” 111-12, 212.
Andrew Lincoln. “America et Europe, la prophétie comme Histoire.” 115-16, 212-13.
Jared Richman. “Blake et Milton.” 137-44, 213.
Morton D. Paley. “Jérusalem et les derniers ouvrages de William Blake.” 147-49, 213.
Martin Myrone. “Blake et le gothique.” 153-55, 213.
Andrew Loukes. “Les Portraits de poètes pour William Hayley.” 156-59, 213.
Troy Patenaude. “L’exposition de Blake à Londres en 1809-1810.” 161-63, 213-14.
John Barrell. “Les relectures de Geoffrey Chaucer par Blake.” 164-65, 214.
William L. Pressly. “Les prédécesseurs de Blake: Mortimer, Fuseli et Barry.” 166-67, 214.
Martin Postle. “Blake, Reynolds et la Royal Academy.” 171-72, 214.
Anthony Dyson. “William Blake, graveur au trait.” 175-78, 214-15.
David Fuller. “Les illustrations de Blake pour La Divine Comédie.” 181-82, 215.
begin page 24 | back to top Suzanne R. Hoover. “La renommée de Blake en Angleterre et aux États-Unis.” 187-88.
Céline Mansanti. “La réception de l’œuvre de Blake en France, de 1868 à 1947.” 190-91, 215.
David Steel. “William Blake et André Gide.” 194-95, 215.
Peter France. “Le poète William Blake traduit en français.” 200-02.
Daniel Marchesseau. “La pérennité de Blake chez trois artistes du XXe siècle.” 205-07. (Francis Bacon, painting based on the life mask of Blake; Jean Cortot, Éloge de William Blake, acrylic; Louis le Brocquy, oil on canvas, apparently unrelated to Blake.)
Catherine de Bourgoing. “Éléments biographiques.” 217-21. (A chronology 1757-1863.)
Catherine de Bourgoing and David Fuller (nos. 138-42 [Dante watercolors]). “Notices des œuvres” (i.e., catalogue of the works in the exhibition).5151. The catalogue strangely omits nos. 1, 17, 24, 89, 97, 118-19, 153-55, 160-62, 164, 172-73, but adds 27 bis, 94 bis and ter. 223-50.

Reviews, etc.

Anon. (Agence France-Press), “William Blake au Petit Palais à Paris,” 2 Apr. 2009 <http://www.cyberpresse.ca>.
*Anon., “William Blake au Petit Palais,” Actualité Paris 3 Apr. 2009 <http://paris.evous.fr>.
*Lorène de Bonnay, “Les Illuminations de William Blake,” Femmes.com 3 Apr. 2009 <http://www.femmes.com/culture/expositions/blake-genie-romantique-anglais-13249>.
*Julie Malaure, “Exposition—‘Mad Blake’ au Petit Palais,” Le Point 5 Apr. 2009 <http://www.lepoint.fr>.
*Craig McGinty, “William Blake at the Petit Palais, Paris,” This French Life 7 Apr. 2009 <http://www.thisfrenchlife.com> (the notice gives no indication that he has seen the exhibition).
Anon. (press release), “Le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais,” Evene.fr 10-12 Apr. 2009.
Anon., “William Blake, Le Génie Visionnaire,” Paris Étudiant Apr. 2009 <http://www.parisetudiant.com>.
§Amandine Rabier, “William Blake: le plus visionnaire des romantiques anglais,” L’Oeil no. 612 (Apr. 2009): 72-75.
§?Anon., “William Blake génie visionnaire,” Connaissance des Arts no. 670 (2009): 16-23.
§Jean-Loup Bourget, “William Blake: Albion—Babylone—Jérusalem,” Critique [Paris] 65, nos. 745-46 (2009): 562-70 (with Himy, William Blake, peintre et poète).
§Georges Raillard, “Exposition—William Blake,” La quinzaine littéraire no. 990 (2009): 17.
*Grant F. Scott (see Blake 43.2 in Part VI).
*Anon., “William Blake du 1 avril au 28 juin,” France Inter n.d. <http://sites.radiofrance.fr/franceinter>.

2009 20 APRIL-4 OCTOBER

*Martin Myrone, ed. Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures. London: Tate Publishing, 2009 [distributed in the US and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, New York]. 8o, 128 pp., 19 reproductions; ISBN: 9781854378637.
Martin Myrone. “Introduction: The grant Style of Art restored.” 7-37.
Anon. “Bibliographical Note.” 38-39. (About the Descriptive Catalogue.)
A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809). 41-86. (Omits Blake’s index.)
“Illustrations of [11] Surviving Works.” 89-101.
“Indexes to A Descriptive Catalogue.” 103-27. (A modern index, not Blake’s.)

Reviews, etc.

§Arifa Akbar, “Recreated: The Exhibition That Broke William Blake,” Independent [London] 18 Dec. 2008 (a puff).
§*Charlotte Higgins, “Blake Retrospective: Tate Stages 1809 Show,” Guardian [London] 18 Dec. 2008: 21 (a puff).
Mona Bobe, “‘Pelerinii din Canterbury,’ într-un remake al singurei expoziţii solo din viaţa lui William Blake,” Ultima Ora 16 Apr. 2009 (in Romanian) <http://www.cotidianul.ro>.
*Louise Jury, “Blake’s Progress, 200 Years On,” Evening Standard [London] 16 Apr. 2009.
*Anon., “Blake Painting Fights Old Battle,” BBC News 17 Apr. 2009 <http://news.bbc.co.uk> (“a painting [of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims] by William Blake is to be displayed alongside the 19th century work [by Stothard] which stole its thunder”; it is “a last minute loan”).
*Anon., “Blake v Stothard,” London Art News [blog] 19 Apr. 2009 <http://coxsoft.blogspot.com/2009/04/blake-v-stothard.html>.
*Alexa Baracaia, “Slated William Blake Show Revisited by Tate Britain,” thelondonpaper.com, 20 Apr. 2009.
*Richard Dorment, “William Blake Exhibition—Tate Britain, Review. Richard Dorment applauds the decision to restage a 200-year-old William Blake exhibition, despite its obvious shortcomings,” Telegraph [London] 20 Apr. 2009.
Mike Collett-White (Reuters), “Tate Recreates Blake Show,” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 21 Apr. 2009: R5.
*Brian Sewell, “William Blake’s 1809 Exhibition,” Evening Standard [London] 24 Apr. 2009 (Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue shows “blundering ignorance” and “silly polemics”; “This is an exhibition of interest only to those for whom Blake is a sacred cow...”).
§Robin Blake, “William Blake at Tate Britain,” Financial Times 25 Apr. 2009.
§Tom Lubbock, “William Blake: The Art of a ‘lunatic’? In 1809, an exhibition by William Blake was derided by critics and buyers alike. At the Tate’s revival of that show, Tom Lubbock explains just how wrong they were,” Independent [London] 27 Apr. 2009.
*Andrea Kirkby, “Blake—Madman or Genius?” PlanetEye Traveler 29 Apr. 2009 <planeteyetraveler.com>.
*Anon., “Blake Exhibition at Tate Britain,” viewlondon.co.uk ?Apr. 2009.
*Laura Cumming, “Exhibition,” Guardian Weekly [London] 1 May 2009: 36.
*Ashley Eldridge-Ford, “London Journal: Reintroducing William Blake,” Art We Love 19 May 2009 <http://artwelove.com>.
begin page 25 | back to top §Martin Butlin, “Blake in London,” Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1276 (July 2009): 487-88.

2009 11 SEPTEMBER-2010 3 JANUARY

William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven is Begun.” Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

An Exhibition from the Morgan’s holdings, divided into I. Engravings (separate); II. Friends and Followers; III. Book of Job watercolors and watercolor portrait of Blake in a blue coat after Phillips; IV. Continental Prophecies; V. L‘Allegro and Il Penseroso watercolors; VI. Job engravings, Urizen, Visions, and watercolors, accompanied by a recording of Charles Ryskamp’s lecture “Collecting William Blake” (about his own collection, now in the Morgan). There was no catalogue, but the pictures are reproduced on the Morgan’s web site <http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/blake>.

Reviews, etc.

*Anon., “Poet, Painter, Engraver, Creator of Illuminated Books—New Morgan Exhibition Presents the Genius of William Blake. Show Includes the Seldom Seen Complete Book of Job Watercolor Series—among Blake’s Greatest Works,” Morgan press release, 10 Sept. 2009 <http://www.themorgan.org/about/press/BlakePressRelease.pdf> (over 100 works are exhibited).
*Anon., The Morgan Calendar of Events, Fall and Winter 2009 (events include “Blake in Poetry and Song: An Evening with Patti Smith,” 19 Nov., and a lecture by Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s Enlightened Graphics: Illuminated Books and New Technologies,” 8 Oct.).
*Holland Cotter, “The Palace of Excess Imagination,” New York Times 11 Sept. 2009: 23, 25-26 (largely fictitious, about Blake in pubs with the Archangel Gabriel and Socrates).
*Barbara Hoffman, “He’s Hellbent on Purgatory,” New York Post 11 Sept. 2009 (“there’s a helluva lot of hell at the Morgan”).

2009 [NOVEMBER]

*William Blake: A Catalogue of Books by and about Blake and His Circle from 1775-2008 Mainly from the Collections of Roger and Kay Easson and Roger Lipman with Additions from Stock. Catalogue 46. San Francisco: John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller, 2009. With a CD of the whole in lieu of index and a keepsake reproduction of Leonard Baskin’s watercolor bust of Blake after the life mask. 4o, xii, 164 pp., 48 reproductions (in black-and-white printed version, in color in the versions on CD-ROM and online <http://www.johnwindle.com/windle/images/pdfs/BlakeCatalogue46w.pdf>); no ISBN.

A very handsome and rewarding publication; “this may perhaps be the largest bookseller’s catalogue of books by and about Blake and his circle ever to have been issued” (ix). The 1706 lots are priced from $5.00 to $89,500 (for Hayley, Designs [1802]) plus “sold” and “P.O.R.” (price on request). (A distressing [to me] number are marked “Not in Bentley.”)

Part V: Books Owned by William Blake the Poet

REYNOLDS, Sir Joshua, Works (1798)

Binding: Bound in half calf in 1860; after it reached the British Museum in 1865 it was heavily trimmed on all sides and rebound in uniform modern leather.
History: Acquired by William Evans Burton (1804-60), successful English comic actor and dramatist, who emigrated to the United States in 1834; the Reynolds volumes were sold with his immense Bibliotheca Dramatica in 1860 (see Part IV).

Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies

à Beckett, William, Jr. “Blake (William), an artist of powerful but eccentric imagination ....” A Universal Biography; Including Scriptural Classical, and Mythological Memoirs, Together with Accounts of Many Eminent Living Characters. The Whole Newly Compiled and Composed from the Most Recent and Authentic Sources. 3 vols. Vol. 1. London: Printed, Stereotyped, and Published, by Mayhew, Isaac, and Co., 1834. 458. <New York Public Library> B. 1836. <Blake (1996)>.

§Adams, Hazard. Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2009.

§Adams, Will W. “Love, Open Awareness, and Authenticity: A Conversation with William Blake and D. W. Winnicott.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2006) <Blake (2008)§>

“Blake’s work and life are read in light of Winnicott’s theory of development and psychotherapy.”

§Aird, Thomas. The Old Bachelor in the Old Scottish Village. Edinburgh: Myles Macphail; London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1845. 36-37. <Bodleian>

Without the help of any suggestion whatever from any external object on which he might be gazing, that sweet strange enthusiast, the painter Blake, had the power, sometimes voluntary and sometimes involuntary, of calling up a face, and seeing it with his bodily eyes projected in palpable semblance on the air, or on the wall before him ....

*Altizer, Thomas J. J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. 1967, 2000. <BB #807, Blake (2004)>

Review

Jennifer G. Jesse, Journal of Religion 81 (2001): 700-02 <Blake (2008)§> (“this book remains an important historical document of its time”).

§Ando, Eiko. “Blake no A Vision of the Last Judgment ni tsuite [On Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment].” Muroran Kogyo Daigaku Kiyo [Memoirs of the Muroran Institute of Technology] 58 (2009): 79-87. In Japanese.

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§Ankarsjö, Magnus. William Blake and Religion: A New Critical View. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2009.
About Blake and the Moravians.

Anon. “Art. VIII” [review of Sacred Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1836), The Works of Cowper, ed. Southey (1836), The Poems of Young, and Willmott, Lives of Sacred Poets]. Church of England Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (1837): 171-229.

“As developed in Blake’s Illustrations of the Night-Thoughts, the last scene becomes grotesquely sublime” (208). The “last scene” is apparently about the vale of Death in Night III, but I do not find a design which is especially apt.

Anon. Bibliographie étrangère ... Année 1811. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, [?1812]. 253. In French.
The articles listed here from Vaterländisches Museum 2 include “6) sur William Blake, artiste, poète et visionnaire [by Crabb Robinson].”

Anon. “Blake, Katharine.” A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, Consisting of Sketches of All Women Who Have Been Distinguished by Great Talents, Strength of Character, Piety, Benevolence, or Moral Virtue of Any Kind. Ed. H[enry] G[ardiner] Adams. London: Groomsbridge and Sons, 1857. 111.
Quotes Cunningham about her.

Anon. “Blake, the Artist.” Polar Star of Entertainment and Popular Science, and Universal Repertorium of General Literature [London] 3 (“for the Quarter Ending at Lady-Day, [25 Mar.] 1830”): 215-18. <Bodleian>
Quotes Cunningham ¶8-10, 23 (omitting the first sentence)-24, 36-39, 41-44, 47-49.

Anon. “Blake (W.)” [under “Recherches Bibliographiques”]. Bulletin de l’Alliance des Arts [Paris, ed. Paul Lacroix] 2, no. 3 (1843): 47-48. In French.
Mentions Songs of Innocence, Romey’s essay, Cunningham, Thel, Milton, Jerusalem, Blair’s Grave, and Job, which are “introuvables en France”; Blake was “passablement fou.”

Anon. “Blake (Wilhelm)....” Encyklopedyja Powszechna. Vol. 3. Warsaw: S. Orgelbrand, 1860. 744. In Polish. <Columbia>

Anon. “Blake, William.” The Supplement to the Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol. 1. London: Charles Knight and Co., 1845. 201-02. <New York Public Library> B. 1851.
He was an “extraordinary artist” whose books are “replete with beauties of the highest order” but who suffered from “a species of chronic insanity.” The account from Cunningham, complete with “replete with beauties of the highest order,” is silently adapted in The National Cyclopædia <BBS p. 342>; The English Cyclopædia <BB #884> cols. 716-17; Spooner, A Biographical History of the Fine Arts <BBS p. 644-45E>; and doubtless elsewhere.

§Anon. “Blake, William, artist-poet.” Robert Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature: A History, Critical and Biographical, of British and American Authors, with Specimens of Their Writings. Originally ed. Robert Chambers. 3rd ed., rev. Robert Carruthers. 8 vols. Vol. 5. New York: American Book Exchange, 1830. 123.
My only evidence comes from the index in vol. 7, which indicates that there are extracts from Poetical Sketches. For later versions, see BB #1347, 1513.

Anon. “Blake, Wm., an artist and poet of singular genius and originality, remarkable also for his extraordinary visions, 1759-1827.” Cyclopædia of Biography: Embracing a Series of Original Memoirs of the Most Distinguished Persons of All Times. Ed. Elihu Rich. London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Company, 1854. 86. <New York Public Library> B. The Pictorial Cyclopædia of Biography .... American ed. Ed. Francis L. Hawks. New York: Appleton and Company, 1856. 102. <Michigan> C. The Comprehensive Dictionary of Biography; Embracing a Series of Original Memoirs of the Most Distinguished Persons of All Countries, Living and Dead. London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Company, 1860. 86. <Bodleian>

Anon. “Blake’s Visionen.” Magazin für philosophische, medicinische und gerichtliche Seelenkunde [ed. J. B. Friedreich] 4 (1830): 34-39. In German. <Princeton>
The account from Cunningham comes via “Das Ausland. April 1830. Nro. 101.”

Review referring to Blake

Anon., Medicinisch-chirurgische Zeitung [Innsbruck] 39, no. 1006 (17 Mar. 1836): 340-52 (in German) <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek> (review of Friedreich’s journal, with a reference to this article: “Blake war ein armer Mahler, der eine Menge Erscheinungen von Verstorbenen frey und willkürlich in seinem Geiste hervorrief, und sie auch wirklich äusserlich verkörpert vor sich zu sehen glaubte, so, dass er sie abzeichnen, ja sich mit ihnen unterhalten konnte. So sah er die Geister Pindar’s, Virgil’s, Milton’s u.s.w.” [352]).

Anon. “The British School of Design.” Library of the Fine Arts 3, no. 13 (Feb. 1832): 89-95.
Fuseli “has had few, if any imitators, unless the equally eccentric designs of Blake can be considered as imitations” (91n).

Anon. “Bunyan and Bunhill Fields.” Fraser’s Magazine 31, no. 183 (Mar. 1845): 308-19. <New York Public Library> B. Anon. “From Fraser’s Magazine. Bunyan and Bunhill Fields.” Littell’s Living Age [Boston] 5, no. 49 (19 Apr. 1845): 107-14.
Quotes Cunningham about Blake and the Archangel Gabriel.

Anon. “Charles Dickens.” Ainsworth’s Magazine 5 (1844): 84-88. <Stanford>
begin page 27 | back to top Discusses Dickens’s “Prose Christmas Carol”: “It is easy to say what this ghost-story is not. It is not matter of fact, like the Cock-lane Ghost; it is not super-imaginative, like Blake’s famous Ghost of a Flea. It is a Ghost full of solidities” (86).

Anon. “Death of Blake, the Painter.” Arthur’s Home Magazine (Mar. 1854) <BB #912> B. New American Magazine [Cleveland] 2, no. 10 (Apr. 1854): 304-05. <Indiana>

Anon. “Editorial Notes. American Literature and Reprints.” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art [New York] 7, no. 38 (Feb. 1856): 213-22. <New York Public Library>

“The grotesque dreams of poor painter Blake, after a hearty pork supper, could not have been more fantastic or numerous” (214).

Anon. “Educational Charities.” Monthly Supplement of the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 6, no. 358 (30 Sept.-31 Oct. 1837): 420-24. <Indiana>
Holy Thursday “was commemorated in the following simple lines by Blake, an eccentric but powerful artist, who published them in a curious little volume, entitled ‘Songs of Innocence’” (424). A vignette represents “Cheapside—Children from the Parochial and Ward Schools Going to St. Paul’s.”

Anon. “Exhibition at Somerset House [Third Notice].” Athenæum no. 239 (26 May 1832): 339-40.
A review of the Royal Academy exhibition, “202. ‘Portrait of the Rev. A. Sedgwick ...’ Phillips, R.A.”: “We are willing to imagine that we see in it all that charmed us in the almost divine head of Blake, painted five and twenty years ago [1807] by the same artist” (340).

Anon. “Exhibition at the Gallery (in Pall Mall) of the British Institution ... 1816.” New Monthly Magazine 5, no. 26 (1 Mar. 1816): 154. <New York Public Library>
The “Portrait of Thomas Bewick,” engraved by Thomas Ranson after William Nicholson, is “a brilliant portrait ... in a style of excellence and originality seldom witnessed, and surpassed only by the extraordinarily fine portrait of Mr. Blake by Schiavonetti after the academician Philips [sic].”

Anon. “Fanaticism.” Correspondent [New York] 3, no. 22 (21 June 1828): 348-49. <California (Berkeley)>
“In a late London paper, we find the following particulars of a well know[n] fanatic, who, we believe, avowed himself a disciple of Baron Swedenbourg. Mr. Blake, (observes the writer) in our hearing ....” The “late London paper” is the Literary Chronicle (1 Sept. 1827) (BB #1050; printed in BR[2] 468-70), quoted with minor misprints and changes. The author of “Fanaticism” may be the journal editor, George Houston.

Anon. “Fine Arts. Wilkie’s Blind Man’s Buff.” Manchester Iris 1, no. 22 (29 June 1822): 170.
Schiavonetti’s “portraits of Vandyke and Blake ... entitle him to a high rank ....”

Anon. “A Fine Day in the Strand.” Fraser’s Magazine 29, no. 172 (Apr. 1844): 379-91. <New York Public Library>
“In Fountain Court lived and died that gentle enthusiast in his own art, the poet-painter William Blake. The account of Blake’s death-bed is one of the most pleasing yet painful pieces of biographical narrative in the English language” (388).

Anon. “Flaxman.” Distinguished Men of Modern Times. 4 vols. Vol. 4: Gibbon to Wilberforce. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1838. 334-43. <New York Public Library>
At the Royal Academy, Flaxman joined with “Blake and Stothard, both artists of original talent; but, like their more eminent companion, less favoured by fortune than many not so deserving of patronage and applause” (336).

Anon. “Flaxman’s Outline Drawings.” New-York Quarterly 2, no. 1 (Apr. 1853): 95-122. <Wisconsin State Historical Society>
About Blake’s engravings for Hesiod, adapted from Cunningham: “William Blake, a man of real genius ... an engraver of rare ability, a man of transcendent imagination ....” “Flaxman and Blake resembled one another personally” (96-98).

§Anon. (“An American Artist”). Hand-Book of Young Artists and Amateurs in Oil-Painting. New York, 1845.

Review referring to Blake
Anon., Methodist Quarterly Review [New York] 30 (3rd ser., vol. 8) (Apr. 1848): 242. <California (Davis)>
Cites Cunningham:

The selfishness of the president [Sir Joshua Reynolds] was not less destructive to the interests of art than the madness of Blake, whose “method of coloring was a secret which he kept to himself, or confided only to his wife, believing that it was revealed in a vision, and that he was bound in honor to conceal it from the world.”

Anon. “Hayley (William) ....” Annuaire nécrologique, ou complément annuel et continuation de toutes les biographies ou dictionnaires historiques .... Ed. A. Mahul. 2nd year (1821). Paris, 1822. 359-62. In French. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
A record of deaths in 1820. The list of Hayley’s works includes Ballads (1805): “Ces poésies furent composées pour accompagner une collection de dessins, de l’ingénieux et bizarre William Blake” (362).

Anon. “Henry Fuseli.” Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment 5 (Jan.-July 1830): 104-05. <Wisconsin>
Anecdotes from Cunningham, including Fuseli’s conversation with Blake about the Virgin Mary’s artistic taste (105; see BR[2] 631fn).

Anon. “The Inventions of William Blake, Painter and Poet.” London University Magazine (1830) <BB #965>
begin page 28 | back to top An advertisement for this issue with contents including “on the Writings of Blake” appears in the London Literary Gazette no. 684 (27 Feb. 1830): 144.

Anon. “John Flaxman.” Family Magazine; or Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge [Cincinnati] 4 (1839): 485-87. <Indiana> B. Family Magazine, or Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge [New York, Boston, Cincinnati] 7 (1840): 85-87 <Michigan>
“In early life, he was in the habit of frequently passing his evenings in drawing and designing in the company of that excellent painter Mr. Stothard, Mr. Blake the engraver (lately deceased, so remarkable for the eccentricity of his opinions and designs), Mr. George Cumberland, and Mr. Sharp” (486).

Anon. Lancet no. 1941 (10 Nov. 1860): 467. <Boston Medical Library>

Theories, if they are to be of value, must be founded upon facts .... This truth, however, appears to be ignored in some of the papers and discussions which form the staple of some of the Medical Societies. ... So it is recorded of a dreamy and enthusiastic painter, that he once saw the ghost of a flea, and sketched it.

Anon. “Martin’s Illustrations of Milton.” Athenæum no. 246 (14 July 1832): 459-60.
“Now we have seen sundry Satans in our day—Fuseli, Lawrence, Stothard, and Blake, tried their talents on the great apostate, and all, in our opinion, more or less failed” (459). (The only publicly visible illustration by Blake for Milton had been in his 1809 exhibition.)

Anon. “Modern Prophets.” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art [New York] 3, no. 13 (Jan. 1854): 33-39. <Michigan>
Mostly about Joan of Arc. The Visionary Heads of “the English artist, Blake, who died in 1812” are used to explain Joan’s voices.

Anon. “Monthly Retrospect of the Fine Arts.” Monthly Magazine 29, no. 7 (1 July 1810): 576-78.
It includes a memorial of Schiavonetti: “His etchings for Blair’s Grave; his head of Blake, after Philip’s [sic] picture; are wonders in the style he adopted” (577).

Anon. (“A Parent”). “Mysterious Stories. For the Christian Observer.” Christian Observer no. 383 (Nov. 1833): 651-56. <California (Berkeley)>
It concerns a story about Mozart’s Requiem in the Saturday Magazine (no. 77). Mozart was commissioned to compose his Requiem by a mysterious stranger, and he died while writing it.

Works of extraordinary genius have been often undertaken with a fervid impulse which the artist considered inspiration, and have been hurried on “day and night,” like Mozart’s Requiem, till exhaustion of mind and body left the gifted enthusiast a prey to every melancholy feeling and awful foreboding. ... But the case of that extraordinary artist, the late William Blake, is still more in point. Before undertaking any work of extraordinary effort he was stimulated by supposed mysterious communications: he thought that he beheld and conversed with the shades of the mighty dead; he was told what he must paint; and the objects to be described were placed, as he imagined, in glowing vision before his eyes: his aërial visitants watched the progress of his work; and his wife, fully believing all her husband’s marvellous stories, viewed him as a being whose pictorial genius was heavenly inspiration, and who was excited to the exercise of his art, not by the ordinary inducements of wealth or celebrity, or even by the innate dictates of genius, but by supernatural messages and suggestions, as inexplicable as the request of Mozart’s mysterious stranger. ... It is most probably, if the circumstance really happened [to Mozart], and was not a mere hallucination, that it could have been explained at the time, had sufficient attention been given for that purpose ... such stories should not be protruded unexplained upon the credulous reader .... (655)

Anon. “The Myth.” Chambers’s Papers for the People [Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers] 1, no. 5 (1850): 1-32 [each number is separately paginated]. <Bodleian>
“Robert Blake, the painter, used to see apparitions so distinctly as to paint from them” (4).

Anon. “Note by the Zoist.” Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare [London, Paris, Leipzig] 11, no. 44 (Jan. 1854): 374-76. <Michigan>
Cites examples of “mystical insanity” and quotes “Mr. James Smith’s Lights and Shades [sic] of Artist Life and Character, just published” about Blake, visions, and the fairy funeral.

Anon. “On the Physiological and Psychological Phenomena of Dreams and Apparitions [No. III. of a Series].” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology [London] 10 (1 Apr. 1857): 292-313. <Michigan>
Swedenborg “had a tendency to spiritualize material objects, and materialize spiritual entities.” “We may also cite a more recent instance—that of Blake, the artist, well known as having illustrated ‘Blair’s Grave’ and ‘Young’s Night Thoughts.’”
On the Visionary Heads:

We ask what were these ideal sitters but actual apparitions—the beings of his vivid ideality, revived by strong and vivid reminiscences of works in which they had been delineated, and which he had reproduced in his waking-dream, and through the influence of his powerful organ of marvellousness he had regarded them as living personages? (307)

Anon. “Painting.” Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge .... Vol. 5. London: B. Fellowes ..., 1845. 466-586. <Bodleian>
“Blake ... was an example of the indiscretion of attempting to lead the public taste by efforts unintelligible to the public begin page 29 | back to top eye. But Blake’s originalities were near allied to madness, and probably often not intelligible to himself” (498).

Anon. “Poetry and Painting.” Photographic Art-Journal [New York, London] 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1853): 56-57. <New York Public Library>
Blake and Young in his Night Thoughts had “the same turn of thought” (57).

Anon. “Predictions and Coincidences.” Irish Quarterly Review 9, no. 34 (July 1859): 337-79. <New York Public Library>
A review of two books that mentions Blake’s visions; “Blake, the painter, lived in an ideal world ...” (354).

Anon. “Richard Bean, Esq.” Gentleman’s Magazine 87, part 2 (Oct. 1817): 368-69. B. Summarized in “Bean, (Richard, 1792-June 24, 1817,) a painter and engraver.” A New General Biographical Dictionary .... Ed. Rev. Hugh James Rose. 12 vols. Vol. 3. London: B. Fellowes ..., 1848. 414. <Bodleian>
An obituary; Bean made “an exquisite portrait he engraved of Blake from Sciavonetti [sic], when he had not been more than two years under the tuition of a master.” “Among English painters the sublime conceptions of Blake, the epic compositions of Barry, and the unrivalled graces of Stothard, were the object of his admiration, attention, and imitation.”

Anon. “Richard Cosway. Fraser’s Magazine. No. cxxxi. November, 1840.” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 36, no. 1032 (14 Nov. 1840): 316-17. <California (Berkeley)>
Cosway “pretend[ed] ... to raise up ‘the dead of the earth’ .... Blake the painter did the same ...” (316).

Anon. “Schiavonetti (Louis) ....” Biographie nouvelle des contemporains. Vol. 19. Paris: Librairie historique, 1825. 53-54. In French. <Boston Medical Library>
It lists “une suite d’eaux-fortes, d’après Blake, pour ... le Tombeau de Blair.” The account in Biographie universelle, below, is very similar.

Anon. “Schiavonetti (Louis) ....” Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains .... Vol. 2, part 2. Paris: Bureau de la Biographie, 1826. 1280. In French. <Harvard>

Anon. “Schiavonetti, Luigi, or Louis.” Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol. 21. London: Charles Knight and Co., 1841. 27.
“The free etchings of Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s ‘Grave,’ and the beautiful head of Blake prefixed to that work, are deservedly much admired.”

Anon. “Scientific Obituary for 1827.” Arcana of Science and Art .... 3rd ed. London: John Limbird, 1828. 240. <Wisconsin> B. Anon. “Conmemoracion de los sabios y artistas ingleses y extrangeros que han fallecido en los años 1827, 1828, 1829 y 1830.” El propagador de conocimientos útiles, ó coleccion de datos interesantes aplicables a las necesidades y a los goces de todas las clases de la sociedad [Madrid, ed. Don José Luis Casaseca] ns 1, no. 5 (Feb. 1832): 237-40. In Spanish. <Complutense University of Madrid>
“Mr. William Blake, an eminent engraver” (1828); “Mr. William Blake, grabador distinguido” (1832).

Anon. “The Sculptor’s Career.” Eliza Cook’s Journal [London] 8, nos. 205-06 (2, 9 Apr. 1853): 356-59, 371-73. <Stanford> B. Pen and Pencil [Cincinnati] 1, nos. 23-24 (4, 11 June 1853): 719-24, 755-58. <Indiana> C. Anglo-American Magazine [Toronto] 3, no. 1 (July 1853): 44-50. <Michigan>
Casual references to Blake.

Anon. “Sketch of Blake, the Painter.” Spirit of the English Magazines5252. The volume title page calls it the Atheneum; or Spirit of the English Magazines. [Boston] 3rd ser., 4, no. 1 (1 Apr. 1830): 25-30. <New York Public Library>
Taken from the review of Cunningham in the Literary Gazette (6 Feb. 1830) <BB #938>

Anon. “Stehen wir im Verkehr mit der Geisterwelt?” Blätter aus Prevorst. Originalien und Lesefrüchte für Freunde des innern Lebens 7 (1835): 160-71. In German. <University of Lausanne>
About dreams and “Blake’schen Visionen” (168).

Anon. “Sympathy and Its Eccentricities.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 10, no. 238 (22 July 1848): 59-61. <Michigan>
In part about Blake’s Visionary Heads.

Anon. “Thoughts upon Sacred Poetry.” British Magazine and Monthly Register of Religious and Ecclesiastical Information, Parochial History, and Documents Respecting the State of the Poor, Progress of Education, &c. 2 (Sept. 1832): 20-25. <Bodleian>

The late ingenious and unfortunate Blake, it will be remembered, considered himself endowed with the power of calling up from the dead any individual whose portrait he might be desirous of painting, and used frequently to point out to his friends the forms of the departed prince and philosopher as being actually present in his studio. A portion of this enthusiasm is inseparable from an expansive and poetical imagination. (22)

Anon. “To Correspondents.” Astrologer and Oracle of Destiny: A Repository of the Wonderful in Nature and the Curious in Art [London] 1, no. 22 (12 July 1845): 203-04. <Harvard>
Response (204) to “A Royal Academician.—The peculiarities of Blake the painter were certainly most extraordinary, and we intend, shortly, to give a memoir of him, from the pen of one who knew him well. He once saw the ghost of a flea ....” Quotes from Varley’s Zodiacal Physiognomy. “Whether Blake begin page 30 | back to top killed any of the species after this interview we are unable to say.” There is no Blake in the index (247-48).

Anon. “The Tournament at the Alhambra.” Household Words [ed. Charles Dickens] 19, no. 474 (23 Apr. 1859): 484-89. <California (Santa Cruz)>
About a visit to “Lopez de Mallara, a mad painter” in the madhouse in the Street of the Five Wounds; “It was vanity and success drove Mallara mad. He is always trying to paint a landscape of chaos, and the ghost of a flea ...” (486). The same passage is given in Walter Thornbury, Life in Spain (1860) 287.

Anon. “Visions of Blake the Artist.” Rural Repository, or Bower of Literature [Hudson, New York] 7, no. 4 (17 July 1830): 30-31. <New York Public Library>
Quotes ¶37 from Cunningham. It may derive from the article in the Casket <BB #1045> or that in the New-England Weekly Review <BB #1046>.

Anon. “Von der Londoner Industrieausstelung II.” Deutsches Museum [Leipzig] 12, no. 36 (4 Sept. 1862): 368-75. <Harvard>
A long section (371-73) about Fuseli and Blake and the Visionary Heads, silently quoting Cunningham.

Anon. “Von der Simulation.” Blätter für gerichtliche Anthropologie 13, no. 3 (1862): 161-87. In German. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
About the “mystische und dämonische Compositionen” of Blake (169).

Anon. “Was den Griechen noch übrig bleibt?” Politisches Journal nebst Anzeige von gelehrten und andern Sachen [Hamburg] Jahrgang 1822, no. 10 (Oct. 1822): 885-89. In German.
“Schon der berühmte Englische Dichter Blake besang prophetisch vor einem Decennium in seinem temple of Cove [?love] Griechenlands in Amerika wieder aufblühende Cultur” (886). I know of no reference in Blake to a Temple of Cove or Love [though “Loves Temple” is in his “Everlasting Gospel”) or to Greece in America.

Anon. “William Blake.” The Georgian Era: Memoirs of the Most Eminent Persons, Who Have Flourished in Great Britain, from the Accession of George the First to the Demise of George the Fourth. 4 vols. Vol. 4: Political and Rural Economists; Painters, Sculptors, Architects, and Engravers; Composers; Vocal, Instrumental, and Dramatic Performers. London: Vizetelly, Branston and Co., 1834 [vol. 1 is 1832, vol. 2 is 1833, vol. 3 is 1834]. 113-15. <Michigan, Stanford>
The painters include Barry, Blake, Cosway, Fuseli, and Stothard, the sculptors include Flaxman, and the engravers include Bartolozzi, Basire, Ryland, Sharp, and John Thomas Smith. The Blake account is silently paraphrased from Cunningham, in particular the error of “about seventy designs” in the Songs.
The Georgian Era is attributed to “Clarke” in the British Library catalogue.

Anon. “William Blake, an artist of singular taste and flightiness of imagination ....” The Almanack of the Fine Arts for the Year 1851. Ed. R. W. Buss. London: George Rowney and Co., 1851. 90-92. <New York Public Library>
A summary from Cunningham; “Blake’s designs ... are the grandest of anything produced by the English School” (91).

Anon. “William Blake, ein ausgezeichneter Künstler, Dichter und Narr.” Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes 4, nos. 145-47 (4, 6, 9 Dec. 1833): 577, 582-84, 586-88. In German. <Harvard, Princeton>
An independent essay based on J. T. Smith (1828) and Cunningham (1830) but with information about Catherine Blake in 1831. There are prose translations of “Edward III” from Poetical Sketches, “The Chimney Sweeper,” “Holy Thursday,” and “The Lamb” from Innocence, “Der Tiger” from Experience, Blake’s letter of 21 Sept. 1800, and Lamb’s letter about Blake, all as in Cunningham (2nd ed.).

Anon. “William Blake, [born 28 Nov.] 1757, London.” The Anniversary Calendar, Natal Book, and Universal Mirror .... 2 vols. London: William Kidd, 1832. 2: 776.

*Anon. “William Blake’s Art and Poetry Featured in Lambeth Railway Tunnel. A mosaic and audio installation featuring the works of William Blake—who lived in Hercules Road—can now be found in Centaur Street.” London SE1 Community Website. 16 June 2009. <http://www.london-se1.co.uk>.

Anon. “William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.” Cornhill Magazine 2, no. 8 (Aug. 1860): 225-41.

It is wilder and more picturesque ... to be stark mad and a believer in the “ghosts of fleas” and the connection of “William Pitt and the New Jerusalem,” like Blake; but I think the balance of happiness is in favour of such quiet, unostentatious working lives as those led by William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. (230)

Anon. “Winter Exhibition of Pictures, at the Suffolk Street Gallery.” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 20, no. 576 (17 Nov. 1832): 330-31.
“The Exhibition embraces specimens of the works of nearly seventy deceased Artists .... Among them are ... Fuseli, Zofani, Blake, Opie ....” Nos. 41 and 227 depict “Dead Game, &c. Blake. Among the finest compositions of their class. It is worth while to compare these pictures, with what Smith, in his Life of Nollekens, tells us of Blake’s colouring.” J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828) (BR[2] 622), is quoted somewhat approximately. But of course William Blake never depicted “Dead Game”; the artist here is B[enjamin] Blake.

begin page 31 | back to top

Anon. “The Wonders of Human Folly.” Chambers’s Papers for the People [Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers] 8, no. 63 (1851): 1-32 [each number is separately paginated]. <California (Berkeley)>
Quotes (from Cunningham) about the fairy funeral (13-14).

§Antonielli, Arianna. William Blake e William Butler Yeats: Sistemi simbolici e costruzioni poetiche. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2009. 366 pp.; ISBN: 9788884539748. In Italian. <http://www.fupress.com/Archivio/pdf/3805.pdf>.

Ariel.5353. It is not clear to me whether “Ariel” is a pseudonym for the author of the essay or serves some other purpose. “Blake, Dichter, Schwärmer, und Mahler zugleich.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [Tübingen] no. 86 (10 Apr. 1811): 341-43. <Harvard>
It gives “The Tyger”/“Der Tiger” in English/German as in [Crabb Robinson’s essay in] Vaterländisches Museum (Jan. 1811) <BB #2538>, which it cites.

B., G. H. “Historical Sketch of Painting.” Universalist Quarterly and General Review [Boston] 2 (Jan. 1845): 23-38. <Harvard Divinity School>
“We must take rather a disproportionate space for Blake, the water-color painter, who affords a curious instance of an imagination too strong for the government of a less exercised judgment” (37). The example is about “imaginary sitters.”

§Bacak, Matt. Reader’s Guide to William Blake. New Delhi: Centrum Press, 2009. 23 cm., 267 pp.; ISBN: 9789380106588.

Baillarger, [Jules]. “Pathologie. Maladies mentales. De l’influence de l’état intermédiaire à veille et au sommeil sur la production et la marche des hallucinations [part 2].” Annales Médico-Psychologiques [Paris] 6 (1845): 168-95. In French. <Boston Public Library>
Mentions “un halluciné de Bedlam, nommé Blake, dont l’histoire, publiée dans la Revue britannique,5454. Anon., “Hôpital des fous à Londres,” Revue britannique (1833) <BB #958>. a été reproduite par M. Brierre de Boismont ....” “Blake, en effet, conversait d’âme à âme avec les nombreux personnages ...” (192).

Baseggio, G. B. “Schiavonetti (Luigi).” Biografia degli Italiani illustri nelle scienze, lettere ed arti. Ed. Emilio de Tipaldo. Vol. 4. Venice, 1837. 425-27. In Italian. <California (Berkeley)>
“Il mostrò nelle acque forti pel poema la Tomba, del Blair da’ disegni del Blake ...” (426).

*Bedard, Michael. William Blake: The Gates of Paradise. 2006. <Blake (2007)>
Reviews
Anon., Star Phoenix [Saskatoon, Saskatchewan] 16 Dec. 2006 (one paragraph).
Renee Steinberg, School Library Journal (Dec. 2006) (one paragraph: “a rich biography,” “[a] handsome and meticulously documented volume”).
D. F. B., Horn Book Magazine (Jan.-Feb. 2007): 81 (one paragraph: a “valiant biography”).
*R. K. Dickson, Bloomsbury Review (Mar.-Apr. 2007) (one paragraph: “a worthy introduction”).
Anon., Through the Looking Glass Children’s Book Reviews (“thought-provoking”).

§Beer, John. “Words or Images? Blake’s Representation of History” and “Blake, Coleridge and ‘The Riddle of the World.’” Romanticism, Revolution and Language: The Fate of the Word from Samuel Johnson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bell, Robert, ed. The Annotated Edition of the English Poets. London, 1854-57.
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Quarterly Review 110, no. 220 (Oct. 1861): 435-59. <Michigan> B. London Quarterly Review [American ed.] 110, no. 220 (Oct. 1861): 226-39 <New York Public Library> (quotes Blake [Descriptive Catalogue ¶17]: “As Linnæus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men” [438/228]).

*Bentley, G. E., Jr. Blake Records. 2nd ed. 2004. <Blake (2005)>
For addenda and corrigenda, see Bentley, “William Blake and His Circle” for 2008, Blake 43.1 (summer 2009): 44-45.

*Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Blake’s Murderesses: Visionary Heads of Wickedness.” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 69-105; 21 reproductions of portraits of murderesses, 5 by Blake.
“Blake’s information about them [his four murderesses] must have come from the gutter press ... or compendia such as the Newgate Calendar,” some of which “bear inscribed portraits which Blake’s Visionary Heads seem to echo” (69).

*Bentley, G. E., Jr. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. 2001, 2003. <Blake (2002, 2004)>
Review
Mervyn Nicholson, English Studies in Canada 28.4 (Dec. 2002 [July 2003]): 737-41 (“definitive,” “a major achievement,” “it is hard to imagine a more comprehensive biography,” a book of “beautiful sanity”).

Bentley, G. E., Jr. William Blake’s Conversations. 2008. <Blake (2009)>
“Blake’s Pronunciation” (xxi-xxix) is reprinted as chapter 5 (17-36) of Leaves from Your Own Book: Papers in Honours of Sudhakar Marathe, ed. Sachidananda Mohanty, Alladi Uma, D. Murali Manohar, Sindhu Menon (New Delhi: Authors Press, 2009).

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§Benton, Michael. “Imagining Blake.” Literary Biography: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 38-41.
The essay is from his “Biographer, Biography, and the Reader,” Journal of Aesthetic Education (2007) <Blake (2009)>.

§Benziman, Galia. “Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (June 2007): 167-97.

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 42, number 4 (spring 2009)

*Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2008.” 116-46. (Wonderfully detailed and wide-ranging. “Color versions of all illustrations are online at ... <http://www.blakequarterly.org>.[e])
*M. Crosby. “William Blake’s Miniature Portraits of the Butts Family.” 147-52. (“The stylistic similarities among the three [Butts] portraits,” all on ivory, suggest that they were made in 1809, as that of Elizabeth Butts is dated; Butlin had speculated 1801 for that of Thomas Butts, Sr.)
Morton D. Paley. “The Man Who Married the Blakes.” 153-55. (The Reverent John Gardnor [1728/29-1808] kept a drawing school and exhibited his landscapes frequently, some of which he engraved himself.)
G. E. Bentley, Jr. “The American Blake Foundation.” 155-58. (Roger and Key Easson’s “American Blake Foundation was a brave enterprise” [158].)
Newsletter
Anon. “Blake’s Grave.” 158. (“Luis and Carol Garrido have rediscovered the exact site of Blake’s grave at Bunhill Fields.”)
Anon. “Martin K. Nurmi, 1920-2008.” 158. (An obituary).)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 43, number 1 (summer 2009)

*G. E. Bentley, Jr., with the assistance of Hikari Sato for Japanese publications. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2008.” 4-48. (It includes an “Appendix: Blake Records, 2nd ed. [2004] Addenda and Corrigenda” [44-45].)

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 43, number 2 (fall 2009)

Céline Mansanti. “William Blake in transition Magazine (Paris, 1927-38): The Modalities of a Blake Revival in France during the 1920s and 1930s.” 52-60. (Wide-ranging and thorough; “The Blake revival which takes place in France at the time is based on serious misconceptions of the poet” [52].)
Reviews
*Grant F. Scott. William Blake (1757-1827): The Visionary Genius of British Romanticism (Petit Palais, 2009). 61-64. (The exhibition “succeeds admirably,” “a magnificent introduction to Blake’s versatility and range.”)
*Alexander S. Gourlay. Martin Myrone, The Blake Book (2007). 64-65. (It is “a sensitive and impressive introduction to Blake’s visual art.”)
*Brent E. Kinser. Kevin Hutchings, Songs of William Blake (“Self-published music CD with booklet” [2007]). 65-66. (The CD “is best described as a conventionally polished, over-intellectualized folk recording.”)
Stephen C. Behrendt. William L. Pressly, The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art (2007). 66-69. (“Blake is mentioned in passing,” but there is a substantial section on Fuseli.)
*Andrew Lincoln. Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (2007). 69-71. (“The complexities are expertly unraveled and lucidly explained here” [69].)
Minute Particulars
Wayne C. Ripley. “Printed References to and Known Prices of Blake’s Night Thoughts, 1796-1826.” 72-75. (Quotes and analyzes 11 previously unrecorded references in catalogues [1798-1820], chiefly of booksellers, to the edition of Young’s Night Thoughts [1797] with Blake’s designs.)
*Paul Miner. “A Possible Sketch of Blake’s Napoleon.” 76-77. (A recently rediscovered sketch is perhaps for Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Napoleon [c. 1809, Butlin #652, untraced since 1882].)
Angus Whitehead. “A Further Reference to William Blake in the Letters of Charlotte Smith.” 78. (The letter to her publishers Cadell & Davies of 16 Dec. 1802 refers to “the person who made the drawings” for Hayley’s “last publication about animals [the title I forget].”
*Jennifer Grotz. “The Ladder.” (A poem.)

Bloom, Harold. “William Blake.” The Visionary Company. 1961 .... <BB #1232, BBS pp. 415-16>
The section on Poetical Sketches is reprinted in §Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime, ed. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) 271-75.

§Borkowska, Eliza. But He Talked of the Temple of Man’s Body: Blake’s Revelation Unlocked. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 22 cm., viii, 289 pp.; ISBN: 9781443803298.

§Brion, Marcel. “Les Livres prophétiques de William Blake.” Les cahiers du sud 76 (Feb. 1926): 108-32. In French.
Discusses Tiriel, Thel, Marriage, and Visions.

Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake 1757-1827: A Man without a Mask. 1943 [i.e., 1944] .... <BB #1288, BBS p. 426> M. William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Faber and Faber, 2008. ISBN: 9780571241880.

[Brown, Samuel]. “Ghosts and Ghost-Seers.” North British Review [Edinburgh] 9, no. 18 (Aug. 1848): 393-416. B. North British Review 9 [American ed., New York, vol. 4] (Aug. 1848): 213-26. C. “Ghosts and Ghost-Seers. From the North British Review.” Littell’s Living Age [Boston] 18, no. 226 (9 Sept. 1848): 490-500. D. “From the North British Review. Ghosts and Ghost-Seers.” Eclectic Magazine [New York] 15, no. 3 (Nov. 1848): 348-62. <Indiana> E. Samuel Brown. “Ghosts begin page 33 | back to top and Ghost-Seers.” Lectures on the Atomic Theory and Essays Scientific and Literary. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co.; London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1858. 2: 348-84 (Blake reference on 360-61). <Harvard>
Review of three books; about Blake’s Visionary Heads: “Whatever images he remembered in whole, or constructed out of parts drawn from memory, reached the retina from within ...” (401 [1848 Edinburgh]).

§Bucke, Richard Maurice. “William Blake.” Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. 1901. <BBS pp. 427-28A> B. 1905. <BB #A1306> ... D. §1923. <BBS pp. 427-28D> E. Kosmisches Bewusstsein. Trans. Elisabeth von Brasch. Celle: Kampmann, 1925. In German. F. §Cosmic Consciousness. 1926. <BBS pp. 427-28E> G. §1928. <BBS pp. 427-28F> H. §1931. <BBS pp. 427-28G> I. §Kosmisch bewustzijn: een studie in de evolutie van den menschelijken geest. Amsterdam: Gnosis, 1934. In Dutch. J. §Cosmic Consciousness. 1935. <BBS pp. 427-28H> ... L. §1943. <BBS pp. 427-28J> ... N. §1946. <BBS pp. 427-28L> O. §1947. <BBS pp. 427-28M> P. 1948. <BBS pp. 427-28N> ... R. 1951. <BBS pp. 427-28P> S. §New York, 1964. T. §New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967. U. §New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. V. §New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967. U. §New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. V. §New York: Dutton, 1969. W. §Die Erfahrung des kosmischen Bewusstseins: eine Studie zur Evolution des menschlichen Geistes. Trans. Karin Reese. Freiburg im Breisgau: Aurum-Verlag, 1975. In German. X. §1988. Y. §La conscience cosmique: une étude de l’évolution de la conscience humaine. Sherbrooke, Quebec: Éditions du IIIe millénaire, 1989. In French. Z. §Cosmic Consciousness. Penguin Books, 1991. AA. §Kosmisches Bewusstsein: zur Evolution des menschlichen Geistes. Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1993. In German. BB. §Cosmic Consciousness. Penguin Books, 1995. CC. §Kosmicheskoe soznanie. Moscow: Izd-vo “Nik,” 1995. In Russian. DD. §Das kosmische Bewusstsein: seine Wege und Prinzipien. Schäffern: Arcturus-Verlag, 2005. In German. EE. §Cosmic Consciousness. Champaign: Book Jungle, 2007. FF. §Mineola: Dover, 2009.

§Bucklow, Christopher. “The Sea of Time and Space: William Blake and Religion as a Human Creation.” Sea of Faith Magazine (1998): 14-15 <not Soldier of Fortune as speculated in Blake (2009)> B. If This Be Not I. [London]: British Museum; [Ambleside]: Wordsworth Trust, 2004.

[Bulwer Lytton, Edward]. “Conversations with an Ambitious Student in Ill Health.” New Monthly Magazine (1830) <BB #1313A> B. 1832. C. 1835. D. 1835. E. 1835. <BBS p. 429B-E> F. E. L. Bulwer’s sämtliche Werke. Trans. Louis Lax. Vol. 6. Aachen: Jacob Anton Meyer, 1835. 123. In German. <Michigan> G. 1868. H. 1868. <BBS p. 429F-G>

[Bulwer Lytton, Edward]. “A Strange Story.” All the Year Round (1862) B. 1862. <BB #1314A-B> C. Sir E. Bulwer Lytton. A Strange Story. Boston: Gardner A. Fuller, 1862. 271. <Harvard> D-O. 1863 .... <BB #1314C-N>

Burdett, Osbert. William Blake. 1926, 1974. <BB #1316, BBS p. 429> D. London: Parkstone, 2009. Temporis Collection.

§[Bury, Lady Charlotte]. The Separation: A Novel. By the Authoress of “Flirtation.” 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830. 3: 111. B. 2 vols. New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830. 2: 76. <New York Public Library>
Speaks of

the few who live in, and yet out of the world. Such a man, for instance, as old Blake, the artist, and his wife, whose characters (if mortal portraiture could do them justice) would be among the most extraordinary and the finest that ever were drawn. Persons who, living in a garret and in an abject poverty, enjoyed the brightest visions, the brightest pleasures, the most pure and exalted piety. The world might call them mad, but they might with far more truth have called the world mad.
In her diary (published 1839) Lady Charlotte describes a notable dinner (in ?1818) with Blake and Lady Caroline Lamb (BR[2] 333-34).

§Busque, Toni Le, Chris Meade, and Sasha Hoare, eds. Songs of Imagination and Digitisation. London: if:book, 2009. <http://www.songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net>.
Contributions from Lisa Gee, Tim Heath, Toby Jones, Daljit Nagra, Sue Thomas, and Tim Wright, among others, plus a poem by Adrian Mitchell—“this book will be growing.”

Carey, Alice. Clovernook or Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West. 2nd ser.. New York: Redfield, 1854. 361. <New York Public Library>

It was one of the most beautiful conceptions of Blake, displayed in those illustrations of the Night Thoughts which forever should cause his name to be associated with the poet’s, that his [Death’s] countenance who is called the Last Enemy was all sweetness and pitying gentleness.

Carrick, John D. “Blake the Painter and the Picture of Sir William Wallace.” The Laird of Logan, or Wit of the West: Being a Collection of Anecdotes, Jests, and Comic Tales. Glasgow: David Robertson; Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd; London: Longman, 1835. 152. <Princeton>
“This artist was once requested to draw the likeness of Sir William Wallace ... aspect of a demon” (Cunningham ¶37).

Cates, W. L. R. “Chronology.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. Vol. 5. New York, 1833. 744.
Under 1757 is “Birth of William Blake (died, 1827).”

§Chambers, John. “The Horse’s Mouth: William Blake (1757-1827).” The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2009. 68-77 (chapter 6).

Chambers, R., ed. The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar Including Anecdote, begin page 34 | back to top Biography, and History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character. 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1863-64. 2: 288.
Under 31 Aug. is John Bunyan: “Bunyan was buried in Bunhill Fields ... [with] William Blake, the visionary poet and painter; Thomas Stothard, and a host of others ....”

Chevalier, Tracy. Burning Bright. 2007. <Blake (2008, 2009)>
Translations have also appeared in Danish (§Brændende ild [2007]), Dutch (§De onschuld [2008]), French (L’Innocence [2007]), German (§Die Lieder des Mr. Blake [2008]), Hebrew (§Boʿer be-or [2009]), and Russian (§Tigr, svetlo goriaschii [2008]).

Choon, Ban Kah. “William Blake and the Ontology of Romanticism.” Focus, the Magazine of the Literary Society of the University of Singapore ns no. 1 (1967): 42-51.

*Clark, Lorraine. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. 1991. <BBS p. 438> B. §Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521110471.

Clark, Steve, and Jason Whittaker, eds. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. 2007. <Blake (2008)>
Review
Hatsuko Niimi, Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu [Essays in English Romanticism] 33 (2009): 135-39 (in Japanese).

Clark, Steve, and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. 2006. <Blake (2007, 2008)>
Reviews
§Morton D. Paley, European Romantic Review 20 (2009): 418-27 (with Michael, Blake and the City).
Julia M. Wright, Romantic Circles (2009) <http://www.rc.umd.edu>.

§Comfort, Alex. “Individuative Cosmologies—Blake.” I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion. London: Mitchell Beazley Publishers; New York: Crown Publishers, 1979. 119-23.

Cooper, Andrew M. “Freedom from Blake’s Book of Urizen.” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 187-218.

[Cox, George Valentine]. Jeannette Isabelle: A Novel. 3 vols. London: John Richardson, 1837. 3: 173. <Harvard>
“He reminded himself of the supernatural visions which used to trouble the fancy of the celebrated painter, Blake, who illustrated the Night Thoughts—but in vain: his was no fancied vision ....”

Craik, George L[illie], and Charles MacFarlane. The Pictorial History of England during the Reign of George the Third: Being a History of the People, as well as a History of the Kingdom. Vol. 3. London: Charles Knight, 1843. 751.
A paragraph under engravers: “it is not denied that this vigorous mind was diseased ....”

Crosby, Mark. “’A Fabricated Perjury’: The [Mis]Trial of William Blake.” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 29-47.
Blake was tried at the Chichester quarter sessions in Jan. 1804 for assault (including “putting in fear”), a common law offense, and for sedition and seduction from allegiance and duty, statutory offenses. However, only the first, assault, was subject to the jurisdiction of the quarter sessions; the others were, by statute, subject to trial only at the higher court of assizes. The only other trials for sedition at the time (“damn and bugger the bloody King”) were at the assizes and resulted in three convictions (three months’ imprisonment for two, one unknown) and one case abandoned for lack of witnesses.

Cumberland, G. “Hints on Various Modes of Printing from Autographs.” Journal of Natural Philosophy (1811) <BB #1430> B. “Hints on Various Modes, etc. ... (Journal de Nicholson, No. 126).” Bibliothèque britannique; ou recueil extrait des ouvrages anglais périodiques ... [Geneva] 50 (1812): 69-76 (Blake reference on 71). In French.

*Cunningham, Allan. “William Blake.” The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Vol. 2. 1830. <BB #1433, BBS p. 445>
Reviews referring to Blake
Anon., Dublin Literary Gazette no. 7 (13 Feb. 1830): 99-102 <New York Public Library> (“Some of those [extracts] we had marked, from the life of Blake in particular, are exceedingly entertaining” [102]).
Anon., “Literary Notices,” Spirit of the English Magazines [Boston] 3rd ser., 3, no. 11 (1 Mar. 1830): 448 <California> (“Jan. 9, 1830. ... Allan Cunningham has been busy on his Painters, and the lives of West, Opie, Barry, Blake, Bird, Fuseli, Raeburn, &c. are to grace his next volume”).
Anon., Dublin Literary Gazette no. 25 (19 June 1830): 388-90 <New York Public Library> (review of the account of Flaxman in vol. 3: “the Reverent Mr. Mathew ... afterwards aided Flaxman in befriending Blake”; Flaxman’s “chief companions were Blake and Stothard”; “With Blake, in particular, he loved to dream and muse ...”; see BR[2] 631fn).
L. Sw.-Belloc,5555. The list of collaborators includes “Mme L. Sw. Belloc” (without a hyphen). Louise Swanton Belloc was a prolific translator; her grandson was Hilaire Belloc. Revue encyclopédique, ou analyse raisonnée des productions les plus remarquables dans les sciences, les arts industriels, la littérature et les beaux-arts [Paris] 46 (June 1830): 664-67 (in French) <New York Public Library> (sympathetic paraphrases of Cunningham: “De tous les personnages qui figurent dans la dernière partie de la galerie ... le plus curieux et le plus attrayant ... est ... Blake”; “il se livrait à la fin de la journée à toutes les fantaisies de son imagination. Il oubliait entièrement le présent pour ne vivre que du passé”; “les begin page 35 | back to top funérailles d’une fée”; quotations about the Visionary Heads; “Les œuvres de Blake ... sont des compositions de la plus étrange bizarrerie, souvent inintelligibles, et cependant empreintes de poésie” [666-67]).
Anon., “From the Literary Gazette. The Family Library, No. X,” Museum of Foreign Literature and Science [Philadelphia, New York] 16 (June 1830): 498-501 <Michigan> (a reprint of BB #938).
Anon., “Blake’sisiones [Blake’s Visionen5656. So corrected on p. 154. ],” Allgemeines Repertorium der gesammten deutschen medizinisch-chirurgischen Journalistik [Leipzig] 5, no. 1 (1831): 16-17 (in German).
Anon., Friends’ Monthly Magazine 2, no. 1 (“First Month” 1831): 20-26 <Harvard> (“We arrive, after those of Barry and Blake, at the account of Opie ...” [24]).
Anon., “Literary Notice,” Cabinet of Religion, Education, Literature, Science, and Intelligence 5, no. 6 [del; 5] (May 1831): 284 <Harvard> (it has “condensed biographies of ... William Blake”).
Anon., Athenæum no. 226 (25 Feb. 1832): 124-25 <Princeton> (“he weaves his collected facts and anecdotes together into a narrative of great simplicity and beauty—in some instances, as in the life of Blake, of almost unrivalled beauty”).
Anon., Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 21, no. 610 (22 June 1833): 405-07 <Oxford English Faculty Library> (review of vol. 6: “Eminent painters were now arising on all sides .... Phillips, too, had shown such poetic feeling in his portrait of Blake, as raised him high among his brethren” [406]).

Cunningham, Peter. Hand-Book of London. Past and Present. New ed. London: John Murray, 1850. <Harvard>
Bunhill Fields: “William Blake, painter and poet, (d. 1828); at the distance of about twenty-five feet from the north wall in the grave numbered 80; no monument” (90); Fountain Court, in the Strand: “At No. 3, in this court, died William Blake, the painter, that eccentric but real genius” (191); Molton Street (South), New Bond Street: “William Blake, the clever but eccentric painter, lived for seventeen years at No. 17 in this street. Here he had interviews with angels and persons of scarcely inferior distinction” (341).

*Damon, S. Foster. William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols. 1924 .... <BB #1455, BBS p. 447> F. 2006. ISBN: 9781428632141.
Review
§Robert Hillyer, “William Blake, the Philosopher,” Dial 77 (Sept. 1924): 257-59 (“a book which must serve as a foundation to all future study of William Blake” [259]).

Dendy, Walter Cooper. On the Phenomena of Dreams, and Other Transient Illusions. 1832. <BB #1477>
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Monthly Review ns 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1832): 278-91 <Harvard> (“Blake, the late eccentric artist, has affirmed, that Edward the First sat bodily before him for his picture, which would have been painted to the life, were it not for the sudden appearance of Sir William Wallace in the study, which completely disconcerted the artist and his guest” [288]).

Dent, Shirley. “Why a Particular Location Can Make a Poem Universal: As Blake’s poetry shows, very specific settings often resonate far beyond them.” Guardian [London] 28 Oct. 2008 [online only]. <http://www.guardian.co.uk>.

Dibdin, T. F. The Library Companion .... 1824 .... <BB #1484>
The account of Blake’s visionary drawings (BR[2] 398-99) is reprinted in Robert Bigsby, Visions of the Times of Old; or, The Antiquarian Enthusiast, 3 vols. (London: C. Wright; Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1848) 1: xxix (footnote) <Columbia>

*Eagleton, Terry. “The Original Political Vision: Sex, Art and Transformation: Dissent and emancipation were holy for William Blake. He could teach our prime minister so much about how to be radical.” Guardian [London] 28 Nov. 2007: 34.
For an indignant response, see Hobson, below.

*Eaves, Morris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. 2003, 2004. <Blake (2004, 2007)>
Review
R. Paul Yoder, Romantic Circles (28 July 2009) <http://www.rc.umd.edu>.

Echion [Edward Chatfield].5757. For the identification of Echion as Chatfield, see Aldine Magazine of Biography, Bibliography, Criticism, and the Arts 1 (1839): 234 <Harvard>. “Poetic Painting and Sculpture.” New Monthly Magazine and Humorist [ed. Theodore Hook] 55, no. 218 (Feb. 1839): 196-205. <New York Public Library>
“What will the reader think of a painter representing the Blessed Virgin performing a dance with the Prince of Darkness or of another delineating the Ghost of a Flea?” (197).

Edgarton, Miss S. C. “Night Studies of the Artist.” The Rose of Sharon: A Religious Souvenir, for MDCCCXLII. Ed. Sarah C. Edgarton. Boston: A. Tompkins and B. B. Mussey, 1842. 113-18. <California (Berkeley)>
A poem about Blake’s Visionary Heads “suggested by some peculiar traits of his [Blake’s] genius” by Cunningham.

§Elliott, Clare. “’A Backward Glance O’er’ the (Dis)United States: William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ‘Authentic American Religion.’” European Journal of American Culture 28.1 (2009): 75-93.
On the influence of Blake’s poetry on Emerson.

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*Engelstein, Stefani. “’Natural’ Reproduction and Reproducing Nature.” Chapter 2 (61-112) of Anxious Anatomy (2008) <Blake (2009)§>
The chapter has sections on “William Blake’s Bodies” and “Prolific Devourers in Blake.”

Ennemoser, Dr. Joseph. Geschichte der Magie. Leipzig: Brodhaus, 1844. 177. In German. <Columbia>
“Der Engländer Blake, ein Maler ... unterhielt sich in seinen Visionen ... mit Genien und Dämonen ....”

Erle, Sibylle. “Blake, Colour and the Truchsessian Gallery: Modelling the Mind and Liberating the Observer.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 52 (2008). <http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca>.
Especially about the 12 great color prints.

§Erle, Sibylle. “Leaving Their Mark: Lavater, Fuseli and Blake’s Imprint on Aphorisms on Man.” Comparative Critical Studies 3.3 (2006): 347-69. <http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/ccs>.

F., J. H. “Blake, the Visionary.” True Briton: A Weekly Magazine of Amusement and Instruction ns 1, no. 11 (1852): 163-64 (part 1); 1, no. 12 (1852): 179-80 (part 2). <Princeton>
Silent quotation from Cunningham, including “The Tiger” (omitting the last stanza). “Blake—how few hear the name to recognise it as that of a genius; yet he was such” (163).

Farrell, Michael. “William Blake and the Bible: Reading and Writing the Law.” Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Darby Lewes. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. 27-36 (chapter 3). <Blake (2009)§>
“Blake’s attitude towards the Bible was ambivalent” (27).

§Felstiner, John. “’The stationary blasts of waterfalls’: Blake, the Wordsworths, and the Dung.” Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 34-38, 361.

*Fenton, James. “Colour Blind: James Fenton wonders what William Blake really thought about slavery.” Guardian [London] 5 May 2007.

Ford, Talissa J. “’Jerusalem is scattered abroad’: Blake’s Ottoman Geographies.” Studies in Romanticism 47 (2008): 529-48.
On British plans to populate Palestine.

Friedreich, J[ohannes] B[aptista]. Systematische Literatur der ärztlichen und gerichtlichen Psychologie. Berlin, 1833. In German. <Michigan>
In the bibliography of “Visionen des Dichters und Malers Blake” (30-31) for his “Geschichte und Literatur der psychischen Krankheiten,” he includes Cunningham vol. 2, Das Ausland no. 101 (Apr. 1830) (which I have not seen), and “Mein Magaz. für Seelenkunde. 4 Heft. p. 34” (see Anon., “Blake’s Visionen,” above).

Fuller, S. M[argaret]. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown; New York: Charles S. Francis and Company, 1844. 148. <Michigan> B. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Summer on the Lakes. With Autobiography ... and Memoir, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Channing, and Others. London: Ward and Lock, 1861. 142. <Bodleian>
“Blake, the painter, whose life was ... a series of trances ... in his designs of the Resurrection, represents spirits as rising from, or hovering over, their bodies” (perhaps she was thinking of the designs for Blair’s Grave).

*Gardner, Charles. William Blake the Man. 1919, 1970. <BB#1662> C. §BiblioLife, 2009. ISBN: 9781110380190.

*[Garrido, Luis, and Carol Garrido]. “Cause for Celebration: The Location of William Blake’s Grave Discovered!” ?2009. <http://www.friendsofblake.org>.

Gatty, Margaret. Notes and Queries 2nd ser., 7 (16 Apr. 1859): 325.
An answer to a query (2nd ser., 7 [2 Apr. 1859]: 279): “’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours” from Young’s Night Thoughts “has been beautifully illustrated by Blake,” a design she describes.

§Gigante, Denise. “Blake’s Living Form.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.4 (2009): 461-85. B. *“Blake’s Living Form: Jerusalem.” Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 106-54, 266-74 (chapter 3).
On Jerusalem as living form.

*Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” 1863 .... <BB #1680, BBS p. 484, Blake (1999, 2002, 2007)>
Reviews, announcements, etc.
Bookseller 26 Sept. 1861 and repeatedly thereafter.
Crosthwaite’s Register of Facts and Occurrences Relating to Literature, the Sciences, and the Arts (Sept. 1861) <Bodleian> (Gilchrist’s book “is now definitely announced for publication in November”; quotes the Publishers’ Circular about it: “we ourselves remember being assured by a gentleman who knew this unfortunate man of genius, that so little did any one appreciate his half-insane drawings, that, on his death, they were carried away in considerable quantity and sold with waste paper,—drawings, be it remembered, every one of which would now be the object of fierce competition in any auction-room in England”).

Goethe. Faust. A Tragedy. Trans. Lewis Filmore. London: William Smith, 1847. 193. <Bodleian>
In the notes, it mentions Cunningham and quotes the first stanza of “To the Muses.”

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§Goldsmith, Steven. “William Blake and the Future of Enthusiasm.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.4 (2009): 439-60.
About Blake’s “transition from a theological concept of enthusiasm to a practice of literary-critical engagement as enthusiasm.”

§Gould, John. Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Artists .... 1835. <BBS pp. 491-92>
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Westminster Review 23, no. 45 (July 1835): 53-61 (“of Blake it is well observed, that ‘the pure-minded Flaxman pointed him out as a melancholy instance of English apathy’” [60]).

§Grab, Ginger. “Such, Such Were the Joys: The Poetry of William Blake.” Living Pulpit 5.4 (1996): 28-29.

Green, Julien. “William Blake, Prophète 1757-1827.” 1927 .... <BB #1739, BBS p. 494, Blake (2002)> E. §“William Blake, Prophet”/“William Blake.” Le langage et son double. Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1985. In English and French on facing pages. F. §Paris: Fayard, 2004.

Green, Matthew J. A. “Dreams of Freedom: Magical Realism and Visionary Materialism in [Ben] Okri and Blake.” Romanticism 15.1 (2009): 18-32.

Grille, François. “Blake, Peintre, Graveur et Poëte anglais.” Revue universelle des arts [Paris, Brussels] 14 (1861): 372-75. In French. <New York Public Library>
About the Visionary Heads and the deathbed sketch of Catherine (he cites Gazette littéraire on Blake, which I have not seen).

Grinsted, T. P. “William Blake.” Relics of Genius: Visits to the Last Homes of Poets, Painters, and Players, with Biographical Sketches. London: W. Kent & Co., 1859. 157-58.
“His mind is thought to have been confirmed in chronic insanity .... He made a journey to Jerusalem, and on his return published one hundred designs of figures of men, spirits, gods, and angels.” Blake is listed under Bunhill Fields.

*Grønbech, Vilh[elm]. William Blake, Kunstner, Digter, Mystiker. 1933. In Danish. <BB #1756> B. §2002. ISBN: 9788798871224.

*Haggarty, Sarah, and Jon Mee, eds. Blake and Conflict Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 8o, xiii, 235 pp.; ISBN: 9780230573871.
Papers from a conference, Blake and Conflict, at University College, Oxford, Sept. 2006. After Jon Mee and Sarah Haggarty, “Introduction” (1-11), it consists of:
Saree Makdisi. “Blake and the Ontology of Empire.” 12-26. (“Blake refuses Orientalism” [17].)
*Angus Whitehead. “‘A wise tale of the Mahometans’: Blake and Islam, 1819-26.” 27-47. (A carefully factual essay indicating Blake’s sympathies with Islam.)
David Worrall. “Blake, the Female Prophet and the American Agent: The Evidence of the 1789 Swedenborg Conference Attendance List.” 48-64. (Details about the fascinating enthusiasts who attended the meeting to establish a Swedenborgian church, including the Quaker prophet Dorothy Gott and the US land-agent Colborn Barrell.)
Susan Matthews. “Impurity of Diction: The ‘Harlots Curse’ and Dirty Words.” 65-83.
David Fallon. “‘She Cuts his Heart Out at his Side’: Blake, Christianity and Political Virtue.” 84-104.
*Sarah Haggarty. “From Donation to Demand? Almsgiving and the ‘Annotations to Thornton.’” 105-25.
Jon Mee. “‘A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action’: Mutuality, Converse and Mental Fight.” 126-43.
Sibylle Erle. “Shadows in the Cave: Refocusing Vision in Blake’s Creation Myth.” 144-63.
*Mark Crosby. “A Minute Skirmish: Blake, Hayley and the Art of Miniature Painting.” 164-84. (Blake’s stipple techniques as a miniaturist differed significantly from those advocated by Hayley and contemporary miniaturists.)
*Luisa Calè. “Blake and the Literary Galleries.” 185-209.
Morton D. Paley. “Blake’s Poems on Art and Artists.” 210-27. (A little masterpiece about “Blake’s conflict with the artistic values of his own time,” especially “the Orléans Sale of 1798” [210].)

Hale, Sarah Josepha [Buell]. “Blake, Katharine.” Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from “the Beginning” till A.D. 1850 .... New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853. 209-10. <Harvard>

Hannay, James. Satire and Satirists: Six Lectures. London: David Bogue, 1854. 272. <Bodleian> B. New York: Redfield, 1855. 231. <Harvard>
“I have seen a MS. of Blake the painter, in which, speaking of somebody’s praise of somebody else, he says: ‘Christ used the Pharisees in a rougher way.’” Hannay (1827-73) quotes from “Sir Joshua Praises Michael Angelo,” Notebook p. 28, owned from 1847 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Review referring to Blake
Anon., “Satire and Satirists,” Athenæum no. 1396 (29 July 1854): 934-35 (quoting Hannay about Christ and the Pharisees). B. Eclectic Magazine [New York] 33, no. 2 (Oct. 1854): 243-46. C. Littell’s Living Age [Boston] 2nd ser., 6, no. 539 (1854): 566-69. <Michigan>

Hayley, William. Memoirs. 1823. <BB #1814>
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Literary Chronicle no. 213 (14 June 1823): 369-70 (quotes Hayley’s letter to Johnny Johnson [11 Mar. 1802, BR(2) 122]: “The kind indefatigable Blake salutes you cordially, and begs a little fresh news from the spiritual world”).

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[Hazlitt, William]. “On the Old Age of Artists.” 1823, 1826. <BB #1817, Blake (2006)>
The account of Blake and other mystics (BR[2] 446-47) is reprinted in Anon., “Table-Talk.—Old Age of Artists. (New Mon.),” Spirit of the English Magazines [Boston] 14 (1 Nov. 1823): 107-11 <Harvard>.

Hemans, Mrs. [Felicia Dorothea]. “The Painter’s Last Work.—A Scene.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832) <BB #1830>
The poem and its footnote are also quoted in Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art 20, no. 118 (Apr. 1832): 449-50 <California (Berkeley)> and Christian Messenger [New York] 1, no. 29 (19 May 1832): 232. In a letter of 3 Feb. 1832, Mrs. Hemans wrote: “I should be very glad to know how you like the little scene I have taken from the life of Blake the painter, which appears in this month’s Blackwood” (Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans ... [Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836] 236; there were other editions of Saunders and Otley in London, 1836, and New York and London, 1836).

*Himy, Armand. William Blake, peintre et poète. 2008. <Blake (2009)>
Reviews
*Jean-Yves Masson, “William Blake, gravé dans l’esprit. Une nouvelle biographie est consacrée au poète et peintre. Avant tout un voyant, dont l’existence rangée d’artisan graveur est aussi mystérieuse que l’œuvre,” Magazine littéraire [Paris] no. 481 (Dec. 2008): 84-85 (in French).
§Jean-Loup Bourget (see William Blake [1757-1827]: Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais under 2009 in Part IV).

Hitchman, Dr. John. “The Pathology of Insanity. A Lecture ....” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology [London] 3 (1 Oct. 1850): 501-21. <Stanford>
About Blake’s Visionary Heads, from Cunningham (514-15); “the painter Blake, lived in an imaginary world, and was guilty of freaks, which, had he not possessed a gentle, kind, heroic wife, might have confined him for life within the walls of a lunatic asylum” (514).
Review referring to Blake
Dr. H[einrich] Laehr, “Bericht über die Leistungen in der Psychiatrik,” C. Canstatt’s Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der gesammten Medicin in allen Ländern im Jahre 1850 [Erlangen, ed. Dr. Eisenmann] 3 (1851): 13-59 (in German) (about “der Maler Blake,” who lived “in einer eingebildeten Welt ...” [21]).

Hobson, Theo. “A Man of Vision: William Blake’s radicalism was not Marxist, it was aimed at liberating Christianity from the authoritarian errors of the church.” Guardian [London] 29 Nov. 2007 [online only]. <http://www.guardian.co.uk>.

[Holbrook, Josiah]. A Familiar Treatise on the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Music. 1833. <BB #1871> B. A Familiar Treatise on the Fine Arts, Embracing Painting, Sculpture, and Music; with Sketches of the Lives of the Most Celebrated Masters. 2nd ed. Boston: James B. Dow, 1837. 96-97. <Harvard>
Derived from Cunningham’s Lives. The abstract gives “Of Blake—His wild and singular character—Imagines himself visited by spirits—Anecdote of his taking the portrait of Lot—His scriptural pieces—His poverty and cheerfulness—His death.”

§Hone, T. B. Lives of Eminent Christians. 1833.
Review referring to Blake
Anon., British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record [London] 15 (Jan. 1834): 162-77 (“The enthusiastic painter Blake had some romantic ideas upon this subject” of “the belief that we may meet in that celestial country the glorified members of the great literary priesthood, who laboured while on earth to exalt the name of their Maker” [170]).

Horst, Georg Conrad. Deuteroskopie, oder merkwürdige psychische und physiologische Erscheinungen und Probleme aus dem Gebiete der Pneumatologie. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Heinrich Wilmans, 1830. 1: 163-67. In German. <University of Lausanne>
Cites Cunningham’s account (¶37) of Blake’s vision of William Wallace in a discussion of second sight.

Howitt, William. Cassell’s Illustrated History of England during the Last Hundred Years. Vol. 2. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1862. 621. <Bodleian>
“The strange but intellectual Blake was both painter and his own engraver, in a style of his own.”

[Hunt, James Henry Leigh]. “Art. XI.—Account of a Familiar Spirit, who visited and conversed with the Author in a manner equally new and forcible, shewing the Carnivorous Duties of all Rational Beings and the true End of Philosophy.” Reflector, a Quarterly Magazine ... Conducted by the Editor of the Examiner [Leigh Hunt] 1 (Oct. 1810): 86-99. <Bodleian>
About “the abuses of the Cabala—of the Great Secret,” of the Rosicrucians, Zoroaster ... 58. When the essay was reprinted as “The Nightmare” in Leigh Hunt’s The Seer; or, Common-Places Refreshed, part 2 (1841), the first three paragraphs, including the Blake passage, were omitted (according to Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 [spring 2010]: 129).

Monsieur the Count de Gabalis may have had the power of invisibility,—a very common virtue with such sages; and the egregious Mr. Blake, who wages such war within Titian and Corregio both in his writings and paintings, may tell us that he is inspired by certain spirits to alter the human figure;—but to be out of sight can as little benefit mankind as to be out of nature. (88)58
For the attack on “Mr. Blake’s Exhibition” by Leigh Hunt’s brother Robert in the Examiner (1809), see BB #1911 and BR(2) 282-85.

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Hytche, E. J. “Illustrations of the Organ of Form.” Phrenological Journal, and Magazine of Moral Science [Edinburgh] 16, no. 77 (1843): 334-47.
“So the painter Blake, when he was engaged in painting Satan, fancied that the Evil Spirit sat to him for his portrait, and used to describe his demeanour to visitors as if he were actually present” (344).

Hytche, E. J. “On the Function and Nomenclature of the Organ Called Wonder.” Phrenological Journal, and Magazine of Moral Science [Edinburgh] 19, no. 86 (1846): 14-28.
In part about “the painter Blake, whose imagination seemed to revel in the charnel-house, and whose portrait indicates an extraordinary development of the organ of ‘Wonder.’ When he painted his celebrated Satan, he believed that he drew from life ...” (16).

Ideler, Dr. [Karl Wilhelm]. “Ueber die Dämonomanie.” Magazin für die gesammte Heilkunde [Berlin, ed. Dr. Johann Nep. Rust] 48, no. 3 (1837): 371-408. In German. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
“Auch der englische Maler Blake, der eine Vorliebe für mystische und dämonische Compositionen hegte, war viele Jahre hindurch von Geistern und Gespenstern umringt” (394). The passage appears (with minor changes) in his Grundriss der Seelenheilkunde vol. 2 (Berlin: Theod. Chr. Fried. Enslin, 1838) 430.

Jacobsen, Friederich Johann. Briefe an eine deutsche Edelfrau, über die neuesten englischen Dichter .... Altona: Hammerich, 1820. 576. In German.
He writes of Blake, The Grave:

Ich habe davon eine grosse Quart-Ausgabe vor mir, die 1813 bei Ackermann zu dem Preise von Lstrl. 2. 12s. herauskam. Sie enthält zwölf schöne Kupfer, nach der Zeichnung von William Blake gestochen von L. Chiavonetti [sic].

*Jenkins, Herbert G. William Blake. 1925 .... <BB #1958, BBS p. 526> E. 1979.

§*Jessen, Elisabeth Engell. Bibelske motiver hos William Blake. Frederiksberg: Anis, 2009. ISBN: 9788774574736. In Danish.
From a dissertation.

§*John, Donald. “William Blake and the Dionysius Andreas Freher Illuminations to the ‘Law’ Edition of Boehme.” Temenos Academy Review no. 12 (2009): 159-80.

*Jones, Jonathan. “Blake’s Heaven: Only one British artist would make it on to a list of the world’s all-time greatest.” Guardian [London] 25 Apr. 2005 [online only]. <http://www.guardian.co.uk>.

§Journal of Religious Ethics
Volume 37, number 1 (2009)
Focus on William Blake

D. M. Yeager. “Of Eagles and Crows, Lions and Oxen: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics.” 1-31.
Thomas J. J. Altizer. “The Revolutionary Vision of William Blake.” 33-38.
Steven P. Hopkins. “‘I Walk Weeping in Pangs of a Mothers Torment for Her Children’: Women’s Laments in the Poetry and Prophecies of William Blake.” 39-81.
Emily Taylor Merriman. “Raging with the Truth: Condemnation and Concealment in the Poetry of Blake and Hill.” 83-103. (Discusses Geoffrey Hill’s lyric about Blake.)

Keeble, Brian. “William Blake: Art as Divine Vision.” Temenos Academy Review (2006) <Blake (2007)> B. Reprinted in §God and Work: Aspects of Art and Tradition. Bloomington: World Wisdom, Inc., 2009. The Perennial Philosophy Series.

Kerner, Justinus. Die Seherin von Prevorst. 1829. In German.
Review referring to Blake
Johann Friedrich von Meyer, “Die Seherin von Prevorst,” Blätter für höhere Wahrheit [Berlin] 10 (ns 2) (1831): 302-24 (in German) <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek> (in the section “Aus dem Wunderbüchlein” [284-324]; about Blake’s visions [320-22]).

*Keynes, Geoffrey, and Gwendolen Raverat. Job: A Masque for Dancing. Music by R. Vaughan Williams. Pianoforte arrangement by Vally Lasker. ?1931. <BB #2049> B. §Full Score. London: Oxford University Press, [?1931]. C. §Miniature Score. London: Oxford University Press, [?1931].
For a transcript of Keynes’s scenario for the ballet and a discussion of Williams’s music, see Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams <BB #1899B>.

Kirzinger, Robert. “William Bolcom: Eighth Symphony for Chorus and Orchestra (2005-2007) on William Blake’s Prophetic Books.” [2008]. <http://bsav.org/images/program_notes/20080228.pdf>.
Program notes for the première with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason. “Dissent: Wesley to Blake.” Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 17-51 (“Blake” is 42-45).

L., C. “Flaxman (John).” Encyclopédie des gens du monde, répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts ... par une Société de Savants .... Vol. 11. Paris: Librairie de Treuttel et Würtz, 1839. 108-09. In French. <Harvard>
“Banks, Cumberland, Sharp, Blake, et surtout Stothardt, le dirigèrent cependant par leurs conseils.”

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Laehr, Dr. Heinrich. Ueber Irrsein und Irrenanstalten. Für Aerzte und Laien. Halle: Pfeffer, 1852. 27, 46. In German. <New York Public Library>
About “Hallucinationen” and “Phantasie”; “Der Maler Blake sah den Teufel, den er so vortrefflich zeichnete” (27).
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Notizen für praktische Ärzte über die neuesten Beobachtungen in der Medicin, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Krankheits-Behandlung [for 1852] [Berlin, ed. Dr. F. Graevell] 5 (1853): 485-92 (Blake reference on 489) (in German).

Lamb, Charles. “Analytical Disquisition on Punch and Judy. Found among the Papers of the Late Charles Lamb.” Monthly Repository ns 11 (Jan., Feb. 1837): 39-42, 113-17. <Princeton>
“As the mystical and no less gifted artist Blake made a microscopic drawing of a flea, and thereunto a calculation of what would be its powers of mischief if it were as big as a horse, so we may all bless our stars that Punch, who seems of the family of Brobdignags, was thus thwarted of his germinant proportions” (113). “I showed this essay to my friend Mr. Hazlitt [d. 1830] some time since,” who commented on it (114).
The essay is dated 1828-30 in George L. Barnett, “A Disquisition on Punch and Judy Attributed to Charles Lamb,” Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (1962): 225-47, and reprinted in New Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 2: 417-27. The essay was probably written between Jan. 1829, when Varley’s Zodiacal Physiognomy with this story was published, and Sept. 1830, when Hazlitt died.

Landseer, John. “The Dream of Human Life. By an Anonymous Painter. After the Design of Michael Angelo Buonaroti.” A Descriptive, Explanatory, and Critical, Catalogue of Fifty of the Earliest Pictures Contained in the National Gallery of Great Britain. London: Richard Glynn, 1834. 41-51. <Harvard>

Michael Angelo made the original sketch, or design, from which the work before us was painted—we doubt whether he could have seen and approved of the figure before us, which has been quoted, we believe, and rendered more perspicuous and credible, by Flaxman and by Blake. (51)
Robert Essick suggests to me that the Blake design Landseer had in mind is the plummeting angelic trumpeter on the title page for Blair’s Grave (1808) and wonders whether Blake had been influenced by Michael Angelo’s drawing.

Levison, J. L. “Remarks on the Cerebral Organ Called Marvelousness by Spurzheim, and Wonder by Combe.” Phrenological Journal and Miscellany 9, no. 47 (1836): 636-43. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>

Blake (who illustrated Blair’s Grave, and Young’s Night Thoughts) believed in the entity of the personages created by his morbid mind, and which he conjured up with a magician’s power; he is said to have been very angry if disturbed while sketching his ideal sitters, among whom were Moses, Aaron, Christ, St Paul, and many of the worthies of olden time. In the heads of [Dr.] Johnson and Blake the organ of Marvellousness was very large. (641)

Lewes, Darby. “Marginal(ized) Blake: The Annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses.” Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Darby Lewes. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. 15-26 (chapter 2). <Blake (2009)§>
The Reynolds marginalia are “essentially public in nature” (15).

Light, Alfred W. “William Blake.” Bunhill Fields: Written in Honour and to the Memory of the Many Saints of God Whose Bodies Rest in This Old London Cemetery. London: C. J. Farncombe & Sons, 1913. B. 2nd ed. London: C. J. Farncombe & Sons, 1915. C. 2nd ed. 2009.

Lombardi, G. Saggio dell’istoria pittorica d’Inghilterra. Florence: Per conto dell’autore, 1843. 132. In Italian. <Michigan>
“Guglielmo Blake ... si distinse dipingendo maravigliosamente [sic] all’acquerello ....”

§Ludlow, Miss. “Blake.” Manual of the Fine Arts Critical and Historical. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850. B. A General View of the Fine Arts, Critical and Historical. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851. C. 5th ed. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.; Cincinnati: H. W. Derby, 1854. 211-17. D. 1858. <Harvard> E. Manual of the Fine Arts. New York and Chicago: A. S. Barnes, 1872. F. 1875. G. [1879].
It is silently quoted from the first edition of Cunningham (¶10-12, 36-41), including “Days of Innocence.”

MacLean, Robert. “The Methodology of Night—William Blake and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts [parts 1-2].” Ritsumeikan Eibei Bungaku [Ritsumeikan (University) English and American Literature] (2006), (2007) <Blake (2007, 2008)§>
A “comparative study of Night Thoughts vis-a-vis The Four Zoas” (9 [2006]) in terms of Dreams, Time, Fallen Existence of Ulro (part 1) and Personae, Apocalypse, and Style and Poetics (part 2).

Macnish, Robert. The Philosophy of Sleep. 1834. <BB #2174A> B. 2nd ed. Glasgow, 1834. <Blake (1999)> C. 2nd ed. New York: William Pearson & Co.; Boston: Samuel Colman; Philadelphia: Chappell and Co., 1834. 227-28. D. George Combe, The Constitution of Man; John Foster, Essays on Decision of Character, &c.; Robert Macnish, Philosophy of Sleep, and Anatomy of Drunkenness; Madame de Stael, Influence of Literature upon Society, &c.; John Mason, A Treatise on Self-Knowledge. New York: William Pearson & Co., 1835. [Separately paginated; the Blake reference is on Macnish p. 42.] <Princeton> E. Macnish. 1836. F. 1838. G. 1845. H. 1859. <BB #2174B-E>

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Madden, R[ichard] R[obert]. Phantasmata or Illusions and Fanaticisms of Protean Forms Productive of Great Evils. 2 vols. London: T. C. Newby, 1857. 1:90. <Michigan>
A paragraph of quotations from Macnish and Cunningham.

§Maddrey, Joseph. “William Blake: The Religion of Art.” The Making of T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2009. 91-93.

*Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. 2003. <Blake (2004)>
Reviews
Dennis M. Welch, English Studies 86 (2005) <Blake (2008)§> (“Impossible History is more repetitive and considerably longer than it should be”).
§Jackie DiSalvo, Science and Society 73.1 (2009): 144-46.

[Malkin, Arthur Thomas]. “Flaxman.” The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Vol. 1. 1833. 27-33. <BB #945, attributed to Anon.>

*Michael, Jennifer Davis. Blake and the City. 2006. <Blake (2007)>
Review
§Morton D. Paley (see Clark and Worrall, above).

*Miller, Matthew. “Cleansing the Doors: Sense Perception and Imagination in William Blake and Aldous Huxley.” TCNJ Journal of Student Scholarship 9 (Apr. 2007). <http://www.tcnj.edu/~joss/archive/2007.html>.

Miner, Paul. “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ as Miltonic Beast.” Studies in Romanticism 47 (2008): 479-505.
Literary echoes from Milton in Blake’s tigers.

Miner, Paul. “The Influence of Hesiod’s Theogony on Blake’s The Book of Ahania.” Notes and Queries 254 [ns 56] (2009): 361-64.
A densely allusive and rewarding essay.

Miner, Paul. “An Unpublished Letter by Ezra Pound on William Blake.” Notes and Queries 254 [ns 56] (2009): 424-25.
Note to Miner of 1956, stimulated by a query about Blake but not dealing with Blake.

Moore, George. The Use of the Body in Relation to the Mind. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1846. 217. B. 2nd ed. London, 1847. C. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847. 181. D. New York, 1848. E. New York, 1849. F. Der Beruf des Körpers in Beziehung auf den Geist. Trans. Dr. Ernst Susemihl [from 2nd ed.]. Leipzig: Ernst Kollmann, 1850. 255. In German. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
“Blake, the painter ... confounded them [phantasms] with realities.” Similarly in German: “Er hatte die Gewohnheit, sich mit Engeln, Dämonen und Heroen zu unterhalten ....”

Moore, Thomas. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Ed. Lord John Russell. Vol. 6. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854. 57. <Michigan>
According to his journal for 17 June 1829, Moore talked to “Lady Sandon, whom I made laugh a good deal by my account of Varley’s book on Astrology, his portrait of the ‘Ghost of a Flea,’ &c. &c.”

Munteanu, Anca. “Visionary and Artistic Transformations in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Journal of European Studies (2006) <Blake (2008)§>
“The aim of this essay is to delineate the parameters of Oothoon’s metamorphosis and define her new identity at the intersection of a number of paradigms that together constitute the heroine’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual profile,” especially “her melancholic predisposition” (64).

*Myrone, Martin. The Blake Book. 2007. <Blake (2008)>
Review
*Alexander S. Gourlay (see Blake 43.2, above).

*Le Navire d’argent [Paris] no. 4 (Sept. 1925)
Issue devoted to Blake <BB #2276>

The issue contains articles by Symons <BB #2802>, Swinburne <BB #2793>, Brion <BB #1282>, and Anon. <BB #1027>, as well as a selection of Blake’s poetry.

Nichols, Ashton. “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149.3 (2005): 304-15.
Blake is on pp. 309-12.

Nouvion, V. de. “Blake (William), graveur, peintre et poëte anglais.” Encyclopédie catholique, répertoire universel et raisonné des sciences, des lettres, des arts et des métiers, formant une bibliothèque universelle. Ed. M. L’Abbé Glaire, M. le Vte Walsh, and “un comité d’orthodoxie.” Vol. 3. Paris: Parent-Desbarres, 1841. 648-49. In French. <New York Public Library>
Blake surpassed his master before he was 20, when he finished his apprenticeship. He had “une brillante réputation” as an engraver. The author cites Cunningham, but some facts come silently from Romey.

Osińska, Agnieszka. “Bez przeciwieństw nie ma postępu. O dualistycznej wizji świata w Pieśniach Niewinności i Doświadczenia Williama Blake’a [“Without Contraries is no progression”: The Dualistic Vision of the World in Songs of Innocence and of Experience of William Blake].” Prace Literackie [Literary Works] 48 (winter 2008): 33-48. Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis no. 3094. In Polish.
About the concept of duality in Blake, Boehme, and Swedenborg.

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§Østermark-Johansen, Lene. “Victorian Angles on Blake: Reading the Artist’s Head in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Angles on the English-Speaking World 3 [Romantic Generations: Text, Authority and Posterity in British Romanticism, ed. Lene Østermark-Johansen] (2003): 141-64 <entered erroneously in Blake (2005)>

*Paley, Morton D. “‘A Virgin of Twelve Years’: Ololon in Blake’s Milton.” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 106-12.
The age of Ololon, a “Virgin of twelve years” (Milton pl. 36, l. 17), may derive from the apocryphal Protoevangelium Jacobi or Infancy Gospel of James about Mary’s early childhood, translated by Jeremiah Jones, A New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament: Wherein All the Antient Testimonies Concerning This Argument Are Produced (1798; first printed 1726-27) 2: 108-10; “according to the rabbinical Mishnah ... the day after [a girl] turns twelve she becomes a naarath, a pubescent girl.”

§Paley, Morton D. “William Blake.” The History of British Art, 1600-1870. Ed. David Bindman. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art; London: Tate Britain, 2009. 216-17. Vol. 2 of The History of British Art. David Bindman, gen. ed. 3 vols.

Parker, Langston. “On the Effects of Certain Mental and Bodily States upon the Imagination.” Analyst; A Quarterly Journal, of Science, Literature, Natural History, and the Fine Arts 3, no. 14 (Jan. 1836): 177-96.
A lecture:

The vividness of Imagination is extremely variable, from the individual who hardly understands the meaning of metaphor, to him who lives in a world peopled by creatures of his own. Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine artist of great celebrity, the celebrated Molanus, and our own visionary Blake, were striking examples of the latter class. (182-83)

Perty, Maximilian. Die mystischen Erscheinungen der menschlichen Natur. Leipzig, 1861. In German. <Harvard>
About Blake’s Visionary Heads.

[Pichot, Amédée]. “Artiste, Poète et Fou. (La Vie de Blake.)” Revue de Paris (1833) <BB #2392A> B. Revue de Paris [2nd ed., Brussels] (1833): 132-50. C. Amédée Pichot. “Le Visionnaire Blake.” Revue britannique (1862) <BB #2392B>

*Pierce, John B. The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. 2003. <Blake (2004)>
Review
Jeremy Tambling, Modern Language Review 100 (2005) <Blake (2008)§> (the book has “good local points, but an uncertain argument”).

Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Love Letters of Mrs. Piozzi, Written When She was Eighty, to William Augustus Conway. London: John Russell Smith, 1843. 14. <Michigan>
Conway, an actor, committed suicide in 1828; among his effects was “a copy of the folio edition of Young’s Night Thoughts, illustrated by Blake; in which Conway had written the name of the person by whom it had been presented to him,—his ‘dearly attached friend, the celebrated Mrs. Piozzi’” (d. 1821).

Platt, J. C. “Exeter Hall.” London. Ed. Charles Knight. Vol. 5. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851. 242. <Stanford>
Quotes “Holy Thursday” from Innocence and remarks: “That eccentric but powerful artist, Blake, was probably present” at St. Paul’s for Holy Thursday. Similar passages appear in London As It Is To-Day: Where to Go, and What to See, during the Great Exhibition (London: H. G. Clarke & Co., 1851) 28 <Bodleian> and in the Illustrated Magazine of Art [New York] 1 (1853): 111 <Michigan>.

Poe, Edgar Allen. The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. N. P. Willis, J. R. Lowell, and R. W. Griswold. 2 vols. New York: Redfield, 1850.
Review referring to Blake
Anon., Southern Literary Messenger [Richmond, VA] 16, no. 3 (Mar. 1850): 172-87 <Stanford> (“In short, Edgar Poe is a painter of ideas, not of men and things. He held precisely the same relations to Dickens, Thackeray, and the like, that the mad artist Blake, to whom the apparition of William Wallace and the ghost of a flea [vide. Cunningham’s British Painters and Sculptors, art. Blake,] were wont to sit for portraits, —held to Hogarth and Reynolds” [182]).

P—ot [i.e., Parisot]. “Blake (Guillaume), graveur anglais, né vers 1759 ....” Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne. Supplément ... Ouvrage entièrement neuf. Vol. 58. Paris: L.-G. Michaud, 1835. 329-30. In French. <California (Santa Cruz)>
“Il ne sortit jamais d’une position voisine de la misère.” The account almost certainly derives from the obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1 Nov. 1827) (BR[2] 473-74), with the same curious bibliography, though Blair’s Grave has become “les Tombeaux de Blair” and Hayley’s Ballads “in 8vo numbers” is misinterpreted as “huis numéros seulement parurent.” It was revised by Val. P[éricaud] in Biographie universelle (1843) <BB #2380>.

[Powell, Thomas, and James Henry Leigh Hunt]. Tales from Boccaccio, with Modern Illustrations: And Other Poems. London: R. Bentley, 1846. 118, 199. <Bodleian> B. Florentine Tales: With Modern Illustrations. 2nd ed. London: R. Bentley, 1847. 118, 186-87. <Michigan>
“Salvestra” (97-182), canto 1, stanza 36:

O, artist Blake! compassion still thou deign’st,
In thy most deathless “Songs of Innocence,”
To all such outcasts, whatso their offence,
Pauper or orphan, clod or climbing boy,
Negro or gaol-bird, with a love intense!
begin page 43 | back to top To Mammon’s slave, though thus she kill young joy,
We’d show like mercy now; reform, but not destroy. (118)
The “Notes to Salvestra” say that Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience are “unequalled, for their touching simplicity and brilliant word-tinting. Nothing can be more pathetic ... the production of such pieces at all is little short of miraculous. It is not art, but inspiration” (186-87 [1847 ed.]).

*Proctor, Loretta. “An Unseen Enemy: William Blake’s Sojourn in ‘Paradise.’” Astrology Quarterly: Journal of the Astrological Lodge of London 71.4 (2001). B. <http://www.lorettaproctor.co.uk/Blake.htm>.
On the astrological significance of Blake’s time in his Felpham “Paradise,” especially the scuffle with the soldier and Blake’s trial for sedition. She concludes that Blake must have been born not at 7.45 pm (as in Urania [1825] [BR(2) 406]) but at “7.26 pm. which keeps Pluto in the fifth house and the Cancer Ascendant then accords with the time that Jupiter crossed over in 1800 when Blake moved to Felpham.”

Pyer, Miss C[atherine] S[mith]. Wild Flowers; or, Poetic Gleanings from Natural Objects, and Topics of Religious, Moral, and Philanthropic Interest. London: John Snow, 1844. 69.
A poem called “The Fairy’s Funeral” with quotations (from Cunningham) about Blake and “a fairy’s funeral.”

Q. “The Pictorial History of Parliament.” Punch or the London Charivari 1 (“For the week ending October 23, 1841”): 174. <Victoria University in the University of Toronto>
Suggests subjects for the decoration of the rebuilt House of Commons: “There is also that immortal Parliamentary metaphor ... ‘The feature upon which the question hinges!’ The only man who could have properly painted this was the enthusiastic Blake, who so successfully limned the ghost of a flea!”

§Quinney, Laura. William Blake on Self and Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 23 cm., xvii, 195 pp.; ISBN: 9780674035249.
It includes chapters on “Wordsworth, Plato, and Blake,” “The Four Zoas: Transcendental Remorse,” “Milton: The Guarded Gates,” and “Jerusalem: The Will to Solitude.”

Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. 2003. <Blake (2004)>
Review
§Brian Wilkie, Modern Language Review 100 (2005) <Blake (2008)§> (“throughout the book, Rawlinson’s own method of ‘reading’ is questionable”).

Reveillé-Parise, J. H. Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit, ou recherches sur le physique et le moral, les habitudes, les maladies et le régime des gens de lettres, artistes, savans, hommes d’état, jurisconsultes, administrateurs, etc. 2 vols. Paris: G.-A. Dentu, 1834. 1: 219. In French. <University of Lausanne>
An account of Blake’s visions as reported from Cunningham in Revue encyclopédique (1830). “Beaucoup de grands esprits ont éprouvé de pareilles hallucinations, comme le Tasse, Pascal, Nicole, Rousseau, Cazotte, etc.”

§Richardson, David Lester [Principal of the Hindu Metropolitan College]. Flowers and Flower-Gardens. Calcutta: D’Rozario and Co., 1855. 164-65. <Michigan>
Quotes Cunningham about the fairy’s funeral, listed under “The Tulip.”

§Riley, Peter. Edward III: A Patriotic Drama after William Blake. [Odense: n.p.], 1972. 6 leaves, apparently published, according to the Cambridge University Library online catalogue.

Rix, Robert. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. 2007. <Blake (2008)>
Reviews
*Andrew Lincoln (see Blake 43.2, above).
§A. Hessayon, English Historical Review 124, no. 506 (2009): 195-96.
§Jeremy Tambling, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.1 (2009): 123-24.

§Rix, Robert. “William Blake: Trance, Therapy and Transcendence.” Litteraturkritik og Romantikstudier 53 (2009): 1-20.

§Roberts, Jonathan, and Christopher Rowland. “William Blake.” The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature. Ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

[Robertson, Joseph Clinton (1788-1852), and Thomas Byerley (1788-1826)]. “The Juvenile Artist.” The Percy Anecdotes. Original and Select. By Sholto and Reuben Percy: Brothers of the Benedictine Monastery, Mont Benger. 20 vols. Vol. 3 [Youth: Enterprize]. London: T. Boys, 1823 [the engraved title page adds: “And sold by J. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1821”]. 159-61 <Bodleian, §British Library> B. Vol. 3. London: J. Cumberland, 1826. 159-61. <California (Santa Cruz), Princeton> C. §New York: Harper, 1850. D. §The Percy Anecdotes ... A Verbatim Reprint .... Preface by John Timbs. London, [1870]. Chandos Classics. E. §The Percy Anecdotes ... A Verbatim Reprint .... London: Frederick Warne and Co.; New York: Scribner, Welford and Co., n.d. Chandos Library.
I have not seen the issue in 44 monthly parts (1821-23). The engraved title page for 1823, 1826 is altered for different publishers and dates, but “The Juvenile Artist” does not seem to be changed.
“The Juvenile Artist” silently quotes, with adjustments, the account of Blake’s youthful studies by Malkin (1806) (“Mr. William Blake ... Gothicised imagination,” BR[2] 562-63), concluding: begin page 44 | back to top

Such was the occupation of Blake when a young apprentice, and the drawings which he made in his holiday hours at this period he afterwards engraved. They were published, and would not have reflected disgrace on artists of double his age and experience.

[Robinson, Henry Crabb]. “William Blake, Kunstler, Dichter und religiöser Schwärmer.” Vaterländisches Museum 2 (1811) <BB #2538>
Review referring to Blake
Ergänzungsblätter zur Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung [Halle] no. 47 (Apr. 1814): cols. 374-75 (in German) <Indiana> (review of the whole issue refers to the Blake essay).

Romey, Ch[arles]. “Blake (William), graveur, peintre et poète anglais d’une étonnante imagination ....” Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture. Vol. 6. Paris: Belin-Mandar, 1833. 292-96. In French. B. Nouveau dictionnaire de la conversation, ou répertoire universel .... Vol. 3. Brussels: Librairie Historique-Artistique, 1844. 357-59. <Ghent University> C. Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture. Vol. 3. Paris: 1852. 265-66. <BB #2546, under Romney> D. 1856.
A long, intensely admiring account of Blake, paraphrased (with acknowledgements) from Cunningham, though the praise is largely Romey’s: Blake was “d’une étonnante imagination, d’un talent plein de magie, l’un des artistes les plus originaux de cette Angleterre ....”
He adds to Cunningham’s account that Blake’s father hired “les maîtres de calcul, d’arithmétique et de tenue de livres” (bookkeeping); that many clients of Basire preferred the work of the apprentice to that of the master; that [Poetical Sketches (1783)] includes “odes ... et sonnets” and that Flaxman counseled its publication “à 30 ans” (Blake was 30 in 1787); that Blake finished his apprenticeship in a little less than seven years (neither Cunningham nor anyone else says exactly when it finished). To Cunningham’s much quoted account of Blake’s courtship (¶9), he adds: “a vague restlessness followed him everywhere, in his studio, his happy retreat, where he forgot his troubles so sweetly, and on his walks, which were his sweetest recreation.” Romey says that Catherine was of very humble birth and of great beauty (Cunningham says little more than that she had white hands, bright eyes, “and a slim and handsome shape” [¶9]). Of the sketch of Catherine which Blake made on his deathbed, Cunningham says no more than that it was “a fine likeness” (¶48), but Romey says it is “remarkable for its expression of a naive and melancholy head strongly depicted, of a woman still beautiful, in spite of her age, a strong air of youth.” I take these biographical additions to be Romey’s embroideries of Cunningham, as Cunningham had in turn embroidered J. T. Smith. His account concludes: “The glory of Blake is not yet come to France; we will be happy if this article persuades our artists to look for the works of this original genius. Art would thus surely gain.”
Romey also says that a French translation of Cunningham will be published (it wasn’t). He states that the French national collection of prints has nothing by Blake, but, through a friend who lives in London, he acquired with great difficulty an almost complete collection of Blake’s curious productions. His account names only the works cited by Cunningham: America and Europe (“Les prophéties sur l’avenir de l’Europe et de l’Amérique”), The Gates of Paradise, Jerusalem, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (with 65 plates), Urizen, Job, illustrations of Blair’s Grave (“Les illustrations du tombeau de Blair”), Canterbury Pilgrims, and Young’s Night Thoughts published by Edwards. None of these writings by Blake—or indeed any other—has been traced to a French nineteenth-century collection. If Romey really owned them, he didn’t notice that Songs has 54 plates, not 65, and that America and Europe are not prophecies in the sense of predicting the future.
Louis-Charles-Reparat-Geneviève-Octave Romey, “membre de l’Institut historique,” born in Paris 26 Dec. 1804, wrote Histoire d’Espagne (Paris, 1835-36) and 16 articles for the Dictionnaire de la conversation (J.-M. Quérard, La France littéraire, ou dictionnaire bibliographique des Savants ..., vol. 8 [Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1836] 137).

§Rorty, Amélie. “William Blake: Shame is Pride’s Cloak.” The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives. Ed. Amélie Rorty. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

§Rowland, Christopher. “William Blake and Life in the Divine Body.” Paul, Grace and Freedom: Essays in Honour of John K. Riches. London: T. & T. Clark, 2009. T. & T. Clark Biblical Studies.

Rowland, Christopher. “William Blake and the New Testament: The Perspectives of the Pictures.” Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in Dialogue. Ed. J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu. 2007. 211-38. <Blake (2009)§>
A “survey of Blake’s biblical hermeneutics in his pictures and engravings” (236); “Blake’s relationship with the Bible is a complex one,” and “Blake’s Christology is complex” (214, 233).

*Rumens, Carol. “Poem of the Week: Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: William Blake was no enemy of science, but he also recognised the limits to Enlightenment rationality, as this poem shows.” Guardian [London] 15 Sept. 2008 [online only]. <http://www.guardian.co.uk>.
The reproduction is the very interesting Blake window in St. Mary’s Church, Battersea, where the Blakes were married.

S., J. B. “Despotism of Imagination.” [Samuel Coate] Atkinson’s Casket, or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment [Philadelphia] no. 7 (July 1832): 315-19. <Indiana>
“The mind of such a man as Blake, is a valuable study to the moralist and the metaphysician.” The account is mostly quoted from the first edition of Cunningham, “Days of Innocence” and all, including the “Introduction” to Innocence (318).

begin page 45 | back to top

§Saklofske, Jon. “Conscripting Imagination: The National ‘Duty’ of William Blake’s Art.” Romanticism on the Net 46 (2007). <http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca>.

Sala, George Augustus. A Journey Due North; Being Notes of a Residence in Russia in the Summer of 1856. 2nd ed. London: Richard Bentley, 1859. 256. <California (Berkeley)>
Sala found a very modest room, which “looks a remarkably clean mausoleum, and does not by any means give me the impression that it is haunted even by the ghost of a flea,—such as poor dear William Blake, the supernaturalist painter, saw what time he witnessed a fairy’s funeral in a garden by moonlight ....”

§*Santos, Alcides Cardoso dos. Visões de William Blake: Imagens e palavras em Jerusalém a Emanação do Gigante Albion. Campinas, Brazil: Editora Unicamp, 2009. 21 cm., 247 pp.; ISBN: 9788526808126. In Portuguese.

Sato, Hikari. “Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791) kara William Blake he (Dai 34 kai zenkoku taikai symposium yoshi Erasmus Darwin no keifu to Igirisu Roman ha) [Influences from Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791) to William Blake (A summary of the symposium, Genealogy of Erasmus Darwin and English Romanticism, at the 34th annual conference [of the Japan Association of English Romanticism])].” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu [Essays in English Romanticism] 33 (2009): 128-30. In Japanese.

Schindler, Dr. Heinr. Bruno. Das magische Geistesleben: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie. Breslau: Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 1857. 227-28. In German. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
About what Blake saw “in Ekstase.”

Schubert, Dr. Gotthilf Heinrich v. Die Geschichte der Seele. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1833. In German. <New York Public Library> B. 4th ed. 2 vols. 1850. 2: 389-91, 414.
A brief account of the visions of Blake “welcher im Jahre 1812 starb” (“who died in 1812”) (613 [1833 ed.]), a confusion perhaps deriving from Crabb Robinson’s anonymous essay in Vaterländisches Museum (Jan. 1811) <BB #2538>. “Die seltsamen Visionen des Malers Blake sind beschrieben von Allan Cunningham in seinen British Painters, London 1830” (642).
Review referring to Blake
Anon., “Von der schlafähnlichen Zuständen der Seele,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [Stuttgart] no. 242 (9 Oct. 1833): 965-66 (in German) <California (Davis)> (account of the “Kupferstecher Blake” [966]).

Schubert, Dr. Gotthilf Heinrich von. Die Krankheiten und Störungen der menschlichen Seele. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1845. In German. <Bayerische Staatsbibliothek>
In a section on “Hypochondrie und Hysterie” is a paragraph about the “hypochondrische Stimmung” of “Kupferstecher Blake” (141-42).

*Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision. 2006. <Blake (2007)>
Review
*Jad Adams, “Blake’s Big Toe: Marsha Keith Schuchard examines William Blake’s unorthodox sex life in Why Mrs Blake Cried, says Jad Adams,” Guardian [London] 1 Apr. 2006 (“a chain of association rather than reasoning”).

§Scott, David. Of Man, Six Monograms. Edinburgh: Constable; London: Moon, Boys, and Graves; Hamburg: Perthes und Besser; Leipzig: Ernest Fleischer, 1831. Folio, 14 pp., 7s. 6d. <Glasgow, Victoria & Albert>
Review referring to Blake
Anon., London Literary Gazette no. 736 (26 Feb. 1831): 139 <Princeton> (the reviewer makes “a comparison not to his [Scott’s] disadvantage with the best things of Blake, Fuseli, Flaxman, and even Michael Angelo” [Scott was a passionate admirer of Blake’s Grave designs (BR[2] 257), and his own designs are indeed surprisingly Blake-like]).

*Sha, Richard C. “Fiery Joys Perverted to Ten Commands: William Blake, the Perverse Turn, and Sexual Liberation.” Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 183-240 (chapter 5).
A highly theoretical account which concludes that “Blake was perverse to his very core” (186).

§Shears, Jonathon. “Blake.” The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading against the Grain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. The Nineteenth Century Series. 59-82.

§Sklar, Susanne. “Sublime Allegory in Blake’s Jerusalem.” Glass 17 (2005): 16-31.

Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct. Rev. ed. London: John Murray, 1860. 107. <Bodleian>
“William Blake, a hosier’s son, employed himself in drawing designs on the backs of his father’s shop-bills and making sketches on the counter” (the account is from Cunningham).

Smith, Charlotte. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Judith Phillips Stanton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 503.
Letter about Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802) to Cadell & Davies, 16 Dec. 1802:

Mr Hayley informd my daughter some time since that he would order his last publication about animals (the title I forget) to be left at Yr Shop for her perusal to be returnd for the profit of the person who made the drawings. If it is there, be so good as to let me know.
For the reference, see Whitehead in Blake 43.2, above.

begin page 46 | back to top

[Southey, Robert]. The Doctor, &c. 1834-47 .... <BB #2731, BBS p. 643, Blake (2009)>
Reviews referring to Blake
A., “The Doctor,” Dublin University Magazine 29, no. 173 (May 1847): 608-23 (“Blake wrote in the assumed character of a madman, and was himself quite insane”; he quotes “Mad Song” [617]).
A., “Curiosities of Literature—The Doctor,” Dublin University Magazine 31, no. 181 (Jan. 1848): 111-21 (“Another volume of the ‘Doctor’—the seventh”:

Dr. Dove did not live to the days of Blake, the great painter, who drew pictures of the dead from their actual apparitions; who seems to have lived in some strange disease of the imagination, which presented to the bodily eye prophets, and martyrs, and apostles.

“O Dove, ‘my guide, philosopher, and friend!’ that thou hadst lived to see what I have seen, the portrait of the ghost of a flea, engraved by Varley, from the original by Blake!” [120]).

Steinbeck, Dr. Alb[recht], and Dr. Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. Der Dichter ein Seher, oder über die innige Verbindung der Poesie und der Sprache mit dem Hellsehn. Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1836. 443-44. In German. <Columbia>
About Blake and Milton, apparently derived from Cunningham ¶23.

§Stevens, Clint. “William Blake’s Golgonooza and Jerusalem: A Conversation in Visionary Forms Dramatic.” English Romantic Review 20.3 (July 2009): 289-307.
It “offers a strategy for reading Blake’s Jerusalem by attending to dialogic or relational qualities of meaning.”

§Sturrock, June. “Eve, Eden, and the Flowers of Experience: Milton, Blake, and Botany.” Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England Ed. Ken Hiltner. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. 91-105 (chapter 5).

*Sung, Mei-Ying. William Blake and the Art of Engraving. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. The History of the Book, 8o, ix, 220 pp., 8 figures; ISBN: 9781851969586.
An original, industrious, and worthwhile examination of the copperplates and woodblocks of Blake and some contemporaries, particularly the unengraved versos with telltale marks of platemakers’ marks and engravers’ corrections.
It derives from her PhD dissertation, “Technical and Material Studies of William Blake’s Engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)” (2005) <Blake (2006)>.
Review
Shirley Dent, Times Literary Supplement 7 Aug. 2009: 31 (“a painstaking study that enlightens both the technical and literary understanding of Blake’s works”).

*Suzuki, Masashi. “Whitman no Shinseki [Whitman’s Relatives]—Swedenborg, Conway, Blake.” Eibungaku Hyoron [Review of English Literature, English Department, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University] 81 (2009): 41-71. In Japanese.

Tannenbaum, Leslie. “Hirelings and Laborers: Biblical Parable in Blake’s Milton.” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (2007) (with a résumé in French). <http://lisa.revues.org/index1369.html> <Blake (2008)§>
Blake’s context is John 10.1-21 (contrasting the “good shepherd [who] giveth his life for the sheep” and the “hireling [who] fleeth”) and Milton’s Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (about clergy supported by tithes).

§Thistle, Louise. “William Blake.” Dramatizing Classic Poetry. Lyme, NH: Smith & Kraus, 1999. Young Actors Series.
Poems scripted to dramatize in the classroom and on stage.

§Torre, Vincent. “William Blake.” Painter/Poets, Poet/Painters. Port Jefferson: Inkwell Press, 2009. 40 copies.

Tsuchiya, Kanako. “William Blake ga mitsumeta tokai no kodomo tachi [Urban Children in the Eyes of William Blake].” Oliva [Section of British and American Literature, Society of Humanities, Kanto Gakuin University 15 (2008): 55-65. In Japanese.

Tsukasa, Erisa. “Muku to Kikan no Uta ni okeru kodomo tachi—shudan to ko [Children in a Group and in Solitude: A Study of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience].” Nihon Joshi Daigaku Daigakuin Bungaku Kenkyuka Kiho [Journal of the Graduate School of Humanities, Japan Women’s University] 15 (2008): 45-53. In Japanese.

Upham, Thomas C[ogswell]. Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840. 105-06. <Princeton> B. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855. <Wisconsin>
Under the section “Disordered Action may exist in connexion with more than one Sense at the same time,” Upham quotes Macnish, Philosophy of Sleep (1834), about Blake and the fairy funeral and concludes “this remarkable person was the subject of disordered auditory as well as visual sensations.”

*Ura, Kazuaki. “Osoro beki symmetry: Dante no dokusha, sashie gaka toshite no Blake: Un’agghiacciante simmetria: William Blake, illustratore-lettore di Dante [William Blake, Illustrator-Poet of Dante].” Shisei Gaku Kenkyu [Studies in Life and Death, COE Programme of Development and Systematization of Death and Life, University of Tokyo] 2 (2003): 354-78. In Japanese.

*Uthaug, Geir. Den kosmiske smie: William Blake: liv, diktning, verdensbilde. 2000. In Norwegian. <Blake (2002)> B. Den kosmiske smedje—William Blake—liv, digtning, verdensbillede. begin page 47 | back to top Roskilde: Batzer & Co., 2001. ISBN: 9788790524326. In Danish.

[Weale, John]. “Blake (William), a poor but meritorious artist ....” Rudimentary Dictionary of Terms Used in Architecture .... 2nd ed. London: John Weale, 1860. 53. <California (Berkeley)>

*Wecker, Menachem. “Did William Blake Know Hebrew? Did the Poet and Artist Know the Kabbalah from His Mystical Studies?” Jewish Daily Forward 11 Dec. 2009: 15.
“Blake had not even mastered the letter alef.”

Whitfield, Andrew David. “A Performer’s Guide to Virgil Thomson’s Five Songs from William Blake.” Louisiana State University DMA, 2004. 52 pp.

Willard, Nancy, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. 1981. <BBS p. 679> B. §N.p.: Paw Prints, 2009. ISBN: 9781442034303.

§Williams, Nicholas M. “Blake Dead or Alive.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.4 (2009): 486-98.
About the perception of motion in Blake.

§Williams, Nicholas M. “‘The Sciences of Life’: Living Form in William Blake and Aldous Huxley.” Romanticism 15.1 (2009): 41-53.

§Williams, Sandra J. “Death, Angels and Football—Blake’s Visions and Almond’s England.” Dream, Imagination and Reality in Literature. Ed. K. Vránková and Ch. Koy. České Budějovice: Editio Universitatis Bohemiae Meridionalis, 2007. South Bohemian Anglo-American Studies no. 1. 73-77.
About David Almond’s Skellig.

§Wobble, Jah [interview by Daniel Trilling]. “Perspectives: Jah Wobble, Musician, on William Blake.” New Statesman no. 4952 (8 June 2009): 42-45.

*Woodcock, Peter. “Awake Albion! Awake! William Blake 1757-1827.” The Enchanted Isle: The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries. 2000. <Blake (2002)> B. §2002.

Woodman, Ross. Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism. (2005). <Blake (2007)> B. §2009. ISBN: 9781442610293.

X. “Blake (William).” Encyclopédie des gens du monde, répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts ... par une Société de Savans .... Vol. 3. Paris: Librairie de Treuttel et Würtz, 1834. 566. In French. <Harvard>
“Blake (William), graveur, peintre et poète anglais, naquit à Londres, en 1757, et mourut en 1828. Voy. Lives of english artistes, de M. Allan Cunningham.”

*Yasunaga, Koji. “William Blake, Songs of Innocence no dai tobira—sono zuzo to kaishaku ni kansatsu [Iconology of the Title Page of Songs of Innocence].” Bijutsushi Ronshu [Kobe Review of Art History] 9 (2009): 126-42. In Japanese.

*Yeats, W. B. “William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy.” Savoy (1896) <BB #3051A> B. 1903. C. 1903. D. 1903. <BB #3051B-D> E. 1905. F. 1907. G. 1908. H. 1914. <BBS p. 692E-H> I. 1915. <Blake (2004)> J. 1916. K. 1961. L. 1961. M. 1964. <BBS p. 692I-L> N. §“William Blake et l’art.” Trans. Martine de Rougemont. La Délirante no. 2 (1967). In French. O. 1969. P. 1970. Q. 1972. R. 1973. <BBS p. 692M-P> S. *William Blake et ses illustrations pour la Divine Comédie. Trans. Martine de Rougemont. N.p.: La Délirante, 2009. 8o, 48 pp., 12 color reproductions; ISBN: 9782857450931. In French.

Division II: Blake’s Circle

CUMBERLAND, George (1754-1848)

John Highmore (1750-84),5959. John Field Highmore, Cumberland’s intimate friend, was an artist and Cumberland’s fellow-employee at the Royal Exchange Assurance Office. In the Essick collection is a small etched portrait, entitled “Mr. John Highmore—from nature” in ink on the facing verso in the hand of George Cumberland, Jr. manuscript journal of a sketching tour in Kent with Cumberland and Thomas Stothard, 22-26 May 1779, 90 pp., inscribed “A Highmore” (Anthony Highmore [1758/59-1829], brother of John). It bears no reference to Blake’s tour on the Medway River in Kent with Stothard and Cumberland in 1780 or 1781 (BR[2] 22-24). On 24 May 1779 Cumberland and Stothard crossed “over the [Medway] River to Allington Castle [just north of Maidstone, Kent], to take views”; Stothard’s pencil drawing (in the Tate) of the castle inscribed “1779” must have been made during this tour,6060. All the information here derives from Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 135, citing the sale of the Highmore manuscript at Bonhams (London), 24 Mar. 2009, lot 109. not on that with Blake and Cumberland.

Anon. “Living Authors, Natives of Bristol, or Residing in That City and Its Vicinity.” The Bristol Memorialist. Bristol: William Tyson, 1823. 58-63. <Bodleian>
The bibliography of George Cumberland (62-63), which must be derived from Cumberland himself, includes his Thoughts on Outline (1796): “Half the [24] designs engraved by the author, the other half by Mr Blake.” His Captive of the Castle of Sennaar (1798) was “published gratis.” The second edition of it in Original Tales (1810) was “altered, but not terminated as the author intended.”

FLAXMAN, John (1755-1826)

The Hawkins collection at the Cornwall Record Office (Truro) reports the following letters from Flaxman to Hawkins (according to the online abstracts, none is related to Blake): begin page 48 | back to top 14 Nov. 1803 (about Hawkins’s statue of Mercury), 11 Apr. 1807, 11 Apr. 1820, 5 Feb. 1822, 15 Nov. 1822, 23 Jan. 1823, 7 Mar. 1823, 31 Mar. 1823, 3 Nov. 1823, 24 Nov. 1823, 25 Dec. 1824, 3 Jan. 1825.

There are also Flaxman letters of 29 Mar. 1799 regarding the inscription on a monument, 3 pp. (§Argosy Book Store, May 2009 online catalogue); 10 July 1802 about a subscription to commission a monument to Captain Miller, 1½ pp. (§A. R. Heath, Feb. 2009 catalogue, lot 20); 25 May 1813 to Mrs. Yarborough, apparently about the Yarborough monument in Campsall, Yorkshire <Doncaster Archives>; 14 Sept. 1818 about the inscription on a monument to Sir John Moore, 1 p. (§Julian Browning Autographs, May 2009 online catalogue); 19 May 1825, 19 Jan., 23 May 1826 (including sketches) to Benjamin Gott (1762-1840), wool merchant of Leeds, with a letter from Gott to Flaxman about paying £250 towards the monument to his son Benjamin <Leeds University>; five letters with his bills about the monument to Sir Rowland Winn <Gloucestershire Archives>; five letters from Lord Egremont, including two about work in progress <Somerset Archives> and receipted bill for models to him <West Sussex Record Office>; a document about a messuage on the north side of the Strand for John Flaxman of King Street, Covent Garden <London Metropolitan Archives>; a lease to John Flaxman, statuary, of 420 Strand <London Metropolitan Archives>.

2009 24 FEBRUARY-28 JUNE

§Angels Guiding a Soul to Heaven, and Other Drawings by John Flaxman (1755-1826). Princeton University Art Museum.
The newly acquired Swedenborgian drawing of 1787-94 is among over 70 by Flaxman in the Princeton collection.

2009 9 APRIL-12 JULY

§John Flaxman and the Renaissance: John Flaxman und die Renaissance. Bode-Museum, Berlin.
Review
Eckart Marchand, “John Flaxman,” Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1276 (July 2009).

FUSELI, Henry (1741-1825)

Pressly, William L. The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007.
There is a substantial section on Fuseli.

HAYLEY, William (1745-1820)

Hayley’s manuscript poem on Wellington’s birthday (1811) addressed to John Flaxman is in the West Sussex Record Office.
A “List of the Portraits of English Poets” (1 sheet folded to make 2 leaves) by Hayley, annotated by George Steevens (1736-1800), was offered in 2009 to Robert N. Essick (“Blake in the Marketplace, 2009,” Blake 43.4 [spring 2010]: 129). This was a precursor to Blake’s 18 “Heads of the Poets” commissioned by Hayley in 1800.

Crosby, Mark. “William Hayley’s Benevolent Gift: The Triumphs of Temper.” Bodleian Library Record 22 (2009): 101-08.
A copy in the Bodleian is poetically dedicated by Hayley to Mariana Starke.

LINNELL, John (1792-1882)

§Nicoll, W. Robertson. “The Literary Associations of Hampstead. III.—Collins’ Farm; North End.” Bookman 6 (Aug. 1894): 145-46.
Linnell lived at Collins’s Farm, which is illustrated with a sketch.

PALMER, Samuel (1805-81)

F., C. “Letters of Samuel Palmer.” Bodleian Library Record 21 (2008): 236-37.
On 132 letters to the Redgrave family acquired recently.

STEDMAN, John Gabriel (1744-97)

Gwilliam, Tassie. “‘Scenes of Horror,’ Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.” ELH (1998) <Blake (2008)§>
“Stedman maintains the armature of sentiment long after its evisceration seems complete” (669).

*Klarer, Mario. “Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).” New Literary History (2005) <Blake (2008)§>
“I will use psychoanalytic film theory” “to push to the foreground the pornographic and the sublime” in Stedman’s book (559).

Index of Blake’s Works

America 7, 21, 23, 44; annotations 25, 37, 40; “Auguries of Innocence” 12; Blake-Varley Sketchbook 14; Book of Ahania 41; Book of Thel 4, 7-8, 9, 11, 21, 26, 32; copperplates 5, 8-9, 46; Descriptive Catalogue 8, 24, 31; Europe 7, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 23, 44; First Book of Urizen 4, 9, 11, 21, 25, 34, 44; For the Children 9, 21, 44; For the Sexes 9, 22, 44; Ghost of Abel 9, 23; Jerusalem 4, 7, 10, 21, 23, 26, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46; Large Book of Designs 7; letters 4, 10, 12, 18, 30, 37; Marriage 4, 10, 11, 21, 23, 32; Milton 4, 10, 12, 21, 26, 42, 43, 46; Notebook 5, 37, 44; “Order” of the Songs 10; Poetical Sketches 10, 12, 26, 30, 32, 36, 43, 44, 46; receipt 10; Small Book of Designs 4, 11; Song of Los 7, 11, 12; Songs 4, 7, 11, 12, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47; Tiriel 32; Vala/Four Zoas 5, 40, 43; Visions 7, 11, 21, 23, 25, 32, 41; watermarks 7

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